Five UX decisions that quietly kill conversion
None of these look like mistakes in a design review. All five show up in the analytics a month after launch.
Asking for more than you need, too early
Every field on a form is a reason to leave. A contact form asking for company size, job title and budget range before it asks what the person actually wants is optimizing for the sales team's convenience at the cost of the thing the sales team needs, which is someone on the other end of it.
The fix is usually to move the question rather than delete it. Ask for the minimum that lets a real reply happen — what they want and how to reach them — and ask the qualifying questions in the reply, when a person is already in a conversation and far more willing to answer them.
Hiding the primary action, and making the secondary one louder
A page should answer three things at a glance: what this is, what to do next, and where the navigation is. When the most prominent button on a page is a newsletter signup and the one that matters is a text link below the fold, the page is working against itself.
The same applies to link labels. "Learn more" tells a visitor nothing about where they will land, so it gets skipped by anyone scanning. A label that names the destination — the price, the process, the format — earns clicks from people who already know what they are looking for, which are the clicks worth having.
Navigation written for the org chart, and pages that punish a phone
Menus written in internal language — the names of departments, the names of products nobody outside the building recognizes — make visitors guess. Labels should be the words a visitor would use for the thing they want, even when those words are less precise than the ones used internally.
And then there is the phone. A layout that holds at desktop and turns into a horizontal scroll on a phone loses the visitors least willing to work for it. Tap targets that are too small, text that needs pinching, and forms that fire the wrong keyboard all cost conversions quietly, because nobody complains — they just leave. Every site we build gets checked at real phone widths before it ships, not resized in a browser.
Full-time teams in Chile and India, about nine hours apart. Chile covers your working day; India picks the file up as you sign off, so weekday work does not wait overnight.
Tier 3 is the top of our creative scale — and the only tier we run. The thinking behind this article is the same thinking behind every brief we take on.