User Experience (UX): Art or Science?
June 10th 2017
The general rule of thumb when it comes to UX is simple: never make the user click twice if you want them to do something. But what happens when you're driving traffic to your target URL(s) to buy, sign up, or generate a lead, and none of that happens? Real UX begins to take place and, unfortunately, it's not so straightforward.
While many may think adjusting the price, offer, or copy would fix the problem (and sometimes it does), it's not always the case. Over the past four years, the impact a layout, colour scheme, or even a font has had on the conversion rate or success of a client's campaign has never ceased to amaze.
To use MusicEDU and BackPay as examples, in both cases when their respective pay-per click (PPC) campaigns began, we were driving traffic at an incredibly low cost-per click (CPC) to the target URLs. Again, in both cases, however, conversions weren't taking place. As you might imagine, regardless of whether we bring a thousand horses to water, if none of them drink and the client doesn't manage a positive return on investment, they won't stay with us. Why would they?
As the PPC metrics were all in the green, and the offers by both companies were attractive to the target markets, we knew it was a UX problem. Digital advertising is an iterative process, and so when things aren't going the way we want them to it's a case of deducing what the culprit could be. For MusicEDU, it was simply adding an image of the director's face, a human face, to the target URL. For BackPay, believe it or not, it was simply changing the font and alignment of the text! In both cases, each campaign went from zero to hero.
All of this finally leads us back to the question in the title of this blog: is UX an art, or is it a science? The conclusion we've come to is that it's both. Put your best foot forward with your creative (the art), bring the target market in, then test and refine (the science).