Six words for more sales
In The Business of UX Writing, Yael Ben-David walks us through a purchase flow she and her colleagues designed for a loan service. Users had been approved for credit they were desperately eager to use, but something was wrong. They were dropping off at the final step. She found that they were afraid to press onward, thinking that there was a chance that going on to the next step would mean they accepted the offer without any changes. The fear of taking on debt by accident was just too scary—so why risk it?
The product team had to act. The fix was 6 new words.
The Business of UX Writing by Yael Ben-David (A Book Apart, 2022), page 104
When surprise doesn’t delight
Design works best when it works as expected. Have you ever been surprised to have made an online purchase you didn’t mean to commit to yet? Clicked “continue,” only to find that you’d just confirmed your order? It’s not fun, and it undermines trust.
Patterns like that are bad for business. They may increase conversion, but they’ll also increase returns, and surely lead to lost customers and painful reviews. They’re violating some important design heuristics, or conventions, that help users quickly make sense of what’s in front of them.
Yael and her team recognized that their product wasn’t addressing an important heuristic: prevent fear of an irreversible action (adapted from UI Tenets + Traps). They solved it with 6 words.
Getting your product back in harmony with user experience heuristics can have plenty of downstream effects on your ROI. You might start with fewer customer service calls and fewer support tickets. And next, you’ll have more satisfied users who send a good word about your product out into their networks. Sometimes, the way to get there is just a few words away.
Making a purchase, signing a contract, subscribing to a service, even just deleting a file in your user account—these are actions with consequences that stick. To prevent fear of an irreversible action, we have to put clarity and consent up front. This often means a few more words. But they’ll be worth it. Sometimes, more is better.
Let’s talk friction
Speaking of clarity and consent, there’s something that can help sharpen them—friction. A few years ago, I found a surprise purchase in my TV’s Amazon Prime orders history. I definitely hadn’t bought “Everest,” but it turns out my toddler had. He couldn’t say much yet, but he was a skilled remote control button-clicker. How could this have happened? Wouldn’t there have been a speed bump or two before this landed in my purchases?
The problem was that, to reduce friction, Amazon had made it oh-so-easy to buy. By default, they’d lined up the “happy path,” or purchase path. My 2-year-old encountered no resistance. He made selections and confirmed the purchase by just pressing enter over and over.
The problem was, that wasn’t a path that made me happy at all, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.
This is a place where UX writing and product design can work together to make the experience better for everyone. Users shouldn’t be able to complete things that involve commitment, like deleting files or buying movies, without a pause or two to ensure consent. We might want to make the “toddler test” a real thing.
There’s a happy end to this story. Amazon had a really generous, user-centered option ready for me—since I hadn’t started playing the movie yet, I had time to cancel the purchase. One less conversion for Amazon, but the opportunity to undo an accidental purchase means I kept the app on my TV—and bought some movies, for real this time. :)
