67 Digital Experience Optimization - Jon MacDonald Jun 13 2024

Erik Martinez: [00:00:00] Welcome to today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast today. Tim and I have the privilege of speaking with Jon MacDonald, CEO of The Good, a firm that specializes in digital experience optimization. Jon has great insights from working with companies like Adobe and Nike, and he has a new book Behind The Click that discusses the psychological principles behind customer decisions to craft journeys that delight, engage, and convert Jon, welcome to the show.

Jon MacDonald: Thanks for having me, Erik.

Erik Martinez: So Jon, before we dive into the topic of the [00:01:00] day, just take a couple of minutes and give us a brief synopsis of your journey that led you to this point.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, well, look, I've been doing a conversion, what's typically conversion rate optimization for 15 years now. It's hard to believe I started The Good that long ago, but the more work we've done to optimize conversion rates for all the brands you've mentioned that people know and love, the more we've realized that to make real lasting gains, you have to pull way back further than just the conversion.

Every element of your website is going to tell the customer something about why they do or do not want to work with you or buy from you. The other option is your website just confuses them enough to look someplace else and realize that they don't want to work with you, right? So, the key is to be able to recognize these moments along the digital journey and pinpoint what's causing them at a deeper level.

Really, after optimizing websites for [00:02:00] all these years, I put together a list of why you should be deploying these tactics. What's the thinking behind all of these? Most of CRO is just tactics. It's telling people to run A/B testing. It's telling people to do this checklist of items to get people to convert. But when you do that, you miss out on the rest of the journey, and folks may never even get to that conversion point. I really wanted to focus on not just telling people what tactics to use to fix their digital journey issues, I wanted to help them understand and show them why those issues are occurring and why a tactic might work or not work for them.

The best way I could find to do that was to explain the fundamental psychology behind those issues so that these companies’ teams could come up with a solution that works for their specific audience. It really helps to realize that decisions online are not just logical, but they're heavily influenced by psychological [00:03:00] factors, so bridging this gap is really what Behind The Click is meant to do. It's to apply these psychological principles to improve digital experiences.

Erik Martinez: Cool. So, let's talk about digital experience and just the definition of what that means. First, maybe you can start with, Hey, this is what basic CROis. Here's how we expand into the concept of digital experience optimization.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, of course. CRO, or Conversion Rate Optimization, is really measuring one metric, and that's improvement to conversion rate. Super easy to understand clear return on investment when it works. But again, customers start that digital experience the moment they encounter your company or brand online, not the moment they go to purchase. There's so much that happens in that journey before and after that conversion point.

So, the goal of digital experience optimization is [00:04:00] really more to create an intuitive, cohesive path for customers to discover who you are, what you do to gather the information they need to make a decision and then to convert, and even after that conversion to make sure that they have a good relationship with your brand and they don't regret that conversion decision.

So, really all of these steps are important, and I argue they're just as important as conversion optimization. But it's both an art and a science. We want to uncover issues that customers face on a company's website or app, and then use research and data and several types of testing to create solutions with real measurable results. Unfortunately, conversion optimization has become synonymous with just A/B testing, and there's so much more that you can do.

It's unfortunate because A/ B testing for years was a wonderful toolset to [00:05:00] have. But now, coming out of COVID, where E-commerce had this nice boom and everybody was saying, okay, I'm getting tons of people to my site, but they're not converting at a high enough level, I want to focus on optimizing for conversions. Look, at The Good, we rode that wave too.

What has happened is that now, it's almost become a commodity. Everybody wants to optimize for conversions and everybody wants to A/B test. Unfortunately, a vast majority of brands are not a good fit for A/B testing. And that's because maybe they don't have enough traffic to get reasonable data results. They don't have enough conversions to even understand if something is working or not. Or they don't have the resources to implement and run testing fast enough.

So, perhaps they have a developer on their team, but he's doing bug fixes or she's out there adding products to the site and fixing issues that come up. The challenge is you really need a full dedicated team to do [00:06:00] A/B testing or just conversion optimization. Most brands who think it's going to be the end all be all for their problems, it's going to solve all of their sales problems and revenue problems, really should not be doing A/B testing. They should be starting way before that and just talking to their customers to understand where issues are. That's going to be way more valuable for them.

Tim Curtis: I like the way you said that. So, about eight years ago now, I made a bit of a hard pivot. It was moving beyond sort of basic blocking and tackling in a lot of the various disciplines within marketing, but it was beginning to lean into the psychology behind that. I had postgraduate work in organizational psychology and traditional psychology, so I had a good basis for understanding the human mind and the capacity of what drives it, et cetera. We call it the reptilian brain, right?

But, at the time, those insights were largely not found within marketing communities. The marketing community [00:07:00] had really not tapped into or unpacked anything related to psychology-based marketing or neurology-based marketing and the different flavors that people sort of came up with those terms. What I like about what you're saying is it is the art and the science. It's something that begins long before they're on a site that essentially gives them the ability to say, choose path A or path B, depending on what group you're in testing an ad.

But there is something significant about that statistical significance and getting brands that will, they're either prematurely pulling the trigger on something, which is something you often see, or they're impatient. They're checking those tests daily. They need to step back and let the process play out. Anybody who's worked in conversion rate optimization can tell you that what you get as an early read oftentimes is not correct, and that's weird how that happens but the results of the end of the day will oftentimes be a winner in favor of something else.

It's not that there's not value in conversion rate optimization. There is obviously, but I think we've come to a point [00:08:00] where we're beginning to get a deeper understanding of marketing in general, and we're beginning to take care and sort of curate elements of our brand that plays into that overall brand experience. I kind of like to feel that that's a part of what you're incorporating into your digital experience optimization or DxO is more of those elements.

In sitting back and working with a lot of startups that are trying to accelerate their brand, they're running into ceilings on returns with traditional digital. They've got to figure out something else besides just paying Google or paying Facebook. The digital experience gives them a chance, DxO will give them a chance to incorporate those elements of, and testing and optimizing, but it gives them permission to work on things that if they said, Hey, we need to work on brand.

A lot of times people don't want to invest in brand. It's difficult to get investment dollars, especially when capital is the cost it is today. So, you've obviously made that pivot. You've gone full in now on [00:09:00] digital experience optimization. So, what does that look like when you're taking somebody that may not even been doing CRO and they may be leapfrogging beyond traditional CRO right into DxO? What does that look like? I'm really curious what those conversations go down like with those kinds of clients.

Jon MacDonald: Well, I think that there's a handful of things. The best way I can summarize this is marketers kind of get a handful of things wrong about experience optimization. I actually covered this in my first book, which was seven plus eight years ago now called Stop Marketing, Start Selling. If that tells you anything, the title alone is taking a pretty hard stance, right? At the time it was not a popular opinion, but in time it's proven to be true. Along with what you're saying, right?

A lot of brands want to kind of skip over the foundation. The problem is that with marketing digital experience is that most brands continue to market once a customer has reached their [00:10:00] site, the reality is, is that their marketing has already won. The customers at their website. Marketing is to drive traffic and awareness, not to convert. So, it's time to switch once somebody gets to your site to providing that best digital experience for the customer. If you take that approach, you're going to be way more successful.

And that's the first step to digital experience optimization is understanding that this really means addressing the only two reasons people are at your site. They're there to understand if your brand can solve their pain or need. And if so, they want to convert. to a lead or a customer as quickly and easily as possible and get on with their lives. This often, unfortunately, shows up as different type of psychological principles that get deployed.

One of them I absolutely hate is negative intent shaming. You see marketers do this all the time where they throw an email pop up up and they say, to close it you have to [00:11:00] click on something that says, no, I don't like discounts.

Tim Curtis: Yeah. Exactly.

Erik Martinez: Right. Right.

Jon MacDonald: There's a lot of issues that marketers get wrong, but if you understand the psychology behind decision-making, it will lead to way more effective optimization strategy as a whole. I mean, the reality is technology is always changing. Optimization tactics are always going to evolve. even the way we live in society changes on a regular basis. However, the psychological principles I talk about Behind The Clkick, they're core to human behavior. They've existed since we were cavemen. Most of them were survival tactics at the time. We still have. You mentioned the lizard brain, right? Reptile brain. It kind of goes back to that to some degree.

Most marketers, for some reason, are not as studied in psychological principles as they really need to be to be effective. Now, they can drive traffic, but to convert it using [00:12:00] marketing, you really need to have an understanding of psychology. So, every principle from group identity to social norms to the bandwagon effect, these all develop because humans are safer and stronger in groups. And these fundamental principles will always be the same. So, if you can understand where they come from at the very base, you're able to use that knowledge no matter what else has changed in the world.

So, using that bandwagon effect, social proof. That's why you see so much social proof out there right now, right? So, there's ways to understand the psychology and then deploy it in a way that is not only going to be helpful to the customer, but it's also going to subconsciously help them to better accomplish those two tasks that I talked about to understand if you can solve their pain or need, and if so, convert as quickly and easily as possible.

Tim Curtis: All right. They sound like they're common challenges. So, when someone comes in, how receptive are they to hearing that? Are they, generally accepted right away, [00:13:00] or is it a little bit of a struggle at least initially for them to kind of come to grips with what you're saying? Do they see that about themselves? Maybe that's the better question.

Jon MacDonald: The folks who reach out to us see it about themselves. They know they have a problem and they want a solution to why their site is not performing at the level they think it should. If they come to us with that mindset of, yes, we have a challenge, our site is not performing, a lot of times they still come to us and say, our site's not converting. And then, the challenge at that point becomes, well, it's not converting because there are four phases that a consumer is going through and conversion is four. It's down the list. Let's start higher in that list.

They go through a discovery phase, information gathering, decision making, and then they convert and then you even have post-purchase after that. So, really you're looking at it as conversion is one-fifth of the journey. If that's all you're focused on, [00:14:00] you're missing out. In fact, that's how in Behind The Click that I actually even break the book down into sections is by each of those phases that consumers go through. Because you need to start with discovery before you can do anything else. That's where customers are forming that initial impression based on whether that company understands their pain or need and has a potential solution.

Erik Martinez: So, Jon, let's, take that a step further, and let's just give the listening audience an example from each one of those phases. So, if we were to start at discovery, what does that look like? So, if I'm a purveyor of garden statues. What does that look like?

Jon MacDonald: Funny, we've actually worked with a couple of retailers that sell garden statues as part of their products, so. I think the easiest way to answer that question is to think about, the most helpful way to answer that question I would say is to think about the principles that are at play and the questions people are asking in each of these [00:15:00] phases. Okay?

In the discovery phase, customers are asking themselves questions like, does this company understand my problem? So, in that case, you really need to carefully craft that first impression that will anchor the rest of the entire digital journey to follow.

Because we have a psychological principle called the anchoring effect, anchoring bias. Right? It's the idea that people are really overly reliant on the first piece of information they encounter. So, let's say they heard about you and discovery via a Google ad you ran. They click on it, come to your site. If there's no thread between those two, they're going to bounce because they were expecting what they saw on the ad, and that's not what the site was delivering. So, the messaging, the look and feel, all of that has to be consistent.

Then customers are asking also in that discovery phase, does this company have a solution to my problem? Really what you need to do [00:16:00] here, I talked earlier about talking to customers. You need to do user testing to determine what are your customer's needs. What are their assumptions? When they come to that digital journey, what are they thinking, so you can help guide them to that right solution? I can keep going with the rest of the phases too, if that'd be helpful.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, absolutely. I think this is fantastic information because I think, we as marketers sometimes, I've sat on both sides of the desk and I can tell you that my experience is you're racing from campaign to campaign to campaign to campaign. We built a schedule. We have a budget, we have a plan. We've got to hit it at all costs. And so, there's this tendency to want to focus on that conversion because that seems like it's the easy left. Right?

Jon MacDonald: It is an easy metric to determine success with, right? If you're going to go to your C-level leadership and say, all this money you invested, look at our conversion rate. It's up. They [00:17:00] understand that. They get it. That's where I was saying earlier, a lot of times the resources aren't there. It's because the buy-in isn't there to do more than just conversion and optimization.

Erik Martinez: I like to loop back into the whole strategic piece of what is the business plan. What is it we are trying to accomplish as a company? Last week I attended a conference of agency owners and one of the common threads in the data that was presented is that clients or retail businesses or lead gen businesses, doesn't really matter, one of the number one things that they're asking for their agencies to prove is ROI. Which goes back to that conversion metric.

But I can tell you that I've recently had some conversations with clients about the journey that they want to go to. Where they are today, where they want to be, and trying to put in the pieces in place to understanding that not everything we'll do, will have that immediate [00:18:00] impact. And I think that's kind of what you're driving at here with the different phases, right?

In discovery, hey, they just need to know about you. That's first battle, right? We got to cut through the clutter, make sure they know about you. I come from a direct marketing background. Tim comes from a direct marketing background. In the direct mail world, it was always about conversion. We mail somebody. Did they respond? We mail somebody. Did they respond? Now, I think marketing has evolved a lot in the years since I've started in direct mail, but there's this hyper-focus on the conversion part and what's making it difficult today is that there's way more competition.

Jon MacDonald: Yes.

Erik Martinez: Way more competition for the exact goods and services. And even when you are a niche brand with a relatively unique product, you can find something similar on Amazon or on Walmart and have it the next day. So, we have to be able to put in bigger plans with more thought behind it. [00:19:00] And I think, that's what you, at least my interpretation of what you're saying is that's what we really need to do. So, if we go through the next phase, if I took my notes right, it was information gathering.

Jon MacDonald: Correct.

Erik Martinez: What does that look like? What are the questions that are people answering?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Well, and this is where I think if the internet was run by sales teams as opposed to marketing teams, we'd have a much different internet experience for users. Because sales, their whole job is to guide people to the best solution for them. Yes, they want to sell as well, but they're going to have a conversation and try to provide the right information to help somebody make a decision. Where marketing just wants people to have information. They just keep sending them information, whether it's relevant or not. And a lot of times they just want it to be beautiful information. So, that's really where the disconnect is.

When you get to that information-gathering phase, people are asking questions like, can I find what I'm looking for? If you continue to market to them, you're [00:20:00] getting in the way of that. You want to create a clear and customized browsing experience. Pretty simple. And then they're asking, what do I need to know about this purchase? So, you have to make sure you're not leaving anything up to interpretation. Take a pure sales play here. Give them the information they need. Not too much, not too little. Answer their questions, guide them on that journey.

And then, this is where you would hit them with social proof because they're asking the questions of who else has already bought this, and if I join those people, what does that say about me? So, you have to show them exactly what the purchasing choice says about them to other people. If you're wearing Patagonia, does it make you look more like a venture capitalist or somebody who actually climbs mountains? That can all be in the imagery in the questions that you're going to ask, not so much in the marketing campaigns.

The problem with this phase is that there's really two types of consumers coming to your [00:21:00] site. There's the maximizers and the satisfiers. The maximizers are customers who they know and they need to know every available option in order to make the best decision possible. They have 100 browser tabs open, they're hitting up every brand, they're comparing, they're maybe making their own spreadsheets. They're the ones who you really need to have as much information as possible.

Then there's the satisfiers. And it's funny because when I say these, everybody is like, yeah, I'm that person or I'm that person. Right? The satisfiers are the ones who are content to find a good solution, and as soon as they find that, I'm done. I got it. I'm moving on with my life. Right? They just want to get the task done. It's good enough, typically, right? So, I think that it's really interesting because you need to find this balance of providing the information that will make the maximizers happy, but not too much information that the satisfiers have decision fatigue.

Where they're [00:22:00] coming in and they're saying, Oh, I got to look through all of this and answer all these questions. We make 35, 000 decisions in a day and we don't even think about most of them, but decision fatigue is a real problem. It has been scientifically shown we make worse and worse decisions, the more we make, not better decisions and this is within a time. Obviously, we learn from those decisions and it can make better next time, but within a whole day, we're making worse decisions the more we make.

I think if we move on to that decision-making phase and this is where the conversion could potentially happen, people are asking the questions like am I ready to make a purchase? So, you really have to guide people with an emotional appeal. You got to hit them with a meaningful and real-time to call the action, and make them feel like they already own it Right? What's it like to already own it? Then, what should I choose? You have to make the choice less complicated. Make it as easy as possible. This is where guided [00:23:00] experiences can really help around doing like a quiz to lead down to one or two options, for instance. Then they ask the questions like, what's in it for me? Are you going to give me a discount? Is there a benefit here? Something that's unique for me.

And then, you know, they're also asking if I'm wrong about this choice, what's the worst possible outcome I might experience. Oh, I have to return it and I have to pay to return it. Am I stuck with the product? You know, am I solving an immediate need, and now I have to push that off a couple of weeks while I exchange the product? What does that look like? Right? So, you have to really build trust and then guarantee that your solution is something that is, going to be worthwhile for them. So, there's a lot to think about there beyond just did they click buy.

 

Tim Curtis: When you mentioned the conversion rate being sort of the easy thing, the easy KPI to use upstream. At the end of the day, the lingua franca of business is [00:24:00] financial. It's all financial. We gravitate toward metrics that are native, if you will, to the financial conversion process and things that we can multiply to figure out where we are.

The challenge that you run into with elements, I'm going to use the term branding because I think everyone kind of understands the concept of branding and the importance of brand. It is difficult to always unlock capital from a source to invest into branding or the brand experience. They're always categorized. I've heard the term softer, used to describe those metrics.

If you operate a business for any length of time, you'll understand that those are not softer. I understand where they're coming up with the softer. Those are mission-critical investments to your business that pay dividends all up and down the conversion funnel. But, you know, that being said, key metrics, the KPIs, what do you do in those areas where it's not going to be a, you know, akin to that lingua franca KPI, like a conversion? [00:25:00] How are you setting those up? What are you using as an evaluative criteria for those elements?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, that's a really great question. So, the reality is that the reason that a lot of folks don't invest in branding as a whole is because they don't understand what branding is, and I say that with the most love for branding firms and marketing agencies. The challenge here is if you ask 10 people what branding means, they're going to get 10 different definitions.

So, a C-suite who's making these financial decisions has a really hard time understanding, what am I paying for, and that becomes the big challenge. Again, they understand conversion rate. I get it. More people I get to the door, the more people who buy, the more money I make. Everyone understands that. So, you're right, the big challenge that we often have is if we're not going to push conversion rate, how do we get funding for all this? [00:26:00] Right?

So, there are five different ways that we typically measure this at The Good and really help people understand on a scale, are they improving in these areas? Because that's really what, let's be honest, the C-suite wants to know is, are they making improvements? And if you can show them that, then they're typically going to back you.

The first is to improve the look and feel of your website. And I put this first because it's the most superficial, but DxO really goes beyond the superficial changes. It incorporates user feedback, behavioral data, to make design decisions that not only look well but perform well. And I think that's the key. Most branding agencies want to do something that looks well. They want to tell a good story and it might look really good.

Now, they would probably argue with me that, no, no, no, we're doing this because it's going to perform well. It's harder to measure that, right? And that's why it's a softer metric. But this is a great way to build those hard-to-measure qualities [00:27:00] like trustworthiness, reliability, and safety that your customers are really craving when they're purchasing online.

The second is prioritizing of ideas and improvements. Most digital teams have hundreds of ideas they'd like to try, but with each change comes a cost in workforce, time, money. So, how do you choose which ones you're exploring? DxO is really going to help zero in on those ideas that are more likely to move the needle for your organization, and that's a real easy sell to C-level. You know what? Let's not pay for something until we're sure it's going to actually be effective. So, that's a good conversation, a good way to reframe that for C-level.

The third is forming a deepened understanding of your customers. Right. And this kind of goes back to the branding to some degree, right? Because you're going to have a more profound comprehension of your customer's behaviors, their preferences, their needs. And all of [00:28:00] this can feed back up the chain to having better ads, to having a better post-purchase experience with reassurance, all of these things.

The fourth is creating a culture of user-centered and data-driven decision-making. It's no secret that data-backed decisions are better than best practices or gut feelings. I think everyone would say, is this brand successful? Well, you could look at it and say, in my gut, I think it's going to be really successful or we've tested this quite a bit and we know it's going to hit our target market. So, a strong DxO program uses real-world data to inform and guide decision-making. And that data has to come from your ideal audience, not just the general public, right? So, again, you're able to take hard data to the C-level and say, we ran this by 1500 people. Here's what they said. That's pretty compelling.

I'll tell you the fifth one and I have a really good story that shows this. The fifth is saving [00:29:00] time and resources by validating design decisions. So, I talked a little bit about this in the first thing, but it really helps you validate or invalidate design decisions before implementing them at full scale. Again, reiterating that it's not just going to have a better-looking site, it's going to have a way more effective site.

So, if you can reiterate those five things to your C-level, improving the look and feel of your site, prioritizing, having a better understanding of your customers, creating a user-centered and data-driven culture, and then saving time and resources by validating, I don't know a C-level that's going to turn that down. You have to do some education there.

A good example of this is, we worked with a major printer manufacturer. We went in, they asked us to audit their site because people were coming to their site and did not understand where they could buy toner for their printers. They were coming online and buying printers left and right, but then they would never buy the toner. And what [00:30:00] we found through user research, we actually did user testing. We sent people who are in roles who buy toner, IT roles, supply roles, etc. And had them go to the site and just prompted them, find the best toner for your printer and add it to checkout, and while you're doing that, talk out loud about the experience that you're having. We're going to record your screen and your audio. We want you to know what you're thinking.

And what we found was pretty clearly that consumers, they expected to go to find their printer that they have, and then on that printer page would have the right toner that they could then add to the cart because they knew what printer they had. They had no idea what toner they needed, right? It was easy to walk up to the printer, get the model number off the front of it, and go, but nobody's opening up the printer, taking out the toner. It feels messy. They just don't know.

Tim Curtis: Right. Yeah. That's too hard.

Jon MacDonald: Right. Unfortunately, there was no way to do that. We came back after having this research, we posed the question and said, Well, why don't you just put the toner that the printer needs for sale on the [00:31:00] printer page? They said, Well, we're here to sell printers. And I said, No, you brought us in to sell toner, but that's a different conversation. I get what your website's supposed to do. They said, Well, that's the way we've always done it. I said, Okay, I get it. We'll be back. Can we meet again in a couple of days?

What we did is we took all the user testing videos and we edited them down to show people being frustrated. They would say, I can't find the toner. It should be on this printer page. I have this printer. How do I know what toner it takes? And we would show clips of this. And while we were doing that in the bottom corner, we put a rolling tally of how much money each person would have spent that deserted and it just kept adding up, adding up, adding up.

We got about three minutes into a 20-minute video highlight reel that we had put together and a high-level senior VP in the room said, you can turn it off. Do what you need to do. It was all about having that user empathy and then taking it back to helping them understand the [00:32:00] financial implications of that. And so, showing them what their consumers were going through and what it was costing them, made them realize, okay, yes, we need to be doing that. And that wasn't even talking about conversion rate. It was higher up in the journey.

Erik Martinez: So, Jon, you know, you just talked about an example where you're doing some live user testing in a fairly simple example, very straightforward example. You're talking about this idea of the role of user feedback, right? So that's one way of collecting that data. What are the other ways of collecting that data, right? You know, we've got surveys and we hear about surveys and then focus groups, and then there's the type of testing that you talked about.

Can you just spend a minute or so talking about what the role of each of these testing types is? And if you were a person and say, Hey, you know what? Maybe you don't have a big budget, you're a small company, you don't have a big budget, but you know you have some issues, you have this gut sense, where do you [00:33:00] start? Where do we start with all these different choices? I'm just curious as to what your advice would be there.

Jon MacDonald: Well, there's two main buckets that I look down into, and that is qualitative and quantitative. Okay. So, getting a little scientific nerdy here, but the qualitative is talking to people where the quantitative is the numbers. It's the actions people take. So, quantitative is really going to be data in terms of what we're talking about today, going to be data like analytics, heatmaps, clickmaps, scrollmaps. It's data that's a result of what people have done. It's hard to understand why they're doing that with just quantitative data, okay? You have a good understanding of what's happening, but you don't understand why.

The qualitative is really going to tell you why. That's where you're going to talk to people, you're going to do the surveys you talked about, you might do things that are more open-ended questions. But user testing is my favorite out of those because it's the most effective. Now, if you are just [00:34:00] starting out, focus 100 percent on the qualitative, ignore the data.

Now, that doesn't mean you don't collect that quantitative data. Yeah, have analytics hooked up. Do something like a triple whale or something to help you understand how people are navigating through your site. There's a whole bunch of those metrics out there. Collect that data, so later, once you have an understanding of what people are thinking, you can then match that up with what people are doing. But don't spend too much time in the quantitative to start. Focus on the qualitative.

Now, if you don't have a lot of budget, maybe you don't have buy-in. You're just a sole optimizer or E-commerce manager or digital product owner, and you need to build up some, I would say, you know, ammo for going in and having resource conversations, what I would do is just interview some customers. I'm not asking you to do a survey. No, I want them on video using your [00:35:00] site with open-ended questions.

Okay, and this can be a recorded Zoom call. There's two types, moderated and unmoderated. Unmoderated is when you're not present, and a lot of people feel more comfortable doing that. Okay. You can go to places like, userinput.io. It's a great tool for this. We actually own that tool, so it's a little bit of a plug, I'll be honest. But the idea behind that is you can go there and get user testing videos done for you, and collect it at a very reasonable cost. There's larger enterprise ones like usertesting.com as well, where, you know, you need to pay quite a bit of money, but if you're just starting out, you can get the same thing on a smaller scale, other places.

The easiest, most cost-effective way, go to your local coffee shop. Take some money, 25, 50 bucks, take your laptop and go up to the line and say, Hey, I'll buy your coffee and while the barista is making it, I want you to click through my website and I'm going to ask you to do a couple of things. I just want to see what your [00:36:00] reaction is. You will be shocked how many people will say yes. This coffee shop test works amazingly for gathering initial data.

So, you take your site and you say, Hey, maybe you sell t-shirts. Hey, find the best t-shirt for you, and I want you to just tell me what you're thinking as you go through this process, talk out loud. There's no wrong answers. I'm not trying to trick you. Nobody's here to trick you. We just want to know the process you go through to make this decision. Put the laptop in front of them and let them go.

Just listen for keywords that come up. I'm looking for the size. I can't find the size filter. I only like this color. I only wear this color, so let me find that color. Oh, where's the color filters? How do I do this easily? Right? Or I only wear long sleeves. I'm always cold. Where do I find a long sleeve, right? So, then you start understanding how people want to navigate the site and what their decision-making process looks like.

And then you can start adjusting your site based on what you keep hearing come up. Obviously, there were [00:37:00] three people that said they wanted to be able to filter, but we don't offer any filters on our category pages. So, we're really kind of creating a problem for ourselves. So, you start to hear these things over and over and the similarities start to really pile up. It's an easy, cheap, effective way to do user testing without any software needs whatsoever.

Erik Martinez: Those are great ideas. Sometimes we make these things way more complicated. I need a fancy tool. I need all sorts of software. I got to reinvent my tech stack. I need a professional psychologist and a market researcher and all those things to do these things. And I think you gave us some real simple ways of addressing that. We make it way more complicated than we need to just to get some basic feedback on how to make our websites better.

Thank you for all this incredibly helpful and actionable information. Is there one last piece of advice that you'd like to leave our audience today, besides [00:38:00] read guys, everybody grab the book.

Jon MacDonald: Well, I think the last piece of advice is that there are all these fundamental principles that shape the way we interact and make decisions in the world. The best investment of your time is to understand your audience. Use that knowledge to help guide them to the best solution to their problem in the easiest, most effective, best possible way for them, which in turn is going to help you reach your customer goals and your company goals. Everybody wins. So many folks are focused on this conversion point without understanding why.

So, yes, read the book. I think if you just spend time talking to your customers, you're going to have a really good understanding of what they're thinking. Maybe not the psychology principles behind that, unless you read the book, but you will know what they want and why they're making decisions in the way they are, what questions they're asking, and you can immediately have a better [00:39:00] experience by just talking to your customers. So, go to a coffee shop, do the coffee shop test. If you have a little bit of money, do some online user testing. All of this is stuff that will help you better understand your customers.

Erik Martinez: Great advice. What's the easiest way to get in touch with you if somebody wants to reach out?

Jon MacDonald: If you want to reach out, I'm very active on LinkedIn,

so just look me up on LinkedIn. It's J O N MacDonald, M A C D O N A L D. I'm very active on there. I try to read all the messages. Hit me up there. You can find a lot of information about The Good at thegood.com. That's the digital experience optimization firm that I founded.

And then, if you're interested in getting a copy of Behind The Click, you can go where most books are sold. It's up on Amazon, et cetera, but you can also go to thegood.com/slashBTC for Behind The Click and use code [00:40:00] btcpodcastfivezero. So, that's btcpodcastfivezero at checkout and you'll get 50 percent off a copy. Would love to hear what you think about it, so definitely send me a message.

Erik Martinez: That's fantastic. And thank you for the generous offer for the audience. Jon, thank you again. We appreciate you coming on the show today. That's a wrap for this episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Erik Martinez from Blue Tangerine.

Tim Curtis: And I'm Tim Curtis from CohereOne.

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