Yes, even checklist symbols impact your buying behavior.

July 2016

When creating an unordered list in a computer program, it usually looks something like this:

item 1
item 2
item 3

The dot could be replaced by ‘-’ but that’s usually where the variantions end.

To make it fit the designs better you’ll see different variations on websites, but simply “making it look better” is not always the (single) intention. We’ve done A/B tests that show that (green) ticks (compared to just a · or a - ) will actually increase the likelyhood of you buying whatever is being advertised. It’s actually one of the most consistent tests that will result in a small (but statistically significant) uplift.

The theory here is that we are trained to see ticks as ‘good’. Remember your homework and how your teacher marked it’s sections as being correct..?

The green doesn’t have a mayor effect, but it’s usually better than using a negative color like red (again from your homework).

Some examples:

Skype listing the benefits of using their desktop app.

Many comparison tables like this one on GitHub wil have checkmarks. Of you could “cross off” the items that are available, but crosses are seen as a more negative symbol.

Basecamp also uses an alternative for the · or — , but it’s not a checkmark but they use thumbs up emoticons instead.

On booking.com it’s not a list, but the effect of the checkmark is still powerful enough when it’s only a single checkmark marking an items as something good.

Recent posts

Optimization hierarchy of evidence

A hierarchy of evidence (or levels of evidence) is a heuristic used to rank the relative strength of results obtained from scientific research. I've created a version of this chart/pyramid applied to CRO which you can see below. It contains the options we have as optimizers and tools and methods we often use to gather data.

View post

[EN] Datascience can do what?

This is a bonus episode with Emily Robinson (Senior Data Scientist at Warby Parker) en Lukas Vermeer (Director of Experimentation at Booking.com). In her earlier session that day, Emily said that real progress starts when you put your work online for others to see and comment on which in this case was about Github. Someone from the audience wondered how that works out in larger companies where a manager or even a legal department might not be overly joyous about that to say the least so I asked Emily about her thoughts on that. Recorded live with audience pre-covid-19 at the Conversion Hotel conference in november 2019 on the island of Texel in The Netherlands. (oorspronkelijk gepubliceerd op https://www.cro.cafe/)

View post