 It's kind of annoying, right, when people arrive and they leave without telling you why. That's exactly what most of your visitors on your website are doing as well. I'm going to try to help you find ways in which you can learn about why they are leaving or stop them from leaving even. I'm Theo, just a shorter, longer introduction of myself. I love optimizing things, including websites, which I've been doing for over half of my life now. I was born and bred in Holland. I love going to the beach, yet I don't come there as often as I'd like. I have a master's degree in psychology. I like doing talks. A couple of talks ago someone reminded me that I was wearing the exact same clothes I was in that photo, but luckily I'm not this time. And I've been working on a company myself that's related to what I'm talking about today. It's called Use of Feedback and it allows you to get feedback from your clients, which will give you recurring revenue for your own company and you can set it up pretty fast. You can try it out via this link and I will show it again at the end of the presentation in case anyone might be interested. So what's the relevance of my talk today? Well, I think this chart pretty much shows the relevance of my talk. The average conversion rate of a website is about 2%, which means that of all the 100 visitors that you get on your website about 2% do what you want, which might be get a lead subscription or purchase something or give a donation or get hosting or contact you and the other 98% leave for whatever reason without doing what you want them to do. The lack of knowing what your users want results in high bounce rates. Bounce rate is a pretty debated metric as it's not really clear what defines someone who bounces or not. Google Analytics, which is probably what most, if not all of you are using, has their own definition of what a bounce is. They basically say someone that arrives on the website does something except for clicking and leaves, which is really weird because if someone arrives on your website, reads a blog for over an hour, discuss it with all their co-workers, not clicks anywhere and leaves, they decide they are labeled as a bouncer, which to most people is like a failed visit. That discussion aside, high bounce rates, however you might define them are unwanted because these are visitors that arrive on your page through labor of your own, perhaps even through funding of your own via ads or display or whichever way and they leave. You don't like bounce, bounce costs a lot of money and basically brings nothing to the table except for knowing that not everyone wants to do your client. Another downside of not knowing what your visitors want is that they will probably have a low time on site. If you are not serving the content that they want to read or you are not reaching them in a way that connects with them or you are not building enough trust in the way that your website was designed or built or set up or whatever, they might just leave. Having a low time on site will probably result in a few people actually doing what you want them to and you can use this as like a proxy metric to see are people increasingly staying on my website or are they just leaving really fast and that might probably be a signal of them not finding what they want. That is actually an extended version of this one. If people will bounce, they will leave really fast and if they like it a little bit but will still leave they will probably still have a low time on site. A metric that is getting more and more related to the user experience on your website or to not knowing what your visitors want or to serving content that doesn't suit them well are bad as your rankings. With recent algorithm updates, Google is attaching more and more value to being able to serve the right experience to users. Simply put, the better your website is and is judged by the experts in Google's panel the better your website will start ranking. Google is turning more and more into a black box so they can't really say anymore like it's a 1% thing or it's a 10% contribution thing. Basically they are saying if your user experience is bad it will cost you in terms of SEO and how much it will cost you is part of the black box and for some sites it will cost you badly and the more words you make it on your website the more it will impact either positively or negatively, etc. with justice. Something to keep in mind with user experience is not just a conversion rate thing anymore it's also related to SEO more and more these days. By the way the talk is short-ish in terms of time that I have available so if during something that I say a question arises just raise your hand and I will just answer it. It sounds more complicated than I had when I raised it there. In terms of learning about the users there are probably hundreds of ways of doing this but I just try to figure out a way to make it as flat and as easy as possible to find out how you could do this. So probably the easiest way to learn more about it to improve your website is through an expertise. Just ask someone who has a lot of experience with how websites should be built, how they can be optimized and ask them what should I do better. It's not the best way like it would be one opinion against the other ones but it's better than not looking at your website and just assuming your developer knows how to build a website properly that fits with your users' desires that is optimized for speed, etc. Get someone to look at it and that will probably become a better website. Then there is the one on top, it's a B testing. It's often associated with conversion rate optimization. If you ask someone, hey what do you think someone in conversion rate optimization does they will probably reply something close to A B testing. I'm not sure how much of you have actually done any A B testing in the past. One, two, maybe three hands. So I will give a short explanation of what this is just to give you an idea. A B testing is basically comparing two versions of a website and seeing which one performs better. Say this is version A of a website and this is version B. We will show this version of a website to half of our users and the other version of a website to the other 50% and we'll just see which one gets more clicks or more sales or more whatever and we call that one the winner and we put it live and then we assume our conversion rate went up and we get more paying visitors out of the same amount of visitors that we get on our website. This is pretty difficult. It involves a lot of development often. It will involve statistical analysis of which version was better. It's not the easiest thing to do and therefore I would put it on top of the pyramid after you already learned lots from an expert after you did what we will talk about in this presentation and then it might be a good idea to start A B testing your findings but you will also need a lot of traffic. You will probably need an expert to set this up for you and keep building these tests for you. It's interesting especially for large companies but for the smaller ones I would advise against it until you have the rest set up very well. So we will focus on the center of the pyramid, user insights. Basically this is the dilemma of most of what we'll be talking about today. Should you do it yourself or let others do it? Of course, hundreds of parameters that you can take into account resources, your own time, how much money you have whether you're spending your own money or your boss's money how much experience you have, etc. I just try to make it as plain as possible black and white decision. Yes, do it yourself, let others do it. Take your own parameters into account for making the decision. I would just recommend it from my helicopter perspective of what I think would be probably the right decision for most people in a situation. We'll be comparing apples to, well, oranges because apples with pear of the like was implied before. So apples and oranges it is. We'll be discussing these three forms of user insight generation in this presentation. I just translated the whole deck to English during their previous talk so I hope I didn't miss anything. The amount of insight you get are on the y-axis and the difficulty that it is to set up or get going or analyze is on the x-axis. The size of the bubble is the amount of costs that it brings with so it's actually a three-parameter chart that I set up for you guys. User recordings, which we'll discuss in detail after this slide are the cheapest one and generally it is the easiest one and probably generates the least amount of insights. User input, one in between, slightly more cost, slightly more insight, slightly more difficulty. User testing, the one on the end, most difficulty, most insight by far most cost. So user recordings, user input, user testing will start with user recordings. There's quite a lot of tools that you can use to set up user recordings. Personally, I'm a big fan of hotjar. I see some people nodding so there's other fans of hotjar as well but hotjar is not the only tool and it's probably not the best one for everyone so if you're considering doing user recordings at least try to have a short look at the other ones as well despite the fact that hotjar would probably be the best solution but that's a bit unfair to the other providers. For this one I would say do it yourself at least to get a hang of it just try to do it yourself at first before you start outsourcing it to others or to other companies. How does this look like? This is a screenshot from hotjar. On the left there's a tab called recordings and when you click it you end up in this overview what you see here are recordings of people that have visited the website. For people that have never seen this this can probably be a bit creepy and it might be a good time to install Adblocker if this is something that bothers you. If you visit a website and this is many websites these days they will track your mouse movements and before GDPR actually log what you type into every form field as well these days your typed stuff is masked because GDPR didn't really like seeing all the data in their profiles what you can see is literally people that move their mouse around on the page click somewhere, move somewhere else navigate a bit there, click a bit there and on the bottom you can see the red dots are clicks and what's something about the yellow dots but I never really got the difference between the red ones and the yellow ones. Something happens when there's a dot. You can see for each of the visitors that visit your website and that are logged some people use Adblocker some people use incompatible browsers reasons why people don't show up the ones that do show up have their own row and some specs about when they visited how long they visited which pages they visited etc. If there's enough time left at the end of my regular site tag I will do a short demonstration of each of the methods but for now I will just run through so that we at least can cover them all before I start demoing one and not be able to show the other ones. I tried to list some skills that are related to doing user recordings it's not research based it's just me thinking about what does it involve to do user recordings and I basically ended up this the big one is patience in this one this list is endless if you have lots of visitors basically the list generates far faster than you can see the recordings yourself so you might have entering filtering or tagging pages or just watching the longest ones or the ones that reach your checkout there's lots of ways to optimize this process but in general it's a process that requires a lot of patience also you should pay attention because it's often in the details where people are clicking somewhere that they shouldn't or they're navigating to a page that they shouldn't I guess that's it also, amputizing is a big one for this because you can't find out why you can see them scrolling see them going back and forth to a page or you can see them clicking somewhere and then waiting with the mouse a bit and then navigating somewhere else but you don't know whether their cat just walked over the keyboard or they were actually considering some deeper thoughts about why they weren't moving their mouse once again not super research based basically for my own interest I have a summary one at the end so you don't have to take photos of these ones you can just have a summary view of the different tool types at the end to see a general overview of how much money, time and learnings are generated per test because hotjar is free up until a limited point you could say the cost is zero, of course there's labor cost if you do this yourself it's far more than zero but there's not an actual money that needs to be handed to someone else in order to use recording depending on how long the videos are that you watch you could think about maybe two minutes per tester and I was generous in my less than one per tester because it can often take up to 10, 20, 30 videos until you see something new or you can figure out what people were doing when they clicked somewhere because it's so deductive to find out what people might have been doing when they did or did not click somewhere the next one the middle circle in the overview chart is user input there's several companies that you can use for this I put my own one in as well because it relates to this but of course I wouldn't want this to be a sales stock so I put two very viable other alternatives in as well I would say outsource it but I think this is the closest one this one is pretty much in the middle you could do this yourself if you take the time to learn how to phrase the questions right and if you find ways to recruit people but I'm leaning towards let others do it because basically your own hourly rate is way too high compared to being able to outsource this to others who can probably do this far more deeply than you can but it's the most on the fence one of the ones that we're discussing for instance this is usability hub this is one of the other two companies I showed on the previous slide and what they will basically allow you to do is to set up a test for instance if you want to learn about the trustworthiness of your website you can set up a test you can name it example.org trustworthiness research you can select English or Dutch as language the site where you want to use a welcome screen or not and just keep adding sections to the questions that you want to ask the more questions you ask the higher the costs this also depends on which apply you use some have fixed costs some have fixed numbers of questions that you can ask etc after you finish this questionnaire you can put it live and people can be able that's a new friends and people will be recruited from either their own panel or from your panel and you can have these people answer your questions that you have about the website for instance this is screenshot from the feedback you would get from my own service I asked people to a similar setup a question does the page look trustworthy or not and why? I used MailChimp as an example here so I'm not sure if that's in somewhere, no it's not these are responses from people in an online panel with answers while looking at the MailChimp page about whether or not they found the page we trust worthy from this feedback you can get written reasons on why these people figured the page was or was not trust worthy for instance very much so looks authentic and genuine the client reference that appears below as you keep scrolling the page also adds to its authenticity on the page there was a client case study visible like a well known client that was praising MailChimp and its services and this tester refers to that client reference as being an authority booster so for instance if you're looking to increase the trustworthiness of your website you might consider running NAB tests that features more of these client testimonials on the homepage just in an effort to improve authority or to improve the social proof that you have on the website skills that are related to doing the user input way of gathering the feedback it's a lot of amplifying as you can see the people are more vocal in what they mean in what they want it's not just clicks or no clicks but it's it takes some effort to read between the lines when someone says oh I really like the interface though it looks a bit dark to my preference and maybe you could add some color it's still vague but you can from what you know about your own website or the sites of your clients will probably be enough if someone just starts describing it as dark or a lot of people start describing it as dark you might be like yeah it's got this darkish flavor over it I might try to brighten it up a bit do keep in mind that it is still subjective feedback there is no NAB testing going on yet it's just people thinking things about your website which as a matter of fact is most of what user insights gathering is and what you might consider AB testing after you gathered your feedback you can see whether or not it actually works the way that people said they thought it might just a normal form did I fill it why should I in a way you could but how would you get people to fill it in like you would need a panel of people to actually do the survey for you and once you use a gravity form these would have to be visitors that are actually on your website already so you wouldn't get feedback from the outside but you would get feedback from the actual visitor does that make sense maybe I don't understand how do you invite with the tools that you mentioned do you invite people to fill in the form or is it a pop up that appears when they leave the site with most of the tools the ones that I've listed on the screen they have their own panels so basically these are just people doing small tasks for a payment like for instance rate whether this image contains a rabbit or not that could be a task they're doing and please give feedback on this website would be another task so you don't have to organize your own panel there are different services for instance with hotjar you can also do similar types of research with polls and these are the small Amazon messenger like polls that pop up and they ask you like hey would you like to participate or we have just a short question that we might want to answer with the user methods such as these these use external panels so you don't have to recruit your own testers but they will recruit them for you in your target demographics and get your questions answered based on that especially for websites that have low traffic this is like a must because otherwise the 20 people that might visit your website today will all have to answer these questions which I never will to get a decent amount of feedback within a reasonable amount of time so empathizing, asking questions, setting up tasks depending on how you have structured input, reporting, logical thinking grouping about 5 euros per tester about 5 minutes per tester and about 1 to 3 learnings per tester once again, rules of thumb no hard side last one and this is the one that people usually pick though it's by far the most difficult one to get set up and even more by far the most expensive companies that offer this user testing really enterprise these days unless you have thousands of dollars budget they probably won't even answer your emails I discovered couple months ago what users do used to be a really good solution until they got bought by this giant and I'm afraid they won't answer my emails anymore as well I think this is the one I would recommend especially if you're looking for Dutch testers I don't think they even have them Dutch testers unless you are in their enterprise premium plus package and user feed is a really new one I think I used that myself but the website looked really good and they seem to be knowing what they're doing very well so that might be worth checking out as well this one for me would definitely fall and let others do it as you can see in a later slide you're paying up to 100 dollars per tester so you really want to utilize them well and not ask them questions which they don't know how to answer or they answer in short phrases which don't help you of course you can do this yourself but because of the pricing of the testers and the amount of time that it takes to set it up and analyze I would really recommend that others do it how does this look like well this is an overview I used what users do for this and you simply get a list of people with some stats about them, the gender, the device that they're using and you can just click on the video and you will just see a video of them navigating on your website much like with the user recordings of Hotjar but with Hotjar you don't know why because you can't hear the people talking you don't know what they're doing or why and with services like user feel use testing what you used to do you can actually ask them questions or let them perform tasks for instance a task what is the first impression of this webpage what is this page for and you can just hear the people talking like what are they saying oh wow I didn't know that button or did you know that there was website X or Y that also has a similar design but they have this pop up in the bottom and it really helps me to navigate the website you will probably get a ton of insights if you know how to phrase the tasks and phrase the questions well to get people thinking and there's always the proverbial rotten apple in there who will just rush through the task in 3.4 minutes and will answer the questions as shortly as they can but you can just rate them lowly, low give them a low rating and if their service is well they will probably supply you with a new tester because they don't want to be associated with bad testers bad testers anyway this one probably takes even more patience than user testing because if you set up your task well people might spend up to half an hour surfing on your website talking and I've even had some months with bad microphones where you have to turn up the volume of your computer to the absolute maximum and I'm here some faint whisper in the end of your earbuds and some testers are amazing I've also had testers that I would really want to meet a person and just ask them about the website more and about the process more and they were very vocal about things they thought about the website and different ideas they had about it and it's a mixed bag mostly with the user input as well some feedback is great and some people they're just rushing through to make some money I can't blame them in a way it's not the best paid task to do this testing from the other end of the line then again they're getting paid for something at least try to offer some value then again we're buying it as a mixed bag so I guess we'll take the good with the bad cost per tester euros really depends on the amount of specificity that you want if you want Flemish Belgian car buyers between the age of 25 and 30 that have bought a Volvo in the last half year that will really wrap up your recruitment cost and might be up to 500 euros per tester especially if you need recruitment agencies to find these guys it will even be more expensive I'd say 50 euros per tester is about the average of please give me a male or a female from Poland or give me someone under 40 from France I would say that would be the average cost per tester if they have to use any devices other than laptop or desktop such as tablet or mobile cost most of them wrap up to 100 euros per tester because they're just a smaller sample of people that are doing the testing on these devices time per tester it's a tough one to find out because often even setting up these tasks costs multiple hours per campaign so that would really wrap up the time per tester especially because you're already listening half an hour to what they're having to say then again the reward can be really high from sometimes from two or three user testers you can really get a lot of insight to improve your website up to 5, 10, sometimes even 20 learnings per tester then again there's these bad apples with 0 or 2 and these are really expensive findings if you have a lot of these in your sample so to recap no, just to recap and just trying to use fancy words to make me sound smart but then something I don't know I'm doing this stuff and then it wasn't for instance when you're looking at any chance what's your website for instance when we would have a user test to look at this website and we've asked them please pretend that you're aspiring blogger that wants to start blogging today find a way to sign up for the service and see what you want looks a smart on my speed one of the findings that a tester might be that you would see them like surfing over the website it has a good visual on it and wow I'm really confused I do have a company but also on the blog which button should I click and that would be something you would hear them say live, like they would be like going back and forth with their mouse and like talking to you I would really want to have a different way to like separate myself like yes I want a blog but I'm also a company like is there some way to like rephrase that button and they would just move on and they click one or the two of the buttons and they'd be like okay now well I'll just pretend I'm a company I really missed that red button over here I figured that would be my next step and that would be like feedback for you to like consider once again should they be tested, you should maybe test everything but that's not possible so you just try to do your test again to for instance a button here that says start your company blog now and you could consider that as input for next A.B. test or as a quick win like hey that really makes sense to have a button there as well for instance if people are landing there from AdWords and you could consider adding a button does that make sense? yeah, I put the study in some kind of study once and then it was the study and I wasn't looking for a hosting at all but even if it's very difficult for someone to pretend that I'm looking for something I would never imagine that you're really looking for something looking at the website differently than someone who's actually about it yes, that is really good feedback I once did user testing like the requesting side of things for a mortgage provider and people were literally skimming over questions that would cost them like 5000 euros easily yes, please add no one would do that at least not the target audience they would really think over decisions that would cost them thousands of euros and in the years they would be like no, I don't think it works for all types of companies but particularly when you're doing insight finding what might work it really helps to get inspiration even from people that aren't necessarily in the mortgage buying market they will also find parts of your website that simply don't work questions that aren't answered even when you're pretending to get a new mortgage you think of more questions than you as a developer or a builder or a marketer have probably done yourself no, I was just insighting any other questions if you want to continue on the question can you give me some ideas of what typical findings you can get from the three different strategies of this yes, I will get my presentation back on the screen it will probably help the thing is with the user recordings you would really have to figure out what is happening yourself because the people aren't talking to you in any written way you will have to interpret what they're doing as working or not working so for instance if someone clicks a button and they click it back and they click it forth and they click it back what were they thinking? were they confused about what page they were landing did they expect another page to load did their mouse slip and did they click the wrong button and did they figure out well I should have been here in the first place there is a lot of interpreting with the user recordings one if you really want you could even add a poll on a page that costs a lot of clicking back and forth and get written feedback based on that so the hotjar suite for instance would allow you to get the why behind the actions as well so this one is mostly what people are clicking somewhere why you don't know, just interpolate this for most companies this is written feedback such as the ones that I show the level of feedback you get is really dependent on the type of questions you phrase on the way you phrase the questions on the way that you recruit your panel on the people you select in your panel I've also seen I was just looking through the results of this one I used this server before when I didn't have a lot of experience with usability testing myself many of the answers were just yes no left different colors it makes no sense to write different colors as a way to improve a certain web page so what you would like is something like this of course I've pasted the best possible slide that I had with everyone writing super constructive useful feedback but if you set it up right you can get something similar like with people using full sentences and dots between lines and capitals and stuff it's amazing how some people deliver their feedback in full caps with explanation marked in between and just writing nice things but probably got a caps lock on or something so this is an indication of the level that you would get from written feedback and the one that you get from the user recording it's really like the most complete experience probably and yes you pay dearly for it but it's the most complete thing there's even user testing that also has facial feedback so they activate webcam and you can actually see people like trying to click somewhere or amazement when it doesn't work what they want or anger when they try to click about 7 times and it simply refuses to do what they want of course the more features you want the higher you pay the tester so it's really up to you how immersive you want the feedback to be in that sense this one is really complete because you simply get someone talking 15 to 13 minutes about your product then again you pay for it does that make sense so in the start I promised you like an overview of the 3 big clusters of ways that you can use to get feedback on your website cost per tester, time per tester, learnings per tester and simply outline them in terms of what you can do once again everything you see on this is an estimate probably not too far off your own experience might vary based on your own decisions what you want are there any questions and second question how much time do I have left give or take do you need any special GPR stations privacy stations on your site if you're running a hotjar a good one the question was do you need any special privacy stations on your website if you're using hotjar after GPR hotjar they became quite a bit nicer than they were before not it was an evil company but they were collecting quite a bit of data on visitors before right now they're masking whatever you type because it might be privacy sensitive and they also mask IP addresses by default so while you do need some kind of cookie warning you don't need extreme marketing cross website stuff that you might need for double click or for other cross website trackers so you would probably personally I think it falls on the statistical cookies but if you have like similar like I think it falls under the similar tick mark as analytics like you're using most of the data is aggregated and if there is individual data you only think you see them moving their mouse around and obviously that's not a privacy concern at least from a legal standpoint can imagine that people won't like it if you tell it to them in their face like yes we will track every centimeter that your mouse moves away click but from a legal standpoint it's not a privacy sensitive piece of data so yes you would need to have it somewhere in your privacy statement but not in the extreme ticks that you might need for instance for double click or retargeting or etc yes thank you for running this actually yes both the second and the third one don't have to be implemented at all these are external so they run on every type of website for every server language that you use wordpad jumlah, drupal, wix, doesn't matter can handle anything I see some doubt it was not what you had expected yes no and the first one the hotjar or similar ones probably GTM is the best and the easiest solution yes how about Google Optimize yes but Google Optimize is an ID testing solution so it falls in the top one of actually comparing whether or not a solution that you might think works better or worse but this does not apply to the bottom two that I mentioned earlier I don't have to interpret and have a lot of knowledge what to do with testing if I had to put price tag on ID testing I do have that on some other place I would be 1000 euros per test easily with all the knowledge that you have to acquire from people with healthy hourly rates and stuff that's an expensive bit but do you combine what you know by that with what you know by psychology yes the psychology mostly comes in this part in the task setup you try to figure out the way that people are thinking and the way in which they would structure their tasks on their own and you just try to figure out the best way to ask them what you want to know and set a task in a way that applies best to them and afterwards when you have like the results for instance when you're watching a video like this you a stuff starts popping up in your head and someone is like wow this works I could really use some trust indicators like I don't know it doesn't really look trustworthy and then the psychology part pops up and says like oh we can use social proof or we can use some other stuff Mr. Cialdini wrote this book just it merges in personally for me it's a big system like all in once but if you would view it as separate ways to activate it it would really be like when interpreting the data or when setting it up so yeah basically the entire process other questions normal questions then we're going to do it like this and then it runs too far that's that thanks for your attention if there's any questions afterwards please feel free to feel or get a business card or anything else thanks for your attention we're going to take a few minutes to set up for the next speaker so take a walk stay seated whatever