The Current State of Mobile UX (18 Common Pitfalls) [Baymard Institute]
Baymard has done a 2+ year, comprehensive mobile UX study. This article analyzes the dataset, provides you with the current state of mobile UX, and outlines 18 common design pitfalls and strategic oversights applicable to most mobile e-commerce sites.
They analyzed 60 major e-commerce sites and grouped their findings in 8 major categories. The results were… not great:
See how few sites ranked “Good”. Mobile forms category has 0 (zero!) good examples among the analyzed major e-commerce sites. Mobile product list has 1 (one!). You can’t purchase any product without filling the form so just imagine how much lost revenue the graph above represents.
Designing “mobile first” has been preached for years now. Everyone knows about it but, looking at the “Good” column, seems like almost nobody practices it.
When some company with good reach comes around and actually provides a great mobile experience across the board, they would reap outsize rewards and market share.
The article provides loads of specific examples, showing what’s good, what’s bad, what needs to be fixed, and how. I guarantee your mobile site is making at least one of the mistakes listed in the article, more likely about half of them.
Brands, Amazon, and the Rise of E-Marketplaces (PDF) [Feedvisor]
How much are US brands using Amazon and Amazon advertising? More than you thought,.
E-marketplaces were the biggest beneficiaries of consumers’ accelerated adoption of e-commerce, driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, Amazon grew its e-commerce market share to 39%, while Walmart displaced eBay as the No. 2 online player in the U.S., with 5.8% market share, per eMarketer.
How many brands sell on Amazon?
How many of them advertise on Amazon?
This way, largely unnoticed by the outside world, Amazon’s advertising business is becoming one of their main profit drivers. See: Do Amazon Ads Bring In More Cash Than AWS?
100m Posts Analyzed: What You Need To Write The Best Headlines [BuzzSumo]
What constitutes a “good” headline? BuzzSumo dug into their index to analyze a casual 100 million headlines.
The article contains:
- The ideal headline length
- The best numbers to use in headlines
- How headlines have changed since 2017
- Headline phrases that drive the most Facebook engagement
- The top themes in the best Facebook headlines
- Phrases that start or end the best Facebook headlines
- Headline phrases that drive the most Twitter engagement
- How to write headlines for Facebook AND Twitter
Top 5 insights:
- Instructional headlines drove the most Facebook engagement.
- Curiosity headline phrases – ie. those that hinted, teased or questioned something – tended to fare a lot better on Twitter.
- The top headline phrase on Facebook had 590x more average shares than the top headline phrase on Twitter.
- The ideal headline length is 11 words and 65 characters, according to the most shared headlines on both Facebook & Twitter.
- The top Facebook headlines are no longer published by low-quality entertainment publications, but instead by authoritative news sites.
Btw, “Top 10” lists are alive and well, still. Here are the numbers used most often in the headlines:
Ten items could be too much for short attention span readers, so the second-most popular number is 5. Similar results for half the work? 😄
Consumers think better of a product when they see the work that goes in [MarketingWeek]
The ‘labor illusion’ means consumers perceive good products more favorably when they’re aware of the effort put in.
Do you know how the travel websites show you how hard they work to show you all the results? (Searching 2,580 flights / 5,275 hotels / 258 car rentals, etc.) They could show you the results immediately, but they don’t. If they can convincingly show you the “hard work” they’re doing, you’ll value and trust the results more.
A few more examples:
- Dyson’s ad telling that they tested 5,000 prototypes in order to build the perfect appliance
- Food ads focusing on traditional, time-consuming, and straining process employed in the making of the product
- Domino’s mobile app transparently showing each step of the process and all the tasks going into making their pizza
- Spanish bank’s ATMs showing the notes being counted as customers wait for their cash
Warning: your product or service need to be good in order for this effect to work. Otherwise, it will work against you. If you show all the effort and provide bad results, the trust will plummet: “If after all this work they can’t give me what I want, I guess they’re not good after all.”
An example of a great ad
Simple, effective, memorable, shareable.
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Until next Thursday!
Radek Sienkiewicz
PS. 10+ years of marketing, conversion optimization, and growth experience went into creating this article. It looks good both on desktop and mobile, too.
