What we do that others don’t, mailing list CTAs, systems thinking

The fourth zine in our series about store design is now available. It’s about the highly profitable act of usability testing.

On text, I wrote a little bit about the new dialectic.

Now that we’re no longer working to secure another client, we have been doing more of our favorite thing: research. In particular, we have been researching our crowded industry, looking at what other optimization agencies do.

We looked at 52 different agencies that claim to do “CRO,” testing, or other optimization-focused work. What we’ve learned:

• Our competitors are almost all agencies, not consultancies.
• Most of their optimization work is focused on best practices, not evidence-based design decision-making.
• Research is almost exclusively quantitative, focused on heat maps, analytics, and rarely anything else. In fact, we could only find two (admittedly exceptional) agencies that actually incorporate talking to other people as part of their methodology: Speero and Copyhackers.
• Most of them are more expensive than Draft, not less.

Our competitive differentiator is customer research. Research is how we’re able to write case studies like these, with numbers that look, on face, to be too good to be true. And we know that research is the most incorrectly denigrated activity in the tech industry.

This is the endpoint of optimization’s commoditization: people seeking the psychic cocaine bumps of “quick wins” and “best practices,” failing to understand that design is fundamentally a slow, deep, patient activity that involves, above all else, listening to & understanding paying customers. When I speak of a psychic & spiritual tragedy in the industry, this is what I’m referring to.

I am grateful for having gone through this exercise, for it will continue to inform our repositioning over the coming months. It is not our job to convince others of what we believe to be correct. It is our job to find those who understand it. I will not apologize for believing that research generates outsize economic value, as it is an objective fact of the reality of this industry. I see the proof of it in my job every single day.

You can see it, too. Get a roadmap from us.

This week, for paid members

• Our weekly lesson is all about mailing list calls to action. Is “early access” enough? No.
• Our design of the week shows what not to do with a size selector if you’re an apparel or footwear brand.
• And finally, our monthly office hours have been scheduled for Tuesday, October 20 at 1p CDT. Join us & turn up!

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

Links & analysis

• In one sense, this post on the ROI of design systems is about design systems. In another, more accurate sense, it is about ROI in a very general sense. In what ways are you calculating the ROI of design activities in order to justify your economic value in an organization?
• A lovely meditation on why designers should be systems thinkers. I agree. Related: Donella Meadows’ groundbreaking, essential work on understanding systems; summary here, book here.
• When should you use a link, and when should you use a button? A gentle reminder. We have gotten away from this principle as we pepper our home pages with buttons, haven’t we? What can we do about it?
• Image-optimizing apps like Crush.pics were once essential for stores, but now that Shopify is compressing images on the fly, they are broadly not useful. One fewer for your store!

This week’s paid lesson: What is an appropriate call to action to join a mailing list?

This week’s lesson is for paid members. Sign into our community to read it, or join us today to get access.