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The Primacy of Product and The Concept of Usability in Landing Page Design

Howdy design fans, Welcome to section two of this exciting course on landing page design and conversion rate optimization. In section one, we laid the groundwork for good design. We talked about a lot of the fundamental principles of design. We defined conversions, we spoke about a little bit how the human mind works, understanding behavioral patterns, things like that. And now we want to start getting into a lot of practical, very grounded techniques for actually making your landing pages better and making landing pages that will ultimately appeal more effectively to your users. Because we did Sprinkle in throughout the first section. Some examples, some advice, some some practical tips. Some of the things that we're gonna talk about now might seem repetitive, but that's okay because we're gonna have new examples, new test results that I'm gonna show you guys is gonna be cool, It's gonna be fun. And if any of the concepts are repetitive, there also could serve as a refresher. So, let'...

s move along into the slides for this lecture. We're going to talk about the primacy of product and defining usability. I want to start just from the beginning and working the ground up and talk about product, Right? So nothing we do obviously is going to be more important ultimately, than having a product that people actually want to buy and people actually want to need. Right? So there has to be a market for what you sell. That's the first important thing. A lot of you might be launching new businesses. I have a lot of students who are who are getting into the service industry or they have a product they wanna sell. It could be products or services, right? But ultimately there needs to be a real need in the marketplace for what you offer doesn't mean you have to necessarily have competitors. Now, you could be selling something unique, but there really has to be a need otherwise, no matter how we do. Landing pages are you're setting yourself up for failure? Obviously we've spoken about this a little bit in the past, but I want to talk about the consultative aspect versus commodities. Both services and products could really be consultative in nature, consultative meaning unique where the value is intrinsic or commoditized in nature could apply to both products and services. Services tend to be consultative in nature, knowing what type of service you offer is going to impact your approach to marketing. When I say consultative in nature, it typically means that it's not using a supply and demand structure for figuring out price consultative services are when people come to you for your expertise for the emotional psychological benefits that you're going to provide them through your services. And I'm gonna show you some examples, but it drastically changes the type of information you want to put on your landing pages. The different types of information that should be given more prominence in your information hierarchies. If you're a consultant or you're offering a B2B service or even a business to consumer service and what people are buying into is your expertise. The same thing is going to a doctor, right? You could have a lot of doctors that offer the same thing. It's not really so much about price, it's more about who's going to treat you the best. That's really crucial when it comes to understanding consultative services. Products are the same way that you can have a unique product that only you make only you manufacture, It's proprietary to you. No one else makes it. And then the marketing is similar in that way, products will tend to be commoditized. If you're selling products, most likely lots of other people sell similar or the same thing. In that case, your approach to marketing is different. The information you want to put on your landing page is different. How you appeal to your first time visitors is going to be different. It's going to be much more heavily focused on line items, Right? Features, benefits, details about the product. Those are the types of things your visitors are looking for. The number one determinant of winning a customer over its price. Right? So, and if you're not going to compete on price, you're typically gonna want to compete on other peripheral value adds that justify a higher price than others. So the classic example of this is Zappos, Zappos doesn't really run too many sales on their shoes, you'll typically be able to find a pair of shoes on Zappos for sometimes significantly cheaper elsewhere. But Zappos still sells a lot of shoes because they have a tremendous value add. They have an incredible, incredible return policy. They built a uniquely distinctive trust factor in their space where when you buy a pair of shoes from Zappos, you know that your purchase is secure, you have a sense of safety, they're gonna come the next day for free and if I need to return them for any reason within the next year, I'm not gonna have a problem doing that. And that oftentimes will justify a higher cost. But at the end of the day, it's, it's still a commodity. It's not a unique service that they offer, but you have to compete on the value add. Like I said, you have that give and take with an extrinsic value system for commodities and an intrinsic value for consultative, unique products and services with that intrinsic value system for consultative services really set based on the perceived value of the customer and the, the self determined value of you, the agency, the seller, the advertisement. Right. So that's an important distinction to understand as you go into figuring out, what do you want to say in your landing pages. How do you wanna present your information and here's an example? Okay, so this is a page from Kohl's Hamilton Beach, four slice toaster oven. Right now, you can get this toaster oven in many different places, Right? They're not the only one, there's hundreds of online retailers that sell that. So, if you look at the page, right, you see a high level of practical detail. There's product information, there's reviews, there's the features of the product. There's the dimensions of the product. There's very little emotional focus. Right? What's gonna sell this thing is is it doesn't have the features that I that I'm looking for at a good price point. So that's the type of information you want to provide. Right? Very little emotional psychological focus on how a person's gonna feel buying this product. That's not important with this type of marketing. Again, it's not about the value, it's about the features of the product and the number one greatest determinant here in a commoditized world is price. If you see that big red price sale 21 that's the the most important information that is displayed on this product page. Now, here's another example to contrast, right? Here's a company called Pager and Pedro is an sort of on call doctor consultative services. It's it's unique there. They have competitors, right? But it's it's a service that's built upon their sophistication, how they put this structure together, how they, how they brought this to market. And if you look at their landing page, right? We're seeing a completely stark contrast to the landing page with the toaster oven. So consultative web pages and services, They lean much more toward the emotional payoff to the customer. If you can see on the bottom right, our numbers speak for themselves, 99% patient satisfaction. 40% plus employee utilization 10 times 10-1 return on investment. These are all payoffs to the user on an emotional psychological level for engaging with this product. Okay. They're not they're not overloading me with details. I don't say anything about price. It's the imagery. Right? So if you're getting you you've all been conditioned to these types of pages because you all use the internet, you should be able to get a sense when you go to these different web pages. How are they marketing themselves? Are they doing it the right way? Are they overloading me with with details and and product information or service information That's more like a commodity? Or is this something unique consultative and it's a little bit more sophisticated. There there's a little bit of mystery around it. Right? So subjective value consultative services are not valued based on a on a on a price and demand sort of marketplace structure. If you sell, if you sell consultative services or unique products. The question you have to ask yourself is how well can you tap into your potential customers needs and emotional fears. Right. That's really important to understand the more you can understand what's bothering your customers on an emotional level. What's causing them to look around for the type of service you offer. What are they struggling with? What's their struggle and you could tap into that on your homepage within the first few seconds of a visit, you're already in a great position to convert that visitor. Let's talk about defining usability for a second. Right? So from a broad perspective, every page of your website should be able to account for the following factors. This is obviously not going to be something that you have to be neurotically focused about on every single page, but just to understand, right? You want your web pages to be useful. So does it feel a need your visitors have? Does it answer the questions your visitors have? Does it provide the information that they're looking for? Right. Is it useful? If it's not useful, get rid of it, learn Herbal. Can your website visitors figure out how to use it? Right. Is it self explanatory? Do can they, can they, can I navigate through your website without any additional instructions? Right. So learn about important memorable Well, your visitors have to relearn how to use your app or your your landing page or your website every time they visit that's important? Effective. Can they actually accomplish tasks on your site? Right. If it's a e commerce site is check out, is there a check out possible, Is it easy to check out? Do they have options available to them? If they want to customize their products? If they want to, you know, customize their service. Could could they call you? If they want to call you, do they have to or can I submit a form easily? Right. So asking yourself these basic questions, is your site effective? Is it efficient? This is also very important. Most of your sites will probably be effective and they'll probably be learnt herbal and memorable. Right? That's the basic, basic, basic but efficiency. Can people get done what they have to get done with the least amount of resources and mental cognitive strain as possible. Right? Any sort of inefficiencies are really inexcusable because inefficiencies are usually pretty easy to solve. Right? So any inefficiencies whether it be page load speed, whether it be making customers read too much information or asking for too much information in the form. These are all things that make the accomplishment of a specific conversion task. Inefficient, desirable. Right? This goes this goes way back to the very first thing we talked spoke about right Primacy of product. Do you sell something that people want? It's that simple. Right? So if you ask yourself, do you sell something that people want and if people want it but they don't understand that they want or they don't understand enough about it. That's how you have to present and package your information delightful, right? We're hearing this word being thrown around this concept of of being delightful. Um is there this experiential element to your website? Something that goes above and beyond just the text and the images or the video, is there a cohesiveness in the design? Do people come to your site and feel that there's something fun about being on your site that there's something enjoyable about shopping on your site, Right? Those are that's not something that's going to be typical in every landing page experience. But when you could accomplish that, you extraordinarily increase the engagement with your brand and ultimately your conversion rate as well, steve Krug, author of Don't make me think we're gonna talk a lot about his concepts throughout the rest of this section and the rest of the course and we have been talking about a lot of his stuff, He's one of the early pioneers in web usability. He wrote a book. Don't make me think, I definitely recommend you get it. And this is his definition of usability. It's simple, sweet and it's elegant. A person of average ability and experience can figure out what you do and how to use your website without it being more trouble than it's worth. Right? So that kind of encapsulates all the different previous ideas. Right? So efficiency effectiveness, desirable. It's useful. It's memorable Itzler Noble, Right? I can figure out what you do and how to do it without it being more trouble than it's worth steve Krug also talks about this concept of perceived value, right? And if you remember our chart about, you know, a couple of sections ago about the BJ fogg's behavior model? This is going to look very similar, perceived value could go from go from high to low. So we'll label the horizontal access access as perceived value. That's right. You have low value and high value and let's say on the on the vertical axis you have um difficulty. So both steve krug and the fog behavioral model talked a lot about difficulty as we spoke about ability. Right? So in with the fog behavioral model as simplicity goes up, perceived ability goes up as well. Right? So that can go anywhere from easy two very hard. Okay, and this is the element, this is the most fundamental concept in usability and then we're going to have an action line that looks something like this, right? Where in this area over here you have success. Your landing page is working right as your perceived value goes up and as the difficulty comes down, Okay, this is where you have your your success. If you're over here, right, very difficult, you need to have high perceived value. If it's very difficult over here, you're gonna fail because there's a low perceived value and people are not going to do things that are difficult with a low perceived value over here. You have failure what your job to what our job is in landing page design and landing page optimization, conversion optimization. Our job is to get as many people as many visitors in this lower right hand quadrant over here, right? This is where we want our visitors, We want as many visitors as possible to feel to perceive the value of what we offer as high and to think that accomplishing what we want them to accomplish is very easy. You win when you design landing pages that put people in the lower right hand quadrant of this chart, perceived value as high perceived difficulty is low. You've got a lot of conversions right in that area. Okay. That's that's the purpose of design and the primacy of product. Understanding how important a good product that people want is right? That increases perceived value, how well you design your pages is, what makes it look easy and seem easy to convert and to engage with your company. So that wraps up the foundation of defining usability. And then we're gonna now go into talking about clarity, removing question marks and a lot of specific examples and techniques that you could use to reduce the cognitive load and to make your landing pages more efficient and easier for users to engage with. I'll see you guys in a few seconds in the very next lecture