How to do testing that really makes a difference
Photo by Árni Svanur Daníelsson on Unsplash
Regular testing is a great way to gather the insights and intelligence you need to make valuable improvements in your activities and helpful iterations to your products. But this doesn’t have to mean spending loads of time and money or spend lots of money on a big overhaul. Focus on making marginal gains, borrowing from the best, and learning from what you do, and you can make a big difference to the people you serve and support.
1. Focus on what’s important
Every year at the Tour de France, competing cycle teams carry out various tests on nutrition, training and technology for their cyclists with one simple aim: to help them get to the finish line quicker. Before you test anything, ask: what is the one aim I want to achieve the most? And then focus all your energy on tweaks and changes you can make to that end.
2. Make marginal gains
In a six-hour race where you might win or lose by a fraction of a second, every single gram of the bike matters.
The concept of marginal gains in this context comes from Dave Brailsford, who transformed British Cycling based on the idea that “if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by one per cent, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.” Brailsford identified the most effective fabric for cyclewear and even determined the optimum pillow and mattress for each rider to get a good night’s sleep!
To find places for marginal gains in your organisation, identify areas for seemingly small improvements, like minor points of friction or drop-offs in a user journey. For instance, you could improve your open rates with better subject lines, then increase conversion with more persuasive calls to action, then take users to better designed donation forms. Once improvements accumulate, these small changes could prove as effective as rebuilding a digital platform from scratch.
To further illustrate this point, I remember working with a donation form that raised ten per cent more money after we simply adjusted the layout. Similarly, I saw increased conversions into regular donation from a petition ‘thank-you’ email with another client. This was simply down to using a sticky regular donation box. Small and simple can still yield powerful results.
3. Borrow from the best
It isn’t always straightforward (especially for organisations with limited capacity) to unearth statistically relevant findings from inhouse testing. To do so, you would either need a high volume of people using your digital spaces, or you would have to run a test for a very long time.
Fortunately, a Greenpeace or Save the Children UK fundraising or campaign action page, for example, will have been tested meticulously in previous iterations, so you could study such pages in detail and borrow their approach. Although each charity’s audience is slightly different, elements like page layouts and form designs could be a good start and then you can adapt them for your website.
4. Learn from what you do
Testing, amending, and testing again to reveal new opportunities to optimise a page layout or content is really important. Schedule enough time to capture the results and share your interpretation of results with colleagues, discuss and learn. Then make time to use those lessons in the planning of your next project.
And be prepared that some iterations to copy, layout or photos will not improve what you already have. If that’s the case, be ready to accept you may have created your best solution for the time being. Call this your baseline, or ‘banker’, and start focusing on other areas for improvement instead.
You've got stacks of tips, so go forth and win your own personal Tour de France! And if you have your own user testing advice or examples of small improvements that made a big difference, drop me a line!
