A/B testing is very popular for the optimisation of home and landing pages. However, after initial quick wins, success rates often slow down. This can be avoided by consistently including the user viewpoint. We would like to demonstrate four ways of how the user viewpoint can be implemented in the testing process of landing pages.
It is less a question whether your home and landing pages are to be analysed and optimised, but rather which tool should be used to do this. There is a large selection of affordable and user-friendly tools which can permanently optimise the home page through simple mathematical processes. But whichever tool you are using, a lot of potential will remain unused in an exclusively mathematical optimisation. In combination with the user viewpoint, however, this can be fully exploited.
In the following, we will demonstrate four test scenarios for landing pages.
1. Include User Problems to Prioritise Test Plans
When testing, we often rely on the gut feeling of a few colleagues. This means, we are merely making assumptions and do not tackle the real user problems. Instead, it is recommended to analyse the home and landing pages by means of customer journey maps. In this way, the real issues will become apparent and can be tackled in combination with tests instead of relying on a gut feeling. Objective test criteria will form the basis in pro or contra of the individual design alternatives. Furthermore, the identified user problems provide an excellent basis to derive the hypotheses on problem causes mentioned under 2.
2. Develop Hypotheses About Problem Causes
Although uncoordinated trial and error may occasionally lead to success, in most cases, it is not sustainable as the cause for the boom tends to be unknown. For this reason, it is sensible to first formulate hypotheses in the team. Design variants can then be tested based on this. In this way, companies start to understand the issues in their customer communication and can respond to them not only in this particular case, but they also develop further in their entire communication with the target group.
3. Improve the Quality of Variables
Even though there is the possibility to try many different designs at a comparatively low price, the individual variants should be well thought out. As usual, the following applies: Quality stands before quantity.
When creating the designs users should already be consulted for tests as early as possible. The design does not need to be ready at this point. Simple sketches or mock-ups are sufficient – this also makes it easier to part from them again. Profound changes, e.g. in the case of a menu adaptation, require a huge understanding before they are submitted to A/B tests. Pretests in the form of card sorting or tree tests would be sensible here in order to guarantee a high quality of the alternative designs.
4. Monitor the Competition
Keeping a watchful eye on the competition would also be useful when conceptualising the design variations to be tested. These may serve as a basis for initial designs which are then gradually adapted and optimised.
Concluding, we can say that A/B or multi-testing is a good option to optimise home or landing pages. However, in order not to be in the dark but learn why users respond better to one particular design variant than another, it is vital to include them already in the conception phase. Of course, you can be happy about short-term success, but in order to achieve long-term success, it is essential to discover the cause of this success. This can only happen in a dialogue with the user.