Paying attention to Conversion Rates

One key facet of designing a great user experience on a website is paying attention to the website's 'conversion rates'. Conversion rate is the rate at which users on a website perform a desired action.  Reading Jesse James Garret’s book on User Experience last night, I started thinking about the conversion rates for different kinds of websites.

For a retail site like Amazon.com, the conversion rate measures how many visitors actually purchase a product.

For a news and information site like cnn.com, conversion rate measures how many people sign up to receive email newsletters and become a part of the CNN news community.

For a customer support site like support.dell.com, the conversion rate measures how many people actually found the answer they were looking for.

As you design your websites, make sure you know what your conversion rate will measure, the target conversion rates, the actual conversion rates etc. Make sure you build features into your website to effectively measure and report progress on the conversion rate. This can help you design an effective user experience.