There’s a world of difference between how businesses think a typical customer journey looks like and how it really looks like. A detailed comparison below.
Also in today’s issue: how to tell a brand’s story, how to create product design hypotheses, how to test emerging acquisition channels.
Lots of interesting stuff to learn and take inspiration from.
————
A typical customer journey
How businesses think a typical customer journey looks like:
How a typical customer journey really looks like.
How to create product design hypotheses: a step-by-step guide [UX Collective]
- OUTCOME: Describe the ideal end state. What is the perfect world you’re aiming to create by bringing your product or service into existence? How will you know (what will you literally see) when this is achieved?
- OBSTACLES: What are the things that research shows, or you believe, are preventing the outcome being achieved? That is, why isn’t the world already how you want it?
- ALTERNATIVES: What new ways of doing things might we try in order to overcome these obstacles?
- HYPOTHESES: Make a prediction based on each alternative under #3 that claims a change will occur to the metrics you outlined in it and in #1 (your outcome).
- NULL HYPOTHESIS: Write the counter-argument to your first hypothesis. If your hypothesis claimed that something will happen, replace the word ‘will’ with ‘won’t’. Design your experiment to disprove this statement.
- PRIORITISE: Apply the uncertainty mapping tool to your hypotheses to prioritise them.
- EXPERIMENT DESIGN: Let’s talk about this another time, I’m sure I’ve pushed my luck getting you to read this far (cheatcode users excepted).
The full process description in the article.
Direct-to-Consumer Research: 5 Effective Ways for DTC Sites to Tell Their ‘Brand’ & ‘Product’ Stories [Baymard Institute]
Key takeaways:
- Baymard Institute’s research shows that — on Direct-to-Consumer, small catalog websites — users need to “get to know” the brand before they want to make a purchase decision.
- Users are particularly interested in brand values and their “origin story”, but materials, manufacturing practices, and product quality are also of key importance.
- 67% of users on DTC sites seek out such nonproduct content, compared to just 37% of users on traditional retail websites.
In the article: how and why customers care about the brand story, what kind of businesses it’s the most important for, plenty of examples and inspiration.
The performance effects of too much lazy-loading [web.dev]
Lazy-loading is a technique to defer downloading a resource until it’s needed, which conserves data and reduces network contention for critical assets. It became a web standard in 2019 and today lazy loading for images is supported by most major browsers. That sounds great, but is there such a thing as too much lazy loading?
The article summarizes the adoption and performance characteristics of native image lazy-loading. Google found that lazy-loading can be an amazingly effective tool for reducing unneeded image bytes, but overuse can negatively affect performance. Concretely, the analysis shows that more eagerly loading images within the initial viewport—while liberally lazy-loading the rest—can give the best of both worlds: fewer bytes loaded and improved Core Web Vitals.
In the article: all the technical details, timings, statistics, charts.
How To Choose, Test, and Scale Emerging Acquisition Channels [Reforge]
Clubhouse, TikTok, Poparazzi, Instagram Stories, Yo, WhatsApp, Facebook Groups, Meercat, YikYak, Google Plus, Twitter, iOS apps, YouTube, The Amazing Race, interactive billboards, Saturday morning cartoons, the Howard Stern Show, smoke signals, or hieroglyphics…
Every time there is an emerging channel, there is curiosity, appeal, and horror in answering the inevitable question…
Should you invest your time and resources into this emerging marketing channel?
This article will give you a framework to figure out if this channel is worth your time and energy.
One of the big lessons to learn is that an “emerging” channel doesn’t need to be a new trendy social channel. It just needs to be an emerging opportunity relative to who else is leveraging that platform in your industry.
————
Until next Thursday!
Radek Sienkiewicz
PS. A typical customer journey for GrowRevenue: Read → Learn → Profit. Short and sweet 🙂
