What factors affect your conversion?

Everyone who runs an eCommerce website is hooked on conversion as the vital key performance indicator to improve. And quite rightly…. It is the one metric that tells you how well your website it turning lookers into bookers (or browsers into buyers if you don’t like things rhyming and prefer alliteration instead.).
So what affects conversion? Well there are a number of factors that have an influence including:

• Usability
  How easy your site is to navigate and transact with
• Security
  How well your site conveys and actually take steps to ensure the safety of customer data
• Content
  How well  the site text and imagery informs &  supports the sales process
• Layout
  It’s not just how much you have on a page, it’s where you put it that counts
• Speed
  How quickly your site appears & displays affects bounce & therefore conversion
• Aesthetics
  How it looks also affects how it converts (try changing the colour of a few buttons if you don’t believe me)

All you have to do it find out what works for your customers.

Information Aesthetics

Following up on my previous 'information visualisation' posts for mapping the influence, I've been researching the 'aesthetics of information presentation'. Primarily I've focused on the different ways in which data can be displayed to make it more useful to the researcher.

This has led me to the Infosthetics site run by Andrew Vande Moere from the University of Sydney:

http://infosthetics.com/

This site is a rich collection of article on different data visualisations and in doing so shows the beauty they can create.

One particulalrly intersting and clever project that is mentioned is the

Time Travel Tube Map by http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/

This interactive graph reorganises the London Underground map based on the times of travel from that station.

It goes to show that for columns and tables of data, usefulness and aesthetics aren't necessarily at opposite ends of the spectrum.