How To Use Hicks Law For CRO Success

His name is Darrell Williams. I believe you must have heard his name, because he keeps writing for various journals, and he recently wrote for a Search Engine Journal, I believe, and was a really good piece. So, yeah, Daryl Williams is the founder of Growth Hack Guides. So do check out growthhackguides.com. 

And, Darrell, it be great if you could join me on stage and switch on your camera. There you are. Hey, Darrell. How’s it going? You’re on mute.

Darrell Williams:

Sorry. I said it’s going. It’s going. Almost there Friday.

V:

Oh, yeah. It’s almost Friday. Great. So, yeah, here is Darrell. And, of course, he will be sharing more details and introducing himself and his company in more detail in the forthcoming presentation. But before I take myself off the stage, I just wanted to drop in a note, for everyone in the audience today that we really want to make this presentation more engaging and more interactive, and we want to move away from those monotonous, you know, unidirectional presentations. So, it’ll be really, really great if you could participate in this presentation by asking questions or sharing your observations. 

Any experiences you know, with your current employer or with your past, if you’re allowed to, of course, just maybe send it to me in the chat or you could also drop a note in the questions panel. Or if it is visible to you, there’s a hand option available in the control panel. So if you click on it, I’ll get a ping that, you have something to say. And I will unmute you guys so that you can interact directly with Darrell on the audio. So that’ll make up for a really, really interesting and really engaging and interactive session. So, yeah, with that, I think, I should now move down the stage and Darrell, it’s all yours.

DW:

Awesome. Well, thank you again, to VWO for just giving me this amazing opportunity, an amazing platform, not necessarily just saying that they allowed me this opportunity to speak. If you ever utilize the platform, you know, how amazing it is, the whole team over there is great. So thank you, first and foremost to VWO. And thank you to everybody who has joined today. 

So we’re all gathered here today to learn about Hicks Law. So Hicks Law is a UX Design Principle, but also a psychological principle as well that I’m gonna really dive into and really talk very in-depth about and how you can actually utilize this to be able to increase your conversion rates.  And just all that together, have a better user experience for whatever vertical that you happen to be in. 

So first of all, who am I?

So, I am the founder of growthhackguides.com. The abbreviated is just GHG. With Growth Hack Guides, we aim to teach people, from all different walks of life, how to basically start an online-based business and how to scale it like a Silicon Valley startup. I have a lot of different startup experiences coming from the Bay Area. And, most previously, in the advertising world, I’m using all the different skills that have, kind of learned throughout the years with nearly a decade of experience to be able to give that information to people when they wanna start an online-based business to help them generate passive income, primarily. 

And I speak to all these differentiated skills that you see listed below. So I have a few clients that I’ve worked with over the past. These are just a few of them, but, all great companies. And hopefully, if you’re watching this, perhaps I can help you and help you with, you know, VWO if you have any questions as well and introduce you to some people over at the team over there.

So at the end of this webinar, what I want you to walk away with is what Hicks Law, is, first and foremost, and how you can use it to increase your conversion rates. Also, cognitive load and how to avoid it, like, the plague, because I’ll just jump into that. Cause to speak about Hicks law is to also speak about cognitive load. And then also the K.I.S.S method, and we’ll dive into that and how that correlates back into Hicks law and equates it to a certain degree of success with CRO. And then I’ll also jump into another acronym, which stands for P.I.E. which I’ll explain later on in this presentation.

So what is Hicks Law? Hicks Law was a theory, a concept, that was invented by William Edmund Hick. Right? So the simple statement and the, the way to go about understanding this is that the time it takes to make a decision increases as the number of alternatives increases. 

Alternatives are that of choices. Anytime anybody comes to your site, no matter what vertical you’re in, they have a lot of different alternatives/places. And it’s very, very crucial to be able to prioritize certain things that are of the highest importance and eliminate those certain distractions because as the law states, the more certain alternatives and choices that you have, the less you’re gonna actually have the immediate action, hence, conversion, take place on your website. 

So this is the actual formula that was created by William Edmund Hick. So, essentially, what this formula breaks down is that the response time is gonna be equivalent to the time involved in the decision-making process. And the cognitive processing time for options that are offered, and then the number of alternatives that are offered. And then that log is, for all my math nerds, it’s logarithmic. It’s a specific mathematical equation for value but essentially, you can find all these different metrics to plug in to be able to calculate your response time. 

By simple analytics metrics, you can get that directive timeline involved in decision-making. You can leverage analytics from the next page path, how long it takes for people to actually go and navigate to an area of your website.

The cognitive processing time, you can actually use certain things like events to be able to calculate how many times people actually clicked on a button to lead to the page. And the number of alternatives is just as simple as how many different options you’re offering, whether it be a lead form or different aspects throughout your website. 

So what exactly is cognitive load? As you can see, it was in that equation, that I just showed you, and I preface my initial, statements by saying that it’s a, very crucial element to adhere to Hicks law. But what exactly is that?

So cognitive load, as simple as a simple statement cognitive load is being overwhelmed with specific options. And the cognitive load creates what they call cognitive barriers. And there are 3 differentiated aspects that I’ll dive more into after this initial slide. But as you can see with this example, it’s the numbers that are expected to take. That’s a cognitive barrier, right?

All three of these different users that are shown here, want to perform a specific action just like when they navigate into your site. They want to perform a certain action, but they have certain cognitive barriers the number of steps it takes to achieve it, the perceived length of each step, and the perceived difficulty of each step, are all cognitive barriers that can cause a bottleneck when you’re trying to get users to convert. And then that leads to that cognitive load, right? Number of choices I have, the amount of thought required to make that certain decision, and confusion of different distractions. There are a ton of ads that can be on-site. There are certain distracting elements that all equate to being that of a cognitive load on a user. 

So I said I was gonna go into more detail about the cognitive load, and I just talked about the 3 different users there, but it’s actually a classification, that they have towards cognitive load that is diff that’s, all differentiated. So you have intrinsic cognitive load. 

The complexity of new information, germane, cognitive load, deep processing of new information. These are users that are gonna look at all the different options. They’re gonna try and process things as soon as possible. Versus the intrinsic cognitive load, it’s just gonna be more complex, they don’t necessarily know where to start. And then you have extraneous, cognitive load where people are getting distracted by the specific elements that I mentioned as well. So what does the typical user experience look like when cognitive load occurs?

So as you can see from this chart, as time goes up, just like the Hicks Law states, as the time goes up, and the choices increase, you have that sliding scale of where you see the user experience go from happy from the less time involved and minimum choices that are given, and it’s a somewhat happy and to being annoyed, to being anger, to being absolutely livid. So this graph actually speaks perfectly to what I’m trying to communicate here, and I’ve definitely seen it, working with a variety of clients, quantified through analytics and certain actions that we try to rectify. And this is definitely a crucial element as it pertains to, making sure that you adhere to that lower scale to where you make that user happy, you’re just offering the right amount of choices to get them towards, that conversion-based goal. 

So how do you avoid cognitive load?So it’s 3 simple concepts: reduce, simplify, and maximize. So reduction doesn’t necessarily coincide with simplifying, just because you reduce certain things doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re simplifying things. I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of different forms and maybe the way a certain form may reduce it, but it’s not necessarily simplifying it. If those choices aren’t necessarily needed, or not important towards a conversion goal, maximize your output from initially taking those 2 first steps to reduce certain elements. But mostly, simplifying certain things that you need to prioritize and actually make of importance and not necessarily have more form fields or certain aspects or elements on your website that don’t necessarily lead to a conversion action.

So with that said, what most companies do, this is an example here. And, just as it was preface leading into this, presentation, in this conversation, would love the interactivity questions asked about this. 

But this is a form from ASOS. It’s a very huge reach retailer online that sells, male clothing and female clothing, a very big, retailer. And this is one singular form that I split out just to put on a presentation, so it can be clear. So with that said, I’m gonna just ask a brief question. Can you spot what’s wrong with this form? 

As it relates to this topic of Hicks Law, obviously, you see a lot of options on this form. This form is just to join and sign up for an account, there may be some type of incentive on the website to get people towards this page. But essentially, when you’re actually on this page, you see 3 different things, that are asked. Right? You have Google, you have Apple, you have Facebook, and they’re all different third-party forms to sign up. Right. And then you have an option to sign up through email where they ask for your email, your first name, your last name, your password, your date of birth, and what you’re mostly interested in buying, to try to segment the audience towards female versus male, your contact preferences, for discounts, new stuff, exclusive, ASOS Partners, and then given that initial CTA to actually go on to create that conversion action for this specific company. 

So I asked the initial question, what key spot was wrong with this form, but I’m gonna just go out and tell you. So, essentially, what starts out as a few different options, if you will, from having the option to sign up through a third-party platform versus getting your email and going through all the steps, you really have more than 2 options. You really have 5 to 6 options given all the different things that we’re discussing, all the different choices that people actually have to, choose from. 3 third parties, that’s 3 different actions versus email versus going into the contact preferences and checking off boxes, there are a lot of options. There are a lot of different things that could possibly cause cognitive load in this situation. So what most companies should do, is the K.I.S.S method. So as a little boy, as I was growing up, my dad always told me about this method of keeping, ‘Keeping It Simple, Stupid’. 

Not to say that anyone’s stupid, by any means, but keeping it simple is definitely an art form. It definitely needs to be, shown to users in this visualization that I have, accomplishing the same thing with lesser choices. So, I have Google and Facebook. I don’t necessarily have Apple or the long form, and then it’s just the immediate CTA, just the click. 

But the initial question here is, like, how do you get to this, this type of variation, this type of user experience? What if other people prefer Apple versus another third-party platform? But the context here is that I would leverage data to be able to do it. Right? So I would see whether or not people would click on Google or Facebook or Apple, and it’s a certain learning process to be able to come to the state to create a variation like this. So how do you get there to be able to leverage that data? What does that leveraging data actually look like? 

So you have funnel analysis that actually VWO offers.

They have a great service called, VWO Insights, that you can utilize where you can use all of these different things that I’m talking about here on the screen. You have funnel analysis. Are people actually going on to that next path? Are they actually struggling where you see that bottleneck? If you see a certain percentage of drop-offs and don’t get me wrong, a drop-off is always gonna be there within the user journey, but if it’s actually really lower, you might have a very serious problem to where you can start to iterate and start to understand certain bits and visual cues that you need to prioritize versus others. And you can set up different testing variations to be able to come to that certain variation that I’ve made, in the previous slide. 

You have session recordings where you can actually jump into the user’s, activity as they are scrolling through certain aspects and elements of your website. Yeah. Form Analytics. We can actually start to quantify specific form fields, and you can see what can possibly be reduced and simplified.

You have surveys. This is definitely underutilized, in my experience in CRO. A lot of times there’s an assumption that’s made, instead of just directly asking users, what is the distracting element? What will it actually get you to convert as a user? As I stated, VWO offers all these different tools. So you can start to understand and you can start to get towards that true north and start to convert users at a higher rate.

So the law averages, high-velocity testing, what actually let’s take a step back. What is actually the law averages and how’s how does it relate to high-velocity testing? The law of averages states that simply you have to be able to have a numbers game take effect. The more things that you would essentially test with high velocity, the more outcomes you actually have toward actually converting users. So this metric is pretty shocking to me, but, pretty standard for all the different clients that I work with.

68.2% of companies don’t perform more than 4 tests per month. And that may sound like a lot, but it’s not. It usually is a lot of, quantity toward like, saying, “Oh, we’ve launched 4 tests a month within the company.” And they think it’s a lot, but those four tests that they’ve launched, that they think are quantity, are not equivalent to that of quality. So it doesn’t necessarily matter in terms of, like, how many, how many tests you run, But it does matter in terms of quality as well. So I would say that high-velocity testing also needs to be paired with quality as well too. So, you have to take both of them in terms of being able to understand what you’re gonna actually put as your output to maximize your actual conversion rate. 

So if you launch 3 tests, but they’re all of quality, that’s great. And you actually have a high conversion rate that’s good, but I will implore you to actually do double, do 6, always constantly be an iteration and really focusing on the quality of your test. 

As a famous quote, my, favorite sports figure says, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

So high-velocity testing, with the addition of segmentation really helps you adhere to Hicks Law. Right? So the previous example I showed you where I made that more simplistic aspect towards an account sign-up form, you really have a lot of different other things that you can start the test based on segmentation, right? Taking the fact that you can look at the user sessions. You can look at the funnel analysis of all the different things that you can leverage from VWO Insights, you can start to create differentiating aspects towards different segments. 

Segments of your audience, meaning that if someone sees Google or Facebook with that small CTA to sign up, with the variation I created, they may just prefer Google and Facebook, and you just have one variation that speaks directly to that audience. Versus showing all the different form fields to an audience that’s more than likely gonna be overloaded by certain options that they don’t know necessarily where to start. So as it relates to high-velocity testing, you should also pair it with segmentation towards your users who are taking specific actions and don’t necessarily try to speak to a crowd but have a one-to-one conversation. And what can that look like? Multi-step form versus an email-only account creation.

Collapsible form fields, again, eliminating distraction versus a step form fields. 2 third-party platforms to sign up versus 3 with no email option, or 2 third-party platforms to sign up versus email account creation only. These are all differentiated segments that you can apply towards testing, but the frequency of how much you test is actually gonna make a difference in the quality of it as well too.

V:

Darrell, before you move on to the next slide, I see that there are actually two questions from the same person. So if you allow me to repeat that question now, the question is from, Cheeka. Sorry if I didn’t pronounce your name correctly, but I unmuted you so you could add more context to your question. You just have to unmute yourself from your side, and then you can ask him directly.

Cheeka:

Okay. Awesome. Can you hear me? Am I audible?

V:

Yes. Okay. So go ahead.

Cheeka:

My question was I’ve worked with a lot of small and medium-sized businesses. And so how can you get that kind of test velocity of 4 plus tests in a month when their traffic isn’t to that level, right? Like, so many of them just don’t. So, when I’m seeing 68%, I don’t think 68% of businesses have enough traffic to run you know, that much even if they wanted to. And then adjacent to that would be, let’s say you’re a step ahead where you have the traffic to be able to do it, but your revenue might not be enough to take that many losses, right? So unless you’re getting a lot of parity, if you’re getting if you’re taking a lot of losses, that’s hitting the bottom line with CRO. So, yeah, I was just wondering how having a high test velocity would be able to, work in that kind of real-world scenario.

DW:

Yeah. Absolutely. So a lot of times whenever a quick client, to be able to get that certain amount of traffic, is primarily been on the paid side to where you can control to be able to have the certain amount of volume to actually quantify certain things towards, hitting certain statistical significance with your test. And also to your point, as far as being able to achieve that bottom line, it’s really about investing more in your SEO as well because that’s the only way that you’re actually gonna get traffic over time. And yes, it’s time-consuming, but usually, to answer your question, it’s been on the paid side of things to be able to account for that.

Cheeka:

Okay. Yeah. That makes more sense. I just wonder, like, would they have the budget for it? For, like, a small business.

DW:

Right. So usually the businesses that I work with have the budget to be able to, invest in doing the high-velocity testing because I go and show different case studies, showing them how it can actually move the needle for them and have different, data to back it up so they are willing to invest in doing it. So if you don’t necessarily have the budget from what I’m hearing, to be able to invest in the high-velocity testing, you can also leverage intelligence tools. You can leverage what people are doing with certain variations of traffic that they’re currently running. And you can start to kind of leverage certain queues of what they’re running versus what you can run yourself, but it would just take longer to actually get those more quantifiable metrics. When I say intelligence tools, there are tools that can show you this person is running paid traffic to this landing page, and maybe that specific business that’s running that traffic to that landing page, and maybe they have TPC traffic or organic traffic, it coincides with your business model, and you could take certain queues and you could set up different variations on your own without actually investing in the certain budgets towards, like, you know, initially doing it with the paid media efforts, but you’re leveraging their data with all their different test iterations that they’re doing actively, and you’re just applying it, but you just have to have to wait over time to where you either build up the budget to do the investment paid or build up your organic traffic. 

So I would really implore you to kinda leverage the different iteration processes that people are doing from that insight that you can glean from different third-party tools if that makes sense. 

Cheeka:

Yeah. That makes sense.

V:

I just wanted to add one more point there as well, to Cheeka’s question regarding the, you know, not having the required amount of budget to invest in high-velocity testing. But, you know, if you look at it from the alternative perspective, the losses incurred by not testing will be much higher in the long term. Right? And we’ve seen this time and again. I’m not saying this because I’m part of the company that sells this solution, but a lot of customers, big clients who come in, they say that they’ve never tested it. They’ve never run an A/B test on their website before and now they do not know who the customer is what they really want, or what the behavior looks like. So, they’ve been in the business for 20, 25 years. I mean, sorry, not 20-25 years, that was an exaggeration, but, they are a decade old in business, in eCommerce or BFSI or whatever sector. But, you know, the process is that, whatever budget you have, you have to start testing from today onwards, and the right time was yesterday as they call it. Right? So, just get on with testing, in the long term, it’ll get you more profit than you were expecting. So, I mean, yeah, that’s that’s a small point that I want to drive.

DW:

Yep. Definitely. And I go to same sentiments. By not testing or allocating the budget, no matter how small it may be, whether it be $200 to $500, is gonna be that iteration process. And like I said, leverage other people that are actually spending those huge dollar amounts and a vertical that coincides with what you’re offering, and just learn from them and just apply whatever you can towards organic, whether it be a small budget, and just kind of leverage what they’re already spending, thousands if not millions of dollars on to get to a certain point to where it’s gonna increase your odds for converting a user.

Great. Any other questions before I move on? Nope. Okay. So as we were talking about segmentation, high-velocity testing, reducing certain aspects towards elements on your site, and then simplifying certain things.

P.I.E. – it stands for potential, importance, and ease. So you really can’t do CRO testing without a specific framework. There’s also other frameworks, but I tend to stick to P.I.E. because it’s the most straightforward. 

So when you have all these different things that as you’re looking into the data and you’re forming certain hypotheses, with the potential, there are gonna be certain constraints to actually implement what you’re wanting to do with, like, the variation that you have to have to create, whether you have a front-end dev or back-end dev, within your organization, to create that experience, I would label that as potential because it’s gonna be, more of a time process investment than actually doing it. So potentially, you can run that test. Vversus that of importance. What do you actually see within the data that is immediate, that needs to be prioritized to have a lower level of effort versus the potential category that has a higher level of effort to actually implement? 

And then ease, what can you do within the next 5 to 10 minutes? Right, that you can just simply do it yourself. So it’s a way of categorizing certain aspects towards moving the needle. And as you can see, please let me know if you would like this CSV file and I can send it to you to utilize for your own business. You have a specific URL where you’re gonna be testing certain things on the site, with the statuses, whether it’s proposed or it’s being quality assured or it’s set to live, what main metric you’re gonna track, with the page location in terms of, like, home page or your PDP, your product description page of your eCommerce-based business. 

What’s the generalized concept? And then there’s quantifiable metric towards, formula, that grades it on a 1 to 5 scale based on the measurable business value, essentially how impactful it can be for your organization. The technical effort, again, talking to your stakeholders within your initial company and getting that number. And then it spits out that prioritization, where you can actually start to see what you need to prioritize and move forward, with that iterative testing towards getting people to convert at a higher rate. 

So with that said, I am open to more questions, ladies and gentlemen, and don’t be shy. Close mouths don’t get fed – that’s what my mother always likes to tell me. If you have any other questions, please don’t be afraid to email me. And I really appreciate the time that you spent today with me. Hopefully, you took a lot of insights away. Yeah, and I’m always at your immediate disposal if you want to, talk after this presentation.

V:

Awesome. Thank you so much, Darrell, for this amazing presentation. So Cheeka is asking, what does ‘P’ in P.I.E. stand for? If you could just repeat it.

DW:

Oh, potential. So as I was, saying, potential or the high investment test whether it requires development, or UX design, certain aspects that are going to just create more of a process towards you actually creating a specific variation. And then again, going through the other two, ‘I – important’, what do you wanna tackle sooner than layer later that has a lower level, and ‘E- ease’, what you can do yourself.

V:

Cool. So by the way, Darrell has also written a blog article on the same topic and, we are honored to to publish that blog on VWO’s website. I’ll just quickly share the link to the article, in the chat window. There you go. So I’ve sent the link to that particular blog piece for all of you. Do give it a read. It’s really good. It’s really, really well well written. So, I just I’ll just give you a few more seconds to click on it. And, bookmark it or just save it in your pocket for reading it later. It’s a really amazing piece. Meanwhile, if you have any questions, any observation with, you know, with regards to adding choices on your website, or if you might have pointed your hands, adding too many choices, or if you might have pointed your hands by not adding a sufficient number of choices, feel free to share those experiences with all the other attendees as well. We’ll be happy to learn from your wins or your failures. Optimization is all about learning.

DW:

Yes. Absolutely. Fail fast and fail often.

V:

So I didn’t, you’re saying something, Darrell?

DW:

Oh, I was just saying fail fast and fail often That’s the motto.

V:

Absolutely. Fail fast and fail often, and that’s how you become a more customer-centric business, something that every business craves to be. And of course, if you have any questions or, you know, if you remember something after the end of this webinar, feel free to connect with, Darrell on LinkedIn or, Twitter wherever Darrell is available. Just grab hold of him and, connect with him, and ask your questions. And I’m sure that he’d be happy to guide you on the path to success. Yeah. So, with that, Daryl, thanks once again for sharing this amazing piece of knowledge with our audience today, and thanks to all our lovely audience as well for sticking, throughout this presentation. 

We’ll meet in the next webinar, which is happening on 19th July, and the topic of that webinar is really, really interesting. So you’ll receive the announcement for it in the follow-up emails along with the link to sign up. With that, it’s me signing off. 

And Darrell as well. Have a great day ahead and have a great weekend as well. Okay. Bye bye.

DW:

Alright. Bye bye.