Did you notice anything unusual about the title of this post? Did you notice the word “THAN” repeats itself? If you didn’t, you’re not alone. Many people miss this repetition thanks to the law of experience – a principle in gestalt psychology that suggests that people use prior knowledge in order to understand certain elements, and look at sentences as a whole and not at each individual word.

Gestalt psychology or gestaltism aims to understand how people perceive and make sense of visual information. According to gestaltism, perceptions are merely the products of complex interactions among various external stimuli. Gestaltism states that objects are considered globally, as a whole before, or in parallel with, perception of their individual elements.

Gestalt psychology claims that wholes are structured and organized using grouping laws. If you learn the grouping laws well enough you will see great change in your conversion metrics and be able to help users complete your funnels quicker and simpler. These laws help design better user interfaces for your site.
Below I have listed the important laws of  gestalt:

 

Law of similarity

This law is often applied in form building.

What do you think, which of the following forms is better?

A:

B:

 

Because of the distance between the labels and the fields in example A, we perceive them as two different columns, making them seem like two different and unrelated groups. By placing them closer together, like in form B, they are emphasized as horizontal pairs. Make it easier for your users to fill in forms in your website by placing labels and fields closer together, and separating each field with a different background color.

 

The law of proximity

This law can, for example, be used when placing radio buttons. Radio buttons are used when the user must select only one choice out of several options. To signal this association to the user, simply place your radio buttons as a horizontal row so that they are closer to each other.

The same principle of proximity is what makes navbars, and related items in checkouts so useful, it is the idea of placing related objects close together. This is applied in the following example from ebay.com, where they offer other items you may also like, and they place them close together in the same area of the page.

 

 

The Law of closure

Think of the Apple logo. Our minds fill in the missing gap and therefore understand this shape as an eaten apple. If our minds didn’t make this completion, we would not understand what it is.

There are plenty of other logos that use the law of closure, here are some examples.

The fact we are able to make these completions and understand  simple shapes as a concept is very useful when coming up with ideas for logos. The advantage of designing your logo with the help of gestalt principles, is that you can create a very simple logo but convey a complex idea. Try to think of some other logos you know. You will find that usually, memorable logos are the most simple logos.

 

The Law of continuity

Here , the principle is that lines that are continuations of each other are perceived as the same line, even in the case of multiple line segments.

For example, when you see the Chanel logo

 

you see it as a regular C and a mirrored C joined together.

 

you don’t see it like this

 

This is another great principle to follow when designing a logo. Very similar to the previous law, this also gives you the option to create a very simple yet unique logo, which will be memorable not despite, but because of its simplicity.

 

The Law of ”Figure-Ground”

This principle describes our ability to identify a figure from the background. This law applies for example in Disqus, notice how there are many things happening on the page, like different colors, shapes, images and texts. However it is still easy for you to tell the figures from the background.

 

Figure-ground lets us know what we should be focusing on the page. This law can also be applied in call to action buttons. For example take a look at this button.

Its got rounded corners, well defined borders, gradient color and resulting illusion of 3D depth.  All of these elements combined differentiate the button from its surroundings. Since your call to action button is the most important element in your page, you want it to be pronounce. Use the above elements to make it easier for the user to notice and identify the button as something that can be activated.

 

Conclusions

Using gestalt principles in user interface design helps us gain functionality and aesthetic appeal and increase the likelihood that your message is communicated to your audience. Perceiving objects as a whole is what makes us recognize objects even if they don’t appear as we are used to seeing them, for example when they are animated.

If we didn’t have this ability, we would not be able to recognize any of the objects you see in this landing page from giftrocket for example.

 Gestalt laws have proven to be very useful in conversion optimization. Do you use any gestalt psychology tricks on your site? Tell us how.

Choosing the right place to start your optimization process is a super important decision. With so many conversion strategies and methods out there it’s hard to know where to start and how.

Where to start: It is customary to divide the user flow into Upper funnel (i.e banners, landing pages, lead generation) and lower funnel (registration forms and pricing pages etc.).  When choosing the starting point of your test you need to take into account that the “lower” the point is in the funnel the less traffic you’ll have for the test.

To help you get started and locate where you need to start optimizing, we’ve listed 3 basic metrics you should be following as soon as possible. These metrics will help you decide where to start optimizing and how.

 

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate metric measures the amount of users who visit your site’s first page, and stop there. For example: if you have 10,000 visits a month to your site and 5000 users leave before doing anything else on your site, your bounce rate is 50%. If your visitors are leaving without taking any actions you may need to work on:

1. Call to action buttons – One of the most important parts of conversion is creating the right call to action buttons. You can find 3 tips to improve your call to action buttons here.
2. Messaging – Check your messaging. Using emotional conversion optimization can vastly improve your conversion optimization and get visitors to take the next step in your site. Check out these 3 emotional triggers to optimize your messaging.

From the screen capture below you can see our clients bounce rate throughout the course of a month. Once standing on over 60% bounce rate, has now changed to less than 10% by simply locating the leaks and addressing them.

One important thing to remember is that bounce rate is a natural part of a website and some people just don’t find what they’re looking for or have found what they were looking for and don’t need to continue on, so you won’t be able to minimize it to 0% but you can reduce it a lot and learn from it.  In many online campaigns even 95% bounce rate is good for certain media channels so it’s always good to compare this data versus any other traffic sources performance for a base line.

• Note that there is a difference between exit rate and bounce rate as Google explains here.

 

Funnel Visualization

Google analytics offers an option to follow your funnel and find the “leak”. Once you’ve set your goals on Google analytics the “Funnel visualization” option will be available. Following it will give you a lot of insight on the amount of visitors who have entered each part of the funnel, the amount of visitors who converted and their flow.

This is a wonderful tool to illustrate where is the most significant “leak” in your funnel, assisting you to take the right action in order to optimize it ( learn to avoid shopping cart abandonment).

For example, as you can see below, 50,516 visitors entered our client’s homepage, 52.56% clicked on the button to proceed. On the side you can see where users went to if they didn’t convert, like the pricing for example. This flow will help you understand where you need to optimize or where you can add conversion metrics.

Below we can see that many visitors end up on the pricing page instead of signing up, so we could add a call to action on the pricing page and increase conversion from there.

 

Technology

One metric you do not want to miss out on is the technology your visitors are using. On Google Analytics you will find (in the Audience category) the option to see which browsers your visitors are using, their version and whether they’re using mobile, desktop or tablets. Once you have this information you can:

• QA – Does your site work on all Chrome versions? Are you compatible to Safari? Run a string of tests on all browsers and make the corrections, do not lose customers because of bugs.

• True Story: In one of our recent tests we discovered that our client’s landing pages weren’t compatible with older versions of IE, which resulted in almost 0% conversion rate. This simple fix boosted their conversion rate by over 50%. Below you can see the difference from before we started optimizing and after, with over 250,000 visits via IE this was a massive optimization:

 

• Optimize: A new study shows that you could lose 40% of your visitors if your site isn’t mobile compatible. Is your site/product mobile responsive? Prepare yourself for your mobile traffic and do not lose it. A simple redirect to a mobile friendly page could save your conversion rate. Know your limitations and address them.
  • Tip: To know which pages you need to optimize for mobile add a secondary dimension in Google Analytics (while in mobile overview) – “landing page”, and see where those mobile visitors are going, that way you won’t need to optimise your entire site to mobile immediately but fix it on the go.

Conversion optimization is an ongoing process that requires many conclusive tests and iterations. Testing too many variables at a time can cause a mess and testing the wrong variable can waste our time. Be sure to work out a test plan before starting out and use Google analytics to tackle the right areas.

What are the metrics you watch to help you decide where to optimize?

 

P.S. We would really appreciate it if you share this post and let us know what you think!

Statistics on registration forms are pretty grim: 86% (!) of users leave a page instantly when they’re required to fill out a form.
Thanks to hundreds of lead generation/signups tests we’ve done in the past 4 years, we’ve come up with various tips and tricks that can help reduce abandonment rate significantly and improve the quality of leads dramatically.

How to create converting registration forms:

1. Auto fill –  Don’t waste your user’s time and energy. Use auto complete to detect the their full name, address and email address. The less you ask of a user the more inclined they will be to fill in the form.
2. Minimize your requests – Remove all the unnecessary fields, they can complete them later on. Ask only for the most basic information and create a quicker process for the user. Give the user the feeling that your form is a 30 second fill out and no more.
   Facebook’s signup process: To make things simpler, facebook could create one field for first & last name and make it look shorter. They could also have just one field for the email address and only after the user clicks “Sign up” show a message that says: “we’re sending you an email, make sure your the address is correct.”Groupon does it in an great way, asking one short question at a time and slowly navigating the user towards the end.

   

3. Help the user – Add small question marks next to your fields including explanations of each field. You’d be surprised to learn the kind of questions that prevent users from filling out a form, things that might seems obvious to you, but aren’t clear to others.
4. Messaging – Be specific, use a title that explains exactly why the user needs to sign up, for example: Signup to get a free e-book!
5. Call to action – Don’t forget to end your form with a clear call to action that indicates the end of the form and the continuation of the next steps.
6. “Show password” – Instead of asking your user to fill in their new password twice for validation, give them the option to “show password” and go over it by themselves. This will reduce the amount of fields and will give a sense of an easy and quick form.By giving users the option to “show” the password, mailchimp reduces the sign up fields to the minimum required and still allows users to verify their email.

7. Social sign up – Make it quick and easy, allow users to sign up or log in via their Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin account.
8. Mobile forms: One of the most important parts of filling out a form on mobile is to be able to see what you are actually doing, Don’t forget to zoom in on each field the user is updating. Another tip is to enable only the relevant keyboards in each field – i.e in the phone field to create the numbers as the default keyboard.
9. Mobility- some users like to use their mobile horizontally and some vertically, don’t forget to make your mobile forms accessible on both screen options and allow for easy usage.
10. Shipping and billing – Allow users to simply auto-fill their payment address from the shipping address instead of filling in their details twice.                 
11. Make required/optional fields clear to the user – If some info isn’t required, we advise you remove it completely. If you still want to keep it in the form make sure it is clear to users what’s mandatory and what’s not.
12. Clear errors – Errors a very important aspect of filling out forms. Locating the errors on the bottom or hidden will make it difficult for a user to understand why they can’t submit the form.

Filling out a form should be a simple step along the funnel. Make sure to test your registration forms as much as possible and of course, learn from your insights. If you want to get some more information, contact us here.