Book: Pocket Guide - Designing for conversion
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Designing for conversion

By Richard Muscat

This book by Richard Muscat will guide you through optimising websites for conversion as well as avoiding common problems such as the incorrect use of metrics, wrong motivations and a misaligned focus. 

 

About this book

This Pocket Guide is about the craft of designing online sales – what many people have come to refer to as conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

Optimising websites for conversion can often fail due to incorrect use of metrics, wrong motivations and a misaligned focus.

This book by Richard Muscat will guide you through avoiding dark design patterns, converting prospects into customers and will allow you take the first step to understanding that conversion is a long term process.

Topics include

My grandfather, nannu in Maltese, was the village tailor and for most of his life earned his keep providing custom tailoring for the people of his village and beyond. He took enormous pride in his craft, making sure everybody knew he did all the work from scratch; designing, measuring, cutting, tailoring, fittings and alterations.

Many terms that move into common usage find their true meanings and origins diluted or forgotten. Conversion as applied to business is not new. Sales and advertising people have used it for decades.

At this point, it may be clear that CRO work is not something you do one Friday afternoon. It is continuous and iterative work. Not appreciating this can mean that first-timers go into the field with unreasonable expectations which are unlikely to be met.

I propose here five guidelines for successful conversion rate optimisation. You don’t need to follow all of these to get your optimisation work right and they’re not exhaustive. But if you’re applying none of them, you might be doing something wrong.

Not everything I’ve discussed will apply to your specific circumstances and you most certainly can’t do all of it at once, even if you agreed with everything I suggested. Some things, you probably knew already, like the importance of talking to customers. Others, you may need to dig much deeper into, like crafting great words or understanding statistics better. Some you’ll be able to work on the moment you put down this book, like making sure you have the right goals in place for your conversion optimisation work.

About Richard Muscat

Richard Muscat

Richard Muscat works on growth at Automattic, the company that makes WordPress.com, Jetpack, and Akismet. He is a designer living and working in sunny Malta.

Previously he was Head of User Experience at Redgate Software in Cambridge and consulted several incubators and start-ups on growth and conversion work.

Conversion as applied to business is not new. Sales and advertising people have used it for decades.

Richard Muscat