Taking on new consulting work, why “CRO” is busted, intentional design

In quiet, reflective observation of the national holiday that is my birthday, Draft will be closed tomorrow.

Speaking of Draft, we celebrated 11 years in business this past Friday. Thanks for all of your support, now & always.

We were recently quoted in Shopify’s roundup of 2023 ecommerce trends, alongside a lot of people who are smarter than us. Take a look, and celebrate with us by setting all trends on fire.

Finally in Draft news, we’re taking on a limited number of one-off consulting projects in 2023, for the first time in almost 10 years. Take a look at that page and email us if you wish to begin a conversation.

I just finished the introduction to Store Design, and I’m hoping to get preorders launched by the time I leave France in six weeks. In it, I wrote a little about what store design isn’t, and I chose to omit our favorite little TLA around here: CRO.

Store design is not a form of conversion rate optimization, even though an improved conversion rate is almost certainly one of the outcomes of store design. It took a while for me to realize this, probably because everybody calls me a “CRO” person! Here are some important things to remember:

• Conversion rate doesn’t matter. Profit matters. You can have a high conversion rate and low profit. You can have a high AOV and low profit. You can even have a high ARPU and low profit! How can we materially help businesses generate more profit through our work, so they can invest more into further growth & success?
• There is no such thing as an “optimal” conversion rate. I guess 100% is an optimal conversion rate? Okay, cool, this is insane. Thank you.
• We don’t optimize for conversion rate exclusively. In fact, some of our highest-impact experiments have not involved material changes to conversion rate! Some of them have reduced manufacturing expenses, increased AOV, or reduced bounce rate.
• Finally and most importantly, we’re a design consultancy. What we do is practice design. I suspect that other people think “CRO” is shorthand for “best design practices & performance improvements,” which isn’t what we do. We listen to customers, channel their intent back to store owners, and generate profit with evidence.

I don’t think it’s my place to call CRO “dead” or anything, but it feels like a played, watered-down term in much the same way as SEO or UX have become, and when I look at it I don’t see myself or Draft in it. What the value-based designer does is both more & less definable, independent of any specific tool, more rooted in the idea and practice of the thing.

This week, for paid members

• We’re going to be creating some chapters for Store Design over the next few weeks, exclusively for paid members. This week’s will focus on how to mine revenue-generating insights from post-purchase surveys.
• Our design of the week focuses on a curious product listing. Or two. Two? Two.
• And our fortnightly teardown is for backpack & apparel brand Mokuyobi.

Want in? Join us now – named one of the best ecommerce communities going on the web.

Links

• In a development that is both unsurprising and shocking, Google is sunsetting Optimize. I’ll have more to say on this topic next week, of course.
• What are the intentions behind a design? This lovely meditation asserts that good design is intentional, but I’d go one step further and argue that all design is intentional. If enacted without intention, you aren’t really practicing design, you’re just going through some motions that look like design.
• Baymard with another profoundly obvious corker: primary navigation should correspond to primary categories for browsing products, and nothing else. Navigation exists to find products regardless of business size, full stop.
• Wikipedia redesigns.
• This is sad, but at least he proposes some solutions.