How a modern, embedded approach can take your website experience from pass to best-in-class
Intro What you need to know: the quick read What is experimentation and how can it help you?
The twentysix approach A fundamental component for customer-focused leaders
Experimentation isn’t new, but its application in web design and user experience have become increasingly sophisticated and effective in recent years, particularly for non-transactional websites.
And with marketing budgets squeezed tighter than ever, experimentation, and its different implementations, has the potential to become even more valuable to brands looking to level-up their digital experience in an agile and cost-effective way.
But challenges remain. Especially for legacy and enterprise-level brands with large, complex websites and multiple stakeholders.
In Experimentation Reimagined, we’ll explore how you can incorporate an embedded approach to experimentation within your digital strategy to achieve business goals with less uncertainty, whilst saving resources, time, and money.
What you need to know: the quick read
• A way for businesses to answer questions by establishing a hypothesis and testing it through an appropriately designed experiment.
• An evidence-led approach to web development and digital strategy which enables you to optimise customer experience and test web prototypes before significant time and financial investment
• A way to help build stakeholder confidence in your digital strategy by generating compelling evidence
• A way to fuel innovation within your organisation, as it matures as an approach over time
• Contributing to a more focused, prioritised web / digital strategy Improving the connection with, and experience of, the customer
• Improving the operational efficiency of a web platform
• Focusing and delivering a better return on investment and helping to de-risk future projects, both small and large
• Facilitating a culture of creativity and enabling organisations to quantify its return
• The removal of guesswork and risk
Unfocused web development programmes that lack prioritisation, by putting strategic rigor back into them
• Ineffective connection with customers or end-users
Inability to demonstrate a rapid return on investment
• Lack of internal alignment and conflicting priorities among decision makers
• The ‘overwhelm’ often seen with huge digital projects, where fear of failure produces paralysis
• Bias mitigation within a company, team or individuals
• What are the biggest problems your organisation has with your web platform right now?
• What are the biggest challenges you think your customers face?
• Within your organisation, who is the strongest objector to evolving your web strategy? What would impress them? What insight or answer would get them to take note?
• Who in your organisation is interested in driving innovation through your brand?
• How can we ensure our replatforming project has the greatest chance of success upon launch?
Experimentation is a way for businesses to answer questions about their website or digital strategy by establishing a hypothesis and testing it through an appropriately designed experiment.
By embracing experimentation as a part of upstream thinking, you’ll be more creative and flexible in what you can achieve, and ultimately, more innovative in your solutions to achieve better returns.
Experimentation is a mindset and approach that spans beyond marketing to encompass how you strive to understand your users, improve operations and grow your business.
A big web development programme that’s unfocused, costly and taking too long to demonstrate a return.
A team that is overwhelmed by the scale of a project, and the speed by which it needs to be achieved.
How?
By helping to identify and validate areas of focus with greatest return to the business.
How?
By helping focus the strategy and form a prioritised plan driven by data and impact.
Experiments are the professional way to answer questions, identify cause and effect or determine predictors and outcomes. The insights gained through experiments help us understand how and why things are what they are and can ultimately be used to change the world by improving the good and overcoming the bad
A brand that needs to make better connections with its audience. How?
By helping you really understand your customers’ needs and validate solutions to improve and personalise their experience.
A CRO programme that’s exhausted and reached its limitations. How?
By helping you step up your sophistication across testing and experimentation, with a focus on driving better business outcomes.
Experimentation is taking a structured approach to testing... It is both an art and a science, because it encompasses both innovative thinking and rigorous analysis
At twentysix, we believe that combining intelligence and imagination can help brands create experiences that accelerate their position in the digital-first world. Including experimentation as part of a web development strategy is one way we help our clients achieve this.
Experimentation can often be limited to end of funnel micro testing such as CRO; whilst it can include this, we take a more holistic stance across the customer lifecycle. Moving experimentation up your funnel to front-impact your web strategy can drive bigger impact, greater investment decisions and improved market cut-through.
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At twentysix we believe in exceeding expectations at every possible opportunity. Experimentation
across the elements of user experience creates both a foundation and a springboard to help us do that with confidence and creativity
Adam Powers, Chief Experience Officer at twentysixUnderstand what your business needs to achieve and pinpoint where your experiments will have most value and drive growth.
Make sure experiments are based on an insight and are designed to learn further insights.
When all teams contribute questions and ideas for experiments, buy-in increases and teams align around the real needs of customers.
Engage key stakeholders and demonstrate impact early to reduce perception of risk, show rapid return in investment and gain buy-in to increasingly ambitious projects.
Don’t just focus on shifting a metric up or down - use experiments to validate new ideas and give you unique insights.
Design experiments to learn how and why your decisions impact customer behaviour. Don’t be put off by experiments that ‘fail’, the deep insights gathered will drive greater wins and your experiment design will improve continuously
Google Analytics or test reports can give you the numbers, but until you engage with people and understand their thinking, you can’t develop effective design solutions that are accessible and relevant for your audience. Keeping real people’s needs centre-stage ensures you design for accessibility beyond the guidelines.
Do you face challenges getting stakeholders to agree to make major investments into your user digital experience, or over where that investment should be focused?
Experimentation allows businesses to ask ‘What if? questions cost effectively. It ensures you constantly understand your users and can continuously improve their online experiences. It also helps you understand what digital investments will improve their connection to your brand and service offering - ultimately improving your organisation’s performance.
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Experimentation is the engine that drives innovation. We’ve seen that leading marketeers are the ones who turn data into action to build a better, more useful experience for their customers
Experimentation enables you to confidently deliver new solutions and ideas that are built on evidence-led understanding of your customers’ experience and that genuinely move your business forward, with proven impact.
As with any business strategy, experimentation should be approached as a cross-business activity. Marketing, operations, digital, customer service and product can, and should, all be involved. When multiple POV and insights are combined, the power of experimentation is maximised.
If you want to drive impactful change - change that will be remembered in 10 years time - experimentation can be your ally. From a one-off project, it
Key challenges faced by our client:
• Increasingly competitive market with a need to differentiate the brand and protect its role as a trusted advisor
• Lack of understanding of who current site users were and how to link the site to revenue
• Complex stakeholder landscape with strong influences leading to a site that was organisationally focused rather than user-centric, with global content bloat.
• Difficult for the marketing team to gain traction and focus on their digital strategy
User testing to understand key needs and nurture pathways
• ‘Tree testing’ to improve information architecture
• Content experimentation to support personalisation
Underpinning experimentation with user data and business intelligence to instil confidence amongst leadership
• Focusing outcomes on key business goals and revenue
• Better digital investment decisions, realised faster
We have loved working hand-in-hand to firstly identify the big picture challenges that could make a real difference to global site performance, then use experimentation methods to demonstrate success, reduce investment risk and achieve board buy-in to an incremental but ambitious programme of web development.
Sarah Woodeson, Client Services Director, twentysixStreamlined global content operations
• Greater authority and ownership of the web estate across the organisation
• Fostering a culture of innovation to drive brand standout Establishing a ‘north star’ digital vision to drive top-of-funnel change
• Identifying and prioritising problems with high-impact return if resolved
• Fostering a creative approach to solution ideation
• Encouraging a culture of ‘try and fail’ with strawman tests ahead of large scale investment and roll-out
Identify the main problem or question around your web platform or digital experience to focus on first. What’s the one thing that you want to understand and solve?
Build a movement to gain buyin and investment. Considering the things that will drive the best quick gains will help you build momentum.
What kind of experiment can you design to test your hypothesis?
Experimentation can help your existing website achieve better outcomes, efficiency and ROI - with no need to start over.
What assets, websites etc. have you already got that you could start experimenting with?
Give everyone in the organisation transparency and visibility of the project from the outset.
How can you share the experiment with others and drive advocacy of the approach?
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Think about who can help you facilitate experimentation across the organisation
Dedicate someone to run experimentation projects, or bring in external expertise
Connect your programme to the main organisation and its mission; don’t hide it away!
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It’s tempting to start your experimentation programme by picking a test that resolves a fierce internal argument. Don’t tackle political questions until you’ve established credibility for the approach. Once you’ve built backing for the process by demonstrating other gains, stakeholders will more readily accept difficult results.
John Prior, Solutions Director at twentysixOur holistic approach to experimentation includes testing hypotheses across key areas. This leads to insights that can optimise a brand’s broader digital strategy and customer experience.
We experiment with, and test, possible solutions as prototypes, to evaluate user acceptance.
Using methodologies including labs, observations and CRO enables us to understand the performance of the user journey created, collect feedback and data on sentiment and usability against a hypothesis.
But at twentysix, our evolved approach to experimentation can also help you understand and answer other, broader questions, such as:
How is digital behaviour evolving, and how does common learned behaviour affect the site experience?
How do the insights uncovered compare to other sites / brands, and what can our collective expert insight add to enrich the findings?
Speedy Hire provides tools and equipment hire to the construction, infrastructure and industrial markets. Traditionally operating in a B2B market, they wanted to explore whether they should expand into the B2C DIY market.
We were keen to use experimentation methods to understand how Speedy Hire’s website could better meet the needs of B2B and B2C customers, and improve the hiring experience.
In order to best support Speedy Hire with this challenge, we conducted an exploration and validation programme of work.
• User testing and research in support of personas and customer journey mapping
• B2C and B2B website structures for tree testing
• Prototypes (high fidelity wireframes) for structure and content testing
Prioritised recommendations
Evaluation of the demand for tool and equipment hire
How do message variants and personalisation perform as part of the solution? What types of content / media are best suited to the audience? How can we activate growth journeys?
What is historic web analytics / usage data telling us, and how does that reinforce or challenge the experiment insights?
What technology is available that can help us further optimise the journey and website?
• Reached a better understanding of Speedy Hire’s audiences
• Validated a viable business idea
• Validated website structure and navigation ideas
• Identified effective content and messaging
• Identified further opportunities to improve UX “
Experimentation allows you to easily try new approaches. It grants the space you need to learn from each interaction and recover quickly by mitigating uncertainty and expanding the realm of curiosity
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twentysix is one of the UK’s leading digital agencies, with bases in Leeds, London and Manchester.
We use intelligence and imagination to help brands create experiences that deeply connect with their customers and accelerate their position in the digital-first world.
Our team is made up of problem-solvers who are all curious at the core. By combining big thinkers in niche specialisms under one roof, we create space to spark new ideas and go beyond what our clients previously thought was possible. We don’t just learn from before; we create what comes next.
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Pick Head of Analytics
Sharman Creative Director
Together our teams will work with you to create a plan and a narrative around experimentation internally within your organisation.
Our specialist Experience Design team build user experiences rooted in constantly evolving customer insight, creating value for our clients.
We have experience across a range of areas from UX Strategy, Analytics and Creative development to user experience, user interface and service design.
Our commitment to creativity and wondering, “What if?”, combined with our rigorous approach to analysing data enables us to deliver experimentation that provides the most tangible and meaningful results.
Emily Guy John