UX has a top vs bottom of funnel problem too

The top-of-funnel brand building vs bottom-of-funnel performance marketing debate has been raging for years now, and over time edges ever closer towards resolution. Marketers have learned the hard way that it’s not enough to merely service demand at the point of decision-making, and that demand needs to be generated and incubated to get the customer to that point in the sales journey. D2C and e-commerce brands alike are trying to wean themselves off the drug that is paid-for bottom of funnel attention and so move the right proportion of their marketing budget from a cost of sale to a fixed cost, with the outsized opportunities for scale which that brings.

I’m unconvinced that UX has resolved its equivalent of the funnel investment challenge, or even given it the consideration that it deserves. In this author’s view, user experience in practice tends to overfocus on usability to the detriment of desirability. Sure, usability is a critical component of helping a user complete a task (buy a new shirt, check-in online, find the time of the next bus) however desirability is the critical element of making them want to complete the task in the first place (the shirt is stylish and a good fit, checking-in online is demonstrably easier than doing it at the airport, the bus is more convenient than the car).

Several simple thought experiments exploring the extremities may illustrate the point.

The highest desirability experiences tend to exist on the intersection of scarcity, liking and social proof (with thanks to Professor Cialdini). Experiences such as buying Taylor Swift or Oasis concert tickets, purchasing brand-name consumer goods at a knock-down price, or getting on to a pre-sales list for a new product from your favourite brand all fall into this category.

In each of these situations, we know that users in the online and offline worlds will go through usability hell to sate their appetite. This usually takes the unedifying form of spending an entire Saturday morning on multiple devices and browsers or queuing overnight outside the retail store to be first through the door in the morning when the doors open.

At the other end of the spectrum lie low-desire high-indifference products. Examples include printer ink and toner cartridges, phone chargers and accessories, stationery, cables and adaptors. For these products, strategically sound user experience planning focuses almost entirely on price and convenience. There are few other ways to win at that end of the market.

However, between these two extremes sits nearly every other product, which is purchased based on a combination of product, price, place and promotion (with thanks to Professor McCarthy). So, while Taylor doesn’t really need to think about usability (albeit it would be great if she did) and suppliers of ink cartridges can’t do too much with desirability, for everyone else both considerations are important.

So what does that means for UX? Here’s four things:

E-commerce UX needs to climb back up the funnel

The Eisenberg brothers, Bryan and Jeffrey, were the among first to codify the psychology of e-commerce way back in the mid to late 1990s. Around that time, pioneering e-commerce websites couldn’t understand the new phenomenon of ‘shopping trolley abandonment’, where users would add products to their cart, but not buy.

Their research revealed six distinct phases of e-commerce buying – find / select / decide / trolley / checkout / fulfil – and that 60% of abandonment issues related to the first three phases, all pre-trolley. The trolley only accounted for 20% of issues, with fulfilment covering the final 20%. These 60% issues were focused around product confidence challenges “is this the best product for my needs”, “is there another product on this site or others which is more suitable”, “did I get the best price”, which when addressed significantly improved performance.

It's no surprise therefore that today that discipline is more commonly called ‘conversion rate optimisation’ and no longer focuses exclusively on the trolley.

CRO needs a rethink

Conversion rate optimisation typically comprises experiments (usually in the form of A/B or multivariate tests) which explore the performance of interface variations. It is my view that too many of these are focused on usability:

• Call to action buttons – changing labels, colour, prominence and position
• Checkout – changing number of steps, autofill, clarity of error messages
• Site search - helping more users find what they’re looking for more quickly
• Navigation – menu structure, layout, labelling and categorisation
• Landing pages – headlines, imagery, text, calls to action, alignment with ad copy which resulted in the user arriving

These are all worthy and should be part of any programme of optimisation. However, desirability experiments are an essential part of any CRO mix, such as the following:

• Upsell – users who bought Y also bought X, suggesting relevant accessories (for example batteries with an electronic device, bulbs for a lamp)
• Product pages – image size, quality and positioning, use of video, product descriptions
• Trust signals – placement of badges, use of third-party scoring systems, customer testimonials
• Pricing and discounts – bundling discounts, countdown timers, before and after comparisons

We need to get back to B=MAP (with thanks to Dr Fogg)

BJ Fogg, founder of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University, established a behaviour model which states that Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt must converge at the same moment for a behaviour to occur, which he has neatly summarised into B (behaviour) = M (motivation) x A (ability) x P (prompt). As Fogg himself attests “Behaviour happens when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt come together at the same time. When a behaviour does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing.”

In the context of user experience, desirability aligns with motivation – the user wants whatever is on offer. Usability aligns with ability – the user is able to access what is on offer. Prompt connects design to context – something has prompted the user to consider what is on offer in the first place, perhaps a life event, an immediate need or a piece of digital marketing.

Brand hasn’t gone away you know

One of the reasons that not every single element of marketing activity can be exactly measured is because humans are not perfectly rational economic units. We make decisions on a whole range of criteria, both arbitrary and logical, spanning both perception and reality. This duality recurs in how the word brand is defined by the world’s leading thinkers on the topic:

Kotler: A brand can “identify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors.”

Godin: “A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories, and relationships…”

Neumeier: “A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service, or organisation.”

Landor: “Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind.”

Keller: “A brand is a set of mental associations, held by the consumer, which add to the perceived value of a product or service.”

Olins: “A brand is the tangible and intangible sum of a product’s attributes.”

The impact of brand therefore flows from its not-fully-logical nature and its outsized impact on buyer behaviour. Consumers, as kings of post-purchase-rationalisation, often aren’t even aware of the impact which brand perception and desire has on their behaviour. As this author often observed during CRO projects, conversion rate could be increased simply by changing the logo on the top left of the page to a better known or more desired brand. And in the interests of a fuller definition of brand, it could be further improved by communicating that brand in imagery, typography, tone of voice and other relevant expressions.

Our users aren’t purely functioning robots, and we do them and ourselves a disservice by designing in a way which assumes that they are.

User experience reflects an amalgamation and evolution of lots of disciplines which came before. One of them, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), emerged in the 1980s as computers were moving from large mainframe centres into people’s homes. It focuses unsurprisingly on how humans interact with computers and explores to the degree to which technology fit into people’s lives, everyday needs and routines.

Because of the nature of the technical challenges HCI sought to solve, it evolved to focus on usability and ergonomics. However, as technology has further evolved from people’s homes and into their pockets and every aspect of their lives, UX too needs to mature further, to build on HCI’s foundation of usability and build on top of it desire.

Before a user can complete an action, they must want to do it in the first place.