Jared Spool of UIE wrote a great article called The $300 Million Dollar Button. Quick synopsis: A mega-huge eCommerce client of his (probably Amazon.com, Costco, or Walmart).  Their web team could see from their server logs that they had a big shopping cart abandonment.  And they were going to redesign to try and fix the problem.

Jared came in and spent a million dollars on focus groups to find out what color had the best conversiony feel watched several users go through the checkout process, and found that most got stuck at the "New User / Login" screen.

So he added a a Continue button with a simple message: "You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout."

This resulted in $15 million in additional sales in 1 month.  Wow.

Watch users use your product.

And don’t just nod your head and think, "You’re right Patrick, I get it.  When you watch users use a product, you see them in action.  Cool.  Now let me get back to my tweetstream and see if @thebloggess wrote something snarky."  You have to actually go do it.

I’ve been watching users use my new Outlook integration for Infusionsoft and it’s been instructive…as always.  Here’s a video sneak peek of what’s coming around the bend.

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