A few weeks ago, I wrote up a case study around the perplexing case of designing user experiences for lead generation pages. I’m going to cover the results of our test shortly, but in the meantime I wanted to share part of the conversion funnel that has forever changed the way I’m going to design for sign-ups.

Designers do a lot of work engineering the experience of creating compelling sign-up forms for a variety of reasons (joining communities, requesting more information, age-gating verification, etc.). I’d like to take a closer look at how the Thank You page of the conversion flow can be leveraged more effectively for experiences that aren’t necessarily tied to joining a social network.

That said, social networking sites are full of awesome examples where the Thank You jumpstarts the user’s uptake, so if you’re:

• Tumblr, you have your user create her first blog post
• Twitter, you have your user find cool people to follow
• LinkedIn, you connect with your email address book
• Meetup, you have your user join a group

But, let’s say you’re a more traditional (perception = less fun) business like a university, can you do more than guide your user towards more descriptive content about the program or services offered (where bounce rate will be high)? How can you make the most of that transaction? How can you parlay the validation “Thank You” into action that can be both inspiring and measurable?

Thank You messaging is not supposed to feel like the awkward end of a first date “Do I kiss him?” moment.

The user has shared her information with you, triggering a response and follow up campaign. She’s staring at the Thank You page, confirming she submitted her information correctly. This is a powerful moment to turn your Thank You into more than:

• a data verification step
• a reiteration of your brand’s identity and tagline
• a jumping off into content (where the bound rate will be high and not super effective in terms of engagement, relationship development, etc.)

Social marketing channels have helped turn Thank You pages into opportunities for secondary levels of conversion where you can experiment with Facebook Fan Page and/or Twitter acquisition.

This brings me back to the use case at hand, while our lead gen page had a number of design constraints, we found that we had a lot of artistic leeway in creating a Thank You page, so we decided to make the number one goal of the page to excite the user to join our Facebook Fan page.

First, let’s look at the original Thank You page, which did include Facebook & Twitter opportunities:

(Note: I apologize for striking through the brand name, my client is a major university and getting approval to share the brand is a bit of a juggernaut.)

Now, let’s look at the redesign of the Thank You page, which puts primary focus on Facebook Fan acquisition v. promoting both Twitter and Facebook equally:

The design:

• Inspired by the idea of the excitement around an “acceptance letter”
• Focused on the fun of university life and community
• Featured access to current students, faculty, and admissions through Facebook

The results:

• Increased Fan Page uptake from 28 fans per week (a consistent rate for one year) to 300+ fans per week (2+ weeks of ongoing data)
• Increased the quality of interactions on the Fan Page, where we were encouraged to see prospects asking questions that were fielded by students, admissions, and faculty
• Increased interaction with blog content, driving traffic to the parent site and making better use of all editorial collateral

As You Design Conversion Experiences Thank You Messaging is:

• Integral—A necessary part of the conversion experience, it’s no longer just a simple hello/goodbye world
• Instantly Gratifying—If you’re testing a conversion experience the results are ongoing and take time. Adding a secondary conversion exercise like Facebook Fan acquisition is an immediate way to leverage (in real time) effects of your messaging
• Social—Leverages warm fuzzies in innovative ways and gets users connecting with one another
• Sticky—The last thing the user will remember about your brand, and can have the added possibility of taking the conversation even deeper into her personal network

Perhaps, the biggest takeaway from designing a great Thank You experience is that the more you can leverage the Thank You, they more you can get your users to connect with your app and with each other the less money you’ll need to spend on post conversion campaigns, marketing, and more. I’d love to hear your experiences around the “Thank You” in your designs, examples, etc.

Thank you!

*Design by my brilliant partners at jjomedia.com

A/B testing is the process, usually aided by tools like Google Website Optimizer, by which you are able to test different elements of your page such as graphics and text to see which generates the best results.

For example you might wish to work out which banner for your latest special offer generates the most clicks to the detail page. The results will help you make an informed decision not only about that campaign but future ones as well.

ABtests.com is a site that allows you to upload and share your A/B testing results. It’s not often this information is exposed as it could lead to an obvious competitive advantage. It’s definitely worth looking through the results as you will be instantly able to implement many of the ideas on your own sites.

Currently there are sections covering tests for:

• email newsletter sign-up pages
• home pages
• landing pages
• launch reminder pages
• pricing pages
• product pages
• sign-up pages

If you are into testing then you should check it out.

Site URL: http://www.abtests.com

Editors note: Neil Patel from KISSmetrics will be running a half day workshop on “How to use A/B Testing, Analytics and Goal Measurement in your Web App” at the Future of Web Apps Miami – February 22-14 2010. Buy your tickets now.

As a user experience designer, A/B testing is not only something I design for, but something I advocate that all my clients implement. It’s one of the best ways we can both provide users with the best and most effective experience and provide businesses with ongoing opportunities to optimize.

The reality is that like almost anything in design, some do it really well, while others fail in appalling and reasonably smile-inducing ways. Getting caught doing A/B testing by your most unassuming and uninformed user is like getting caught with your pants down—embarrassing.

One of the great examples of this occurred in 2000 when Amazon customers found themselves paying different prices for the same DVDs. Ouch!

This brings me to eHarmony, an online dating site that advertises some well-known commercials on television. If you’ve watched US TV in the past year chances are you know the Dr. Neil Clark Warren mantra I’m talking about;)

Throughout 2009 I found myself in a position where I experimented with online dating for two reasons:

• the experience of how dating companies message and market to people
• the dates (er, yes, I do mean the actual dates themselves)
  

Both taught me quite a bit.

Match, Chemistry and a handful of others never shocked me with their emails (some of the usernames that men choose did). However, eHarmony stood out of the crowd for a few reasons:

• rapid-fire morning messages, usually between 4 and 8 in a row (like I was under fire from the “matchmaking tool”)
• radically different branded email templates
• really bad subject lines, all different, but with the same purpose

It’s the really bad subject lines that I’d like to focus on, and they relate to the rapid-firing in a row, because together they produced an experience that killed the romance.

Here’s a typical morning from 2009:

All of these messages, though different, say the same thing: “Get to know so-and-so.” They would have been more scanable and less distracting if they used the same subject line emphasizing the users’ names.

I never wanted to share these observations with anyone in my profession, because it’s inevitably tied to a much larger issue of my love life, and was ready to let this go on January 4 at the same time as my subscription ran out, except then eHarmony took thing a step further.

Beginning January 4, 2010, my inbox filled with an even more challenging set of differing subject lines. More challenging because the messaging was all over the place. Was I a user more interested in “activities,” “spark,” “unique,” “common,” or greatness? I felt like it was eHarmony having the problem ordering off a menu of men and not me. I wanted simple and given to me straight up.

Here’s a typical morning in 2010 (*pardon that they’re all in my trash now):

Distracting and disruptive, right?

This kind of A/B testing made me feel more like an experiment and less like a client. Moreover, my perception of eHarmony became characterized by the realization that this was not a thoughtful process that took pride in emotionally connecting, but that it was more of a massive warehouse churning out widgets.

A/B Testing Should Not Be:

• Transparent
• Radical
• Isolated
• Hurried
• Fleeting

A/B Testing Should Be:

Subtle—User shouldn’t be aware that they are being tested

She should feel like she’s experiencing the very best your company has to offer from personalization to copy to look and feel. You’re learning from her actions, so make it impossibly easy for her to accomplish tasks that teach your team without drawing attention to your team.

Incremental—Don’t break things that are currently working well

Change the text on the button v. changing the button entirely simultaneously altering its shape, color, size, and text.

Aware—Web apps don’t exist alone in the world

News events, seasons, weather, traffic sources, search engine patterns, and even the economy shape the ways in which users discover, interpret, and engage with information.

As you A/B test you should make decisions based on data that’s measured and tracked over time and interpreted with a sensitivity to the world-at-large.

Paced—It’s not a sprint, and when developing apps there is no finish line online

A/B testing takes time and you need to understand your data in terms of mathematical relevance (e.g. how many unique visitors to sales conversions will it take based on traffic patterns to make a relevant sample size?)

Ongoing—Make user testing an ongoing part of your budget, design, and development

The best A/B testing occurs when you’re constantly learning from your users. As you grow your user base or expand your offerings new aspects of interaction will be introduced, and as web technologies change users will change predictable patterns.

Both large and small companies can A/B test successfully, but the same rule applies for making mistakes. Executing A/B testing isn’t rocket science, and it’s certainly not supposed to be harder than finding a great love in this life—e’hem eHarmony.

Gary Vaynerchuk delivered this passionate and powerful speech at FOWA London 09 and it rocked the house. If you need a bit of inspiration (and a slight kick in the ass) don’t miss this one. Warning: Strong language

You can also listen to just the audio here or subscribe to the audio podcast of all the talks.

Just announced: Gary will be speaking at FOWA Miami 2010. There are only three Super Early Bird passes left (save 29%). Hope to see you there!

In this talk from FOWA London, Alex Hunter takes you through the DOs and DO NOTs of developing a powerful and positive brand on the web. This was a favorite among the crowd at FOWA, so don’t miss it.

By the way, there’s only 26 early bird passes left to The Future of Web Apps Miami. With speakers like Twitter, Facebook, Mint.com, Fred Wilson, Molly Holzschlag, John Resig and Reddit, it’s going to sell out quick. Hope to see you there!

I stumbled across a really interesting example of company transparency yesterday. Shirt.Woot sells a different shirt every day and they release all the live data about where their sales are happening.

View large

This is a radical approach because most companies would be afraid their competitors would use this data against them. However, Woot is smart enough to realize that this is a powerful tool for drawing potential customers in and encouraging activity. It’s really interesting to know how you compare with other folks who bought the same shirt.

Interesting, transparent, quirky data, FTW.

Last night Gill was browsing around the web and she stumbled across the site for UK Food Bloggers Association (she’s a keen veggie gardener) which was created with Ning, a white-label social network web app.

She clicked on the Ning logo in the top left corner …

Which led her here …

I love the simplicity of this. When she arrived at the page, she immediately started typing in the name of a social network she wanted to start.

The only real option on the page is typing in the big box that says “Name your social network”.

She had signed up and created an account in literally eight seconds. How’s that for an effective home page?

The downside of this method is that they’ll have a lot of dead accounts – social networks that have been created and never used. Who cares though? It’s easy to clean up unused accounts, it’s a lot harder to grow your user base.

They’re allowing people to do exactly what they want to do, in just a few seconds. Brilliant.

We recently posted about how 37signals increased their sign-ups by 200% with A/B Testing.

A lot of you are using WordPress, which makes A/B testing pretty tricky, so we’ve recorded a screencast tutorial to show you how to do it.

Editor’s note: We’ll be covering topics like A/B testing and marketing your web app at The Future of Web Apps London.

If you’re new to A/B testing, here are a few resources to get you started:

• An Introduction to A/B Testing by Jesse Farmer
• Wikipedia definition
• Google Website Optimizer video tutorials
• Advanced Website Optimizer Tricks
• Official Google Website Optimizer blog
• Google Website Optimizer Tricks

The Video

Please note, if your goal page is on a different domain or sub-domain, you need to make small modifications to your tracking code.

When I had coffee with Jason Fried of 37signals after FOWA Miami, I asked him if he had learned anything about A/B testing that they hadn’t blogged about. And wow, did he have an amazing little tip to share …

Four Amazing Words

He said that they tested various phrases on the Highrise homepage for the call-to-action button. They originally had used various permutations of “Free Trial” and “Sign-up for Free Trial”. Then they tested the phrase:

“See Plans and Pricing”

This resulted in a 200% increase in sign-ups. That’s right. 200%.

He believes it’s because people are afraid if they click a link that says “Free Trial” then they’ll somehow automatically signup for something and be trapped. However, “See Plans and Pricing” encouraged them to explore, without the fear of commitment.

If that isn’t a case for conducting A/B Testing, then I don’t know what is.

Editor’s note: This article is a summary of Jason Fried’s talk at our event The Future of Web Apps. You can also listen to the audio or watch the video of the talk, which is below the article.

I think the future of web apps is more about business models then it is about technology or design. It’s not that those things aren’t important, but I feel that we’ve figured out a lot of that already. I believe the area where we need a lot of work is on the business side of things.

I want to start out by talking about the lumber industry. When saw mills were first created, they didn’t use their waste products such as sawdust. However, after a period of time, they realized they could package this waste into products and sell them at a profit. Things like mulch for gardens, fuel pellets and kindling turned out to be big business.

The lesson we can learn from the lumber industry is this: Whenever you make something, you create valuable by-products that you can sell.

So what by-products are we creating in the web industry?

Wisdom, Experience and Information

We didn’t even realize we were writing a book when we wrote Getting Real. All the material came from ideas we were blogging about that were the result of simply doing business. Just like cutting wood produces sawdust, for us, building software and a company produced information and experience.

We just started blogging about the experience and information we gained and it was only after a year that we realized we had created valuable content we could sell. We launched a book, a conference and a workshop off the back of this information, and in just a few years, it generated over $1,000,000 in revenue for us. Another example of this is Ruby on Rails, which came out of building Basecamp.

The crazy thing is that we were creating all this valuable ‘wastage’ on the side, without even knowing it.

Design Screencasts

I think a great opportunity for designers to generate revenue off of ‘waste products’ is to record their screen while they design. Whenever they’re in Photoshop, just hit the record button, and at the end, package up the video and sell it to other designers. That, I’m telling you, is a by-product that is worth money.

Looking to @garyvee

Gary Vaynerchuk is great example of packaging and selling by-products of your business. As the owner of a shop that sells wine, he has to do a certain amount of wine tasting to expand his palate.

He just decided to turn the camera onto himself as he did this tasting and the product, WineLibrary.tv has rocketed him to fame and success.

“Whatever you’re doing, you’re creating valuable by-products that you could be selling.”

Learning from Chefs

I think successful chefs do a great job of harnessing by-products and generating revenue off of them. They write cook books, host cooking TV programs and create their own line of cookware.

What they figured out is that instead of keeping these things to themselves, they should share as much as they possibly can.

Chefs with large business empires share more and more as they grow. Most business are the exact opposite of this. Instead of sharing more and more as they grow, they become increasingly closed and secretive. They’re robbing themselves of the value of their own by-products – all because they’re afraid of the competition.

Free is the Future of Failure

The next subject I’d like to talk about is the idea of “Free”. I’m not a big fan of free. It’s the wrong direction for this industry.

I think that Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price contains bad advice. I think we should be focusing on how we can charge for our products, not give them away for free.

“Free isn’t the future of business, it’s the future of failure.”

Why is our industry so obsessed with free? The food industry charges for meals, hotels charge for their rooms and cab drivers charge for giving you a ride. People are used to paying for things they find valuable, and every time we release something for free, we’re hurting ourselves.

“The bulk of our paying customers, started out on a paying plan.”

I’ve noticed that quite a few of the web apps that have gone under are the ones that weren’t charging for their product. Of course this isn’t always the case, and charging for your product doesn’t mean you’ll survive, but there seems to be a correlation with web apps that have gone out of business and those that are giving away things for free.

As it becomes more common for web apps to go out of business, it causes a lack of trust in new applications. People are afraid to commit to a web app that may be gone tomorrow.

I Want Sandy is a great example of this. A lot of folks trusted them with their data and then they were bought by Twitter and shut down. If they charged for the product, they probably wouldn’t have shut down as they have revenue to support the business and an obligation to customers.

“When your users aren’t paying for the product, you don’t have an obligation to them. I think that’s bad.”

I’ve noticed that even Google, a company with billions of dollars in cash, has begun to pull back on their free products. If one of the most valuable companies in the world, with some of the brightest minds in the industry, has decided that some things aren’t worth giving away for free, then I’m not sure how smaller companies are going to make that model work.

Failure Isn’t Cool

One of the things that has really been bothering me lately is how it’s become cool to fail. In a lot of entrepreneurial circles there has been talk about “failing early and failing often.” It’s as if everyone thinks that failure is a good thing – a way to get better at business. What is that?

Can you imagine someone walking up to a farmer and say “You should fail often. I hope your crops die every year”? It just doesn’t make any sense.

“No. We should be focusing on succeeding early and succeeding often.”

Another quote that’s thrown around a lot is “Nine out of ten business fail.” That may be true, but what the hell does that have to do with you? Just because someone else doesn’t know how to market or price their products, or how to lead their team, doesn’t mean you should focus on failure. Don’t be intimidated by all this talk about failure.

Learn from Your Successes

I think we should all make a concerted effort to not focus on learning from failure, but instead, learning from our successes.

When you learn from your mistakes, all your learn is what not to do next time. What is this? A process of elimination where you’ve got to get a million things wrong, until there’s nothing else that can go wrong before you know what to do right? That’s what it means when you learn from your mistakes.

I’d rather learn from the things that I’m doing right, and do those again.

In Summary …

Here’s a quick list of the things we’ve covered today:

1. Look for your by-products. Identify what you’re already creating that you can sell.
2. Stop focusing on failure and identify what is working.
3. Please start charging for your products.

Listen or Watch

You can listen to the audio of the talk, or subscribe to the podcast.

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Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/seanosh