Seeing how psychological principles can influence website visitors in various ways is one aspect of website optimization that I find most fascinating. Within the industry, ‘persuasion’ could be seen as something of a buzzword at the moment. Concepts such as social proof, scarcity, urgency, authority, and loss aversion are already being used by bigger retailers. […]

The power of imagery is often underestimated and not used to its fullest potential throughout an online experience. Images connect with our subconscious “system 1” thinking; a fast, instinctive, and emotional brain process that evokes an innate emotional response.  An image is much more than just displaying a product range on a retail site or […]

We’ve been talking a lot recently about how consumer expectations are changing. Primarily due to mash-ups, partnerships, and technology which are enabling previously unrealistic products and services. I saw a brilliant example of this happening last weekend which really encapsulated how a range of consumer behaviours/traits have evolved. But also how these changes are affecting our expectations across the board […]

One girl’s story of falling in love with a supermarket I’d never considered getting my grocery shopping online before, let alone shopping at a posh supermarket like Ocado. But one of my latest foodie fads meant I was trying to eat a wholefood diet of organic purity which was hard to come by in the […]

In this post, we’ve brought exposure to some great charities and non-profit organisations that are using well-considered persuasion techniques in their fundraising efforts. Through our experience in different sectors, we’ve highlighted our observations and suggested potential improvements along the way. 1. Positive personalisation Wikipedia is dependent on donations to maintain its up-time and remain ad-free. […]

One of my favourite activities at PurpleFire is user research, in particular moderated user testing. I’m a huge advocate of user testing to truly understand what users are doing on your site and why. I find sitting with real users and learning from them a truly eye opening and motivating experience. It is sometimes an underrated research technique which […]

Visitor replay tools have been around for a while and they have proven their value in the conversion industry. In this article, I will examine some of the things you should be doing with these tools before revealing the elusive HotJar integration solutions to tag recordings with your split test variations for two of our […]

Many have dubbed 2021 ‘The year of mobile’ and it is no secret that mobile website traffic is rapidly increasing. Smartphones and tablets have been outselling desktops since 2012 and industry experts predict that internet access from mobile devices will overtake desktop this year.  So what does this actually mean for retailers online strategies? Mobile […]

Moderated testing is a vital part of the PurpleFire toolbox during user research. Time and time again it allows us to get great quality research, probing deeper in to users’ experiences, in order to understand the reasons behind their objections. This post outlines some of the things we’ve learned that will give you a great […]

Moderated testing is a vital part of the PurpleFire toolbox during the user research project. Time and time again it allows us to get great quality insights, probing deeper in to users’ experiences to understand the reasons behind their decisions and more importantly, their objections. This post outlines some of the things we’ve learned that […]