Conversion Optimization Minidegree at CXL — Review Part 7

I am on week 7 of my 12 weeks journey at CXL and this week I will review 4 courses from the Conversion Optimization Minidegree:

1. User Research (Megan Kierstead)
2. Fast and Rigorous User Personas (Stefania Mereu, PhD)
3. Heuristic Analysis Frameworks for conversion optimization Audits (André Morys)
4. Google Analytics Audit (Fred Pike)

The above-mentioned courses are the last ones in the second part of this Minidegree and next week I will start the third part out of the five available. I will cover the courses I finished this week one by one.

User Research

Really, user research at its core is about understanding people’s goals, needs, and beliefs. (…) The goal is really understanding who they are, what they do, what they believe, and how we can use that understanding to create better experiences and ideally deliver greater business value. As it turns out, there’s a lot of data that supports the fact that user research and user-centered companies actually do better.

Course duration is 3 hours and there are 7 lessons + final exam.

As the name suggests the course is about user research. It is teaching how to build the right product by talking to your customers.

What I liked about this course is the instructor’s insights about certain things that can only come from experience, like how to choose the right people for the research. And besides that, I also found it very interesting to learn how to develop specific and useful questions

Perhaps it doesn’t sound that interesting, but the way Megan presented these topics made me understand that subjects like these which sound very basic might have much more to them.

I will try to always remember is the fact that there’s a difference between what users do and what they say they do. Our brains are really good at tricking us into thinking we remember something that actually happened in a very different way. You have to observe a user actually doing something, don’t assume that they actually performed this action. This confirms one of my life truths “never assume” :)

Fast and Rigorous User Personas

A well-constructed persona will provide focus for development projects, create empathy for product designers, give perspective to stakeholders, and add context to design choices.

Course duration is 50 mins and there are 13 lessons.

This course is about a data-driven framework to build user personas in three steps:

1. Collect quantitative data
2. Statistical clustering
3. Build archetypes

This was a short course as I have mentioned above just under an hour. But I’d like to mention that the archetype examples they have shown in the last lesson were very valuable to me, because it helps to see things visually. And also something that surprised me was the fact that 2 weeks is considered a very small window to build an archetype.

Heuristic Analysis frameworks for conversion optimization audits

Course duration is 2h 30mins and there are 7 lessons+ final exam.

What is this course about: auditing a site using the 7 levels of the conversion model.

This framework is not just something that helps you to uncover potentials that you might not have seen before, it should make you deliver more objective results, more customer-centric results, also, it’s a good foundation for simplifying the results for decision-makers.

The promise of this program is that afterward:

- you will have proven frameworks to guide conversion optimization strategy

- be able to apply cognitive psychology and persuasion principles to understand user motivations

- provide a structured way to add more value to your CRO program right out of the gate

- tap into opportunities for conversion lifts with better ideas and tactics.

In my opinion, they fulfilled these promises :)

This course was one of my favorites in the Conversion Optimization program. I liked the instructor, content, and subject. I was happy to finally get back into actual website stuff. Of course, I understand that background knowledge like using Google Analytics and user research is essential, but it was fun and interesting to watch the instructor analyzing real websites. I am now considering that maybe it is time to bring my German language skills back to life and read Andre’s book “Die digitale Wachstumsstrategie”.

A little bit about the content. The lessons cover the 7 layers of conversion: relevance, trust, orientation, stimulance, security, convenience, confirmation.

Each layer has a set of questions and you score the website according to them, it’s like a checklist. Basically, you do this for the website you work on, competitor websites, and come up with a percentage score for each of them. And the instructor also provides a spreadsheet for this competitive benchmark.

One more thing I really really liked that there was suggested homework after each lesson. As an example after the first lesson, he suggested printing a website and show it to 10 people, ask half of them how they like it and another half what they think about it. Comparing the answers will help to see which question was more valuable.

Google Analytics Audit

Course duration is 2h 40mins and there are 14 lessons+ final exam.

This course is about auditing Google Analytics with the purpose to diagnose and fix any account so that the data can be trusted. It is very practical, to the point and I liked there are specific things that have to be checked. But also instructor explained when something couldn’t be that specific as a “yes” or a “no” that it’s just something that you have to decide on based on your expertise.

So the lessons start with an introduction to chrome extensions and developer console that are used for auditing. Then basically it is going through each thing that has to be checked and he shows it on an actual website (or a couple of them) how to do it. I liked this approach, it is easy to follow and you can do it yourself whilst watching him.

One thing that I appreciated was that the videos zoomed in when it was needed, like when the text was small, for example. This might not sound like something exceptional, but it was, it made everything so much easier. I don’t think I’d be appreciating it that much, but in the previous weeks, there were some lessons where you also had to look at the instructor’s screen, and when you can’t actually see what’s written it’s not that great.

So not only was he actually auditing Google Analytics set up step by step, but he was also filling out a GA Audit Template that comes with the lesson. Again, sounds like a basic simple thing, but later on, when you have to do it yourself, his comments about filling it in become very valuable.

I have enjoyed this week at CXL and am looking forward to next week when I start the third section of the Conversion Optimization Minidegree which is all about testing.