Let’s establish the hard truth first – marketing is flooded with acronyms. Flooded. Which means not only it is baffling to remember all the existing marketing terms, every quarter there is a portion of new ones ready to confuse us all over again!
And the pitfalls of the whole situation are in the fact that even when you are familiar with all the terminology, all of these marketing abbreviations and acronyms are connected, interdependent and intertwined, which means to understand one you need to also understand the other.
This is why we created this article, explaining the difference between Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) and UX/UI principles.
Ready to find out what it is? Let’s begin!
UI/UX & CRO Similarities
The fact that they are mentioned and compared in the same article means these two marketing online tools – Conversion Rate Optimization and User Interface/User Experience – are quite similar.
Why? Well, both of these marketing practices are aimed to enhance the customer experience. Both – UI/UX best practices and CRO – are utilized to make a website more user-friendly. And both of them are just describing an umbrella of marketing activities, which include UI/UX and CRO-specific tools, KPIs, tools and practices.
And not only they are similar in their goals, but Conversion Rate Optimization and UX/UI principles are also performing better when combines together. The findings from A/B testing made during the CRO-audit bring priceless insights into user behaviour which later lead to high-quality upgrades in the particular User Interface spots.
As you can see in the graph below (going from left to right – don’t be confused), the results from your Conversion Rate Optimization test allow you to understand your customers better and build a better-optimized User Experience, which results in the constant UX-CRO improvement cycle.
To summarize, both UI/UX and CRO are similar in sharing:
- The goal of improving the overall website navigation experience
- The aim of making your website more intuitive and user-friendly
- The underlying objective of converting clients into customers
- The end-result measured in customer satisfaction, i.e. sales
- The unlimited number of online tools aimed to complete such missions
UI/UX & CRO Differences
Now that we talked about similarities shared by both Conversion Rate Optimization services and UX/UI best practices let’s review their differences. We will start with the area that’s different and how each marketing aspect is performing within it.
Main goal
Both User Interface and Conversion Rate Optimization services share a good number of similar goals described in the previous section, although their main goal stays different.
While UI/UX experience’s main objective is to make the website easy to navigate, CRO’s primary goal is to inspire users to make micro or macro-action on the said website.
Focus keyword
Each of the marketing UX and CRO areas is focused on the certain aspects they with to enhance. For UI/UX it is – usability, meaning it’s mostly focused on how well the website is built, how easy it is to navigate and responsive across multiple devices it is.
For Conversion Rate Optimization – convertibility, which means CRO experts mostly care about how well website users are performing the actions they want them to take and how many will convert into customers.
Success measurement
These two aspects are not only focused on different objectives, but they are also measured in different ways. To measure the effectiveness of your current CRO strategy you can just use a simple conversion formula (Unique Purchase Orders/ Total sessions over a time slot = CR) of this period compared to the last one.
Or if we measure the conversion rate of a single page, we can use the Conversion Rate Optimization tests to send users to it’s old and it’s new version, and see which one statistically wins. And when it comes to testing UI/UX experience of the website, you can utilize user monitoring which shows how a real user behaves on your actual website or start a survey that asks random people to browse your website and share their impression of it.
User objective
Even though UI/UX experience and CRO are both centred around user behaviour and user interface, they are aimed to achieve different results.
Meanwhile, UI/UX aims to make the user as happy and untroubled during his journey as possible, Conversion Rate Optimization end result is to actually turn that user into a hopefully returning customer.
Tools
Due to each of the aspects being so different in their goals, measurements, user objectives and focus keywords, UI/UX and CRO practices require different tools to perform their duties. To increase your Conversion Rates use Optimizely, VWO, Convert, Google Optimize, OptinMonster or any other preferred CRO tool.
To set up your UX/UI design, use Try My UI, UserTesting.com, UserBrain.net, UserBob or Userlytics – whichever you prefer.
Conclusion
CRO and UX/UI principles are similar, intertwined and sometimes hard to distinguish between one another. And with having so many aspects in common, and so many points of differentiation you’ve just learned about in the article above, it’s important to remember that a truly successful business utilizes CRO and UX/UI principles and uses findings of each to improve both.
To set up, monitor and enhance your Conversion Optimization and User interface & User Experience right, please don’t hesitate to contact our specialists at InsightWhale using the form below 🙂
