Warm Gun: Designing for Conversion

by October 12, 2010

In his Designing for Conversion: Converting Their Pants Off! talk at the Warm Gun Design Conference in San Francisco, Groupon's Lead Designer Steven Walker shared his tips for optimizing design through live testing. Here's my notes from his talk.

  • Converting at Groupon means a lot of educated testing often. If you test smart, you'll convert the users you want. The ones that are good fro your business. Testing smart means having a schedule. Groupon has a huge queue of tests to run.
  • Run small, simple, and plentiful changes. Testing sweeping changes is useless –you won’t know what is responsible for the change.
  • Iterate your way into complexity –don’t start with a lot of information requests.
  • Twice as many conversions does always not mean twice as much money.
  • Let others inform the tests you run. You are never going to convert on your pages. Other people are using your designs so being open to new ideas is important.
  • You don’t understand the test until it is done. Don’t make assumptions on what test will convert best. If you knew, why would you test?
  • Speed is imperative: cut the time it takes to run a test in half.
  • Wild card solutions can work – test them out.