Author: AB Tasty

AB Tasty is a complete tool for website and conversion rate optimization. We serve as your digital lab, equipped with everything you need to create experiments that will help you to better understand your users and customer journeys so that you can create the clearest and most engaging user experience possible, ensuring your website performs well and yields the maximum results.

Article

Jun 21, 2021

7min read

The Role of Statistical Significance in A/B Testing

AB Tasty

Statistical significance is a powerful yet often underutilized digital marketing tool.

A concept that is theoretical and practical in equal measures, you can use statistical significance models to optimize many of your business’s core marketing activities (A/B testing included).

A/B testing is integral to improving the user experience (UX) of a consumer-facing touchpoint (a landing page, checkout process, mobile application, etc.) and increasing its performance while encouraging conversions.

By creating two versions of a particular marketing asset, both with slightly different functions or elements, and analyzing their performance, it’s possible to develop an optimized landing page, email, web app, etc. that yields the best results. This methodology is also referred to as two-sample hypothesis testing.

When it comes to success in A/B testing, statistical significance plays an important role. In this article, we will explore the concept in more detail and consider how statistical significance can enhance the A/B testing process.

But before we do that, let’s look at the meaning of statistical significance.

What is statistical significance and why does it matter?

According to Investopedia, statistical significance is defined as:

“The claim that a result from data generated by testing or experimentation is not likely to occur randomly or by chance but is instead likely to be attributable to a specific cause.”

In that sense, statistical significance will bestow you with the tools to drill down into a specific cause, thereby making informed decisions that are likely to benefit the business. In essence, it’s the opposite of shooting in the dark.

Calculating statistical significance

To calculate statistical significance accurately, most people use Pearson’s chi-squared test or distribution.

Invented by Karl Pearson, the chi (which represents ‘x’ in Greek)-squared test commands that users square their data to highlight possible variables.

This methodology is based on whole numbers. For instance, chi-squared is often used to test marketing conversions—a clear-cut scenario where users either take the desired action or they don’t.

In a digital marketing context, people apply Pearson’s chi-squared method using the following formula:

Statistically significant = Probability (p) < Threshold (ɑ)

Based on this notion, a test or experiment is viewed as statistically significant if the probability (p) turns out lower than the appointed threshold (a), also referred to as the alpha. In plainer terms, a test will prove statistically significant if there is a low probability that a result has happened by chance.

Statistical significance is important because applying it to your marketing efforts will give you confidence that the adjustments you make to a campaign, website, or application will have a positive impact on engagement, conversion rates, and other key metrics.

Essentially, statistically significant results aren’t based on chance and depend on two primary variables: sample size and effect size.

Statistical significance and digital marketing

At this point, it’s likely that you have a grasp of the role that statistical significance plays in digital marketing.

Without validating your data or giving your discoveries credibility, you will probably have to take promotional actions that offer very little value or return on investment (ROI), particularly when it comes to A/B testing.

Despite the wealth of data available in the digital age, many marketers are still making decisions based on their gut.

While the shooting in the dim light approach may yield positive results on occasion, to create campaigns or assets that resonate with your audience on a meaningful level, making intelligent decisions based on watertight insights is crucial.

That said, when conducting tests or experiments based on key elements of your digital marketing activities, taking a methodical approach will ensure that every move you make offers genuine value, and statistical significance will help you do so.

Using statistical significance for A/B testing

Now we move on to A/B testing, or more specifically, how you can use statistical significance techniques to enhance your A/B testing efforts.

Testing uses

Before we consider its practical applications, let’s consider what A/B tests you can run using statistical significance:

Emails clicks, open rates, and engagements
Landing page conversion rates
Notification responses
Push notification conversions
Customer reactions and browsing behaviors
Product launch reactions
Website calls to action (CTAs)

The statistical steps

To conduct successful A/B tests using statistical significance (the chi-squared test), you should follow these definitive steps:

1. Set a null hypothesis

The idea of the null hypothesis is that it won’t return any significant results. For example, a null hypothesis might be that there is no affirmative evidence to suggest that your audience prefers your new checkout journey to the original checkout journey. Such a hypothesis or statement will be used as an anchor or a benchmark.

2. Create an alternative theory or hypothesis

Once you’ve set your null hypothesis, you should create an alternative theory, one that you’re looking to prove, definitively. In this context, the alternative statement could be: our audience does favor our new checkout journey.

3. Set your testing threshold

With your hypotheses in place, you should set a percentage threshold (the (a) or alpha) that will dictate the validity of your theory. The lower you set the threshold—or (a)—the stricter the test will be. If your test is based on a wider asset such as an entire landing page, then you might set a higher threshold than if you’re analyzing a very specific metric or element like a CTA button, for instance.

For conclusive results, it’s imperative to set your threshold prior to running your A/B test or experiment.

4. Run your A/B test

With your theories and threshold in place, it’s time to run the A/B test. In this example, you would run two versions (A and B) of your checkout journey and document the results.

Here you might compare cart abandonment and conversion rates to see which version has performed better. If checkout journey B (the newer version) has outperformed the original (version A), then your alternative theory or hypothesis will be proved correct.

5. Apply the chi-squared method

Armed with your discoveries, you will be able to apply the chi-squared test to determine whether the actual results differ from the expected results.

To help you apply chi-squared calculations to your A/B test results, here’s a video tutorial for your reference:

By applying chi-squared calculations to your results, you will be able to determine if the outcome is statistically significant (if your (p) value is lower than your (a) value), thereby gaining confidence in your decisions, activities, or initiatives.

6. Put theory into action

If you’ve arrived at a statistically significant result, then you should feel confident transforming theory into practice.

In this particular example, if our checkout journey theory shows a statistically significant relationship, then you would make the informed decision to launch the new version (version B) to your entire consumer base or population, rather than certain segments of your audience.

If your results are not labelled as statistically significant, then you would run another A/B test using a bigger sample.

At first, running statistical significance experiments can prove challenging, but there are free online calculation tools that can help to simplify your efforts.

Statistical significance and A/B testing: what to avoid

While it’s important to understand how to apply statistical significance to your A/B tests effectively, knowing what to avoid is equally vital.

Here is a rundown of common A/B testing mistakes to ensure that you run your experiments and calculations successfully:

Unnecessary usage: If your marketing initiatives or activities are low cost or reversible, then you needn’t apply strategic significance to your A/B tests as this will ultimately cost you time. If you’re testing something irreversible or which requires a definitive answer, then you should apply chi-squared testing.

Lack of adjustments or comparisons: When applying statistical significance to A/B testing, you should allow for multiple variations or multiple comparisons. Failing to do so will either throw off or narrow your results, rendering them unusable in some instances.

Creating biases: When conducting A/B tests of this type, it’s common to apply biases to your experiments unwittingly—the kind of which that don’t consider the population or consumer base as a whole.

To avoid doing this, you must examine your test with a fine-tooth comb before launch to ensure that there aren’t any variables that could push or pull your results in the wrong direction. For example, is your test skewed towards a specific geographical region or narrow user demographic? If so, it might be time to make adjustments.

Statistical significance plays a pivotal role in A/B testing and, if handled correctly, will offer a level of insight that can help catalyze business success across industries.

While you shouldn’t rely on statistical significance for insight or validation, it’s certainly a tool that you should have in your digital marketing toolkit.

We hope that this guide has given you all you need to get started with statistical significance. If you have any wisdom to share, please do so by leaving a comment.

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Article

May 28, 2021

17min read

Everything You Need to Know About Conversion Funnels

AB Tasty

Any business selling products or services online has a conversion funnel — but not everyone realizes it. If you’re unsure what a conversion is or how you can refine yours to sell more online, you’re in the right place. In this post, we’re going to take you through everything you need to know about conversion funnels. We’ll start with the basics — what conversion funnels are and the three key stages — before moving on to some of the most effective strategies to improve your funnels to increase sales. Let’s get stuck in!

In this article, we’ll cover:

[toc]

What is a conversion funnel?

A conversion funnel is a process that takes potential customers on a journey towards buying your products or services. They’re the cornerstone of all e-commerce business models, guiding potential customers from the moment they first become aware of your brand to the moment they make a purchase and beyond.

If you’re new to conversion funnels, think about the shape of a funnel — it’s wider at the top and narrower at the bottom. This represents the flow of people through your marketing strategy. Not everyone who becomes aware of your business will go on to become a paying customer. It’s like brewing coffee using a drip filter — a large volume of coffee grounds go into the top of the brewing equipment and then the funnel filters the high-quality stuff out of the bottom into your mug. A sales funnel works in the same way. The goal is to get as many relevant leads into the top of the funnel as possible, filtering out unsuitable prospects to leave your ideal customers ready to buy from you.

When you optimize your conversion funnel, you maximize the impact of your online marketing strategy and boost sales. This isn’t a once-and-done exercise, but something you need to continually refine throughout your business life. Do you want to know how to do it?

What’s the difference between a conversion funnel and a sales funnel?

The terms conversion funnel and sales funnel are often used interchangeably, but are they the same thing? The answer to this question is no, although they are closely related. A sales funnel typically starts when a potential customer enters the sales pipeline. This can happen online (in an e-commerce environment) as well as offline. However, a prospect typically doesn’t enter your sales funnel until they’re already familiar with your brand and your products or services.

It can take a while to get to this point in the online world, particularly if you’re targeting people who have never heard of your brand before. It takes time to build a connection and trust with your audience.

This is where a conversion funnel comes in. Here, the focus isn’t just on making a sale. It’s about making a connection with your audience, generating leads, and then taking those leads on a journey with your company. Potential customers might come into your funnel cold, without much awareness of who you are or what you do. Over time, your funnel will warm them up, build trust in your offer, and get them ready to buy. It encapsulates the whole process — from the first contact through to purchasing.

The three conversion funnel stages

There are many different conversion funnel models out there. All of them broadly suggest the same thing: breaking the process down into several conversion funnel stages the leads must travel through before making a purchase. Although a customer may enter or exit the funnel at any stage, your personalized model sets out how you intend customers to connect with your business.

The exact model will look different for every organization, but here are the three stages we suggest you follow.

Stage 1: Building awareness at the top of the funnel

The top of the funnel is all about making people aware of your brand and capturing leads. This stage is arguably the most crucial. If you don’t get people into your funnel, how are you going to sell to them? This critical step is often referred to as the awareness stage, and the exact strategy you use to do this will depend on your ideal customer. Who are they? Where do they hang out? What are their fundamental problems and challenges? Why would they be interested in what you have to offer them? The answers to these questions can provide useful directions during the awareness stage. Remember: this isn’t about you; it’s about the customer. Here are a few things that should be happening at the top of the funnel.

Content marketing

To grab attention online, you’re going to need content. This content can take many forms, so it’s essential to think about the types of content your audience is most likely to consume. For example, TikTok videos will likely appeal to 18 to 24-year-olds, but they might not be the best option if you’re targeting an older demographic.

You should consider both onsite and offsite content when outlining your content marketing strategy. An effective conversion funnel needs both. Offsite content helps capture attention and attract people to your website. In contrast, onsite content engages your audience and encourages them to take the next step, such as signing up for your mailing list.

Marketing campaigns

Alongside your content marketing strategy, you should also consider the marketing campaigns you will be running to get people to engage with this content. How will you get your content seen? How will you capture users’ attention? Are you only operating online, or will you use offline marketing to generate leads?

Often, e-commerce businesses are quick to dismiss offline marketing campaigns as irrelevant. However, highly targeted offline campaigns can be extremely useful. The online marketplace is crowded! If you can think of innovative ways to reach your audience offline and direct them to your online content, it could turn out to be a cost-effective way to generate leads for your conversion funnel.

You could also consider how you might automate some of your marketing campaigns. Creating evergreen campaigns that can run in the background while you and your employees focus on other tasks is useful to maximize profits. In essence, it means you can be generating leads for your business while you sleep.

Lead capture

Lead capture is the final step of the awareness stage. It’s where you move your prospects from the top of your conversion funnel to the middle. Once you’ve directed a potential customer to your website and encouraged them to engage with your content, what’s next? Each piece of content your audience engages with on your website should have a call to action — something that tells them what action to complete next.

To achieve this, you might want to consider a lead magnet. This can be something as simple as a discount code. But, for maximum results, you could develop something that helps solve a problem directly related to the product or service you’re offering.

Not only does this ensure you’re capturing highly qualified leads, but it also means people are likely to sign up even when they’re not ready to make a purchase. Given the point of a conversion funnel is to get them ready to buy from you, this is a vital point to consider when outlining your content marketing strategy.

Once you have that email address, it’s time to move on to the second stage of the conversion funnel: nurturing your audience to build desire for your products or services.

The best ways to build awareness

To maximize the number of leads you’re capturing, you should focus your stage one activities across a range of digital marketing channels. Here are some of the most popular options:

Social media

Given there are almost 4 billion social media users worldwide (over half the world’s population), it’s no surprise social media marketing is one of the most popular ways to generate leads. That said, it’s important to note it isn’t an easy option! Many business owners expect social media to be a fast and cheap way to grow an audience. Still, it takes time and persistent effort to get results — just like any other marketing strategy.

Work with a professional to develop a social media marketing plan that helps you stand out from the crowd. Many businesses use social media to attract people into their conversion funnel, but few do it well.

Paid search

What’s the first place you turn to when you need information? It’s estimated there are around 2 trillion Google searches every year — so advertising your content on Google could potentially be very lucrative! Unlike social media marketing, people using search engines are actively looking for the information you’re providing. To get the best click-through rate, make sure the phrases you’re targeting are directly relevant to the content. And test campaigns with a small budget before increasing your spending.

Organic search

It’s also a good idea to optimize your content for organic search. While this isn’t a short-term strategy, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can deliver large volumes of traffic to your website over time. Focus on creating evergreen content — content that doesn’t become irrelevant or outdated and can appear in organic searches for many years to come. When you gain website visitors organically from search engines, you improve your ability to build a list of qualified leads, improving the quality of people entering your conversion funnel.

Stage 2: Nurturing your audience

Many online businesses make the fundamental mistake of pushing for a sale too soon. While you can (and should) always have an option for potential customers to buy from you on their terms, you should design your conversion funnel to nurture your leads, building trust with your brand before moving them into the sales pipeline.

Staying in contact

Once a potential customer has told you they want to hear more from you, it’s essential to stay in touch with them. If you can, you should aim to use multiple channels to do this. Encourage them to follow you on social media, re-target them with relevant online content, and send them regular emails. Research consistently shows the more opportunities a potential customer has to engage with your brand online, the more likely they will buy from you.

In short, it’s not enough to let people know you exist. If you want to sell to them, you need to put in the work to keep them engaged!

Positioning your products and services

As you stay in touch and nurture your audience, you should also ensure each lead is familiar with your products and services. This step isn’t about pushing for the sale — we’ll come back to this in the next stage — but you should be introducing your offering interestingly and engagingly. Essentially, we need your leads to be ready to make a purchase when you deliver your sales pitch. To get to this stage, they need to know what you’re selling.

Building a desire to buy

And finally, throughout the nurturing stage, you should be gearing up your audience to perform the desired action. In most cases, this is completing a purchase. How do you do this? Use emotion.

Humans are emotional beings. Remember earlier when we discussed the problems and challenges your product or service can solve for your customers? What are the emotions behind that problem? Aim to appeal to these emotions when engaging with your audience, and make it clear that you’re here to help them overcome these feelings to foster more positive and desirable emotions. How will your product or service make them feel? Can you impart some of these feelings with your content?

As well as feeling emotion, people have an inbuilt desire to be understood. The more you can show them you understand them, the more they will connect with your brand, and the more desire they will have to do business with you.

Throughout this step, you should be keeping your competitors in mind, especially if you’re operating in a competitive niche. Why should your audience choose you above your competition?

Stage 3: Convert potential customers into paying customers

Stage three is what it’s all about — securing the sale. Without this stage, your business is nothing — without paying customers, you have no profits. But we hope you now appreciate why it’s important to take your audience on a journey through the preceding stages before you attempt to convert them. Once you’ve optimized your funnel, your leads will now be ready to buy from you.

Continue to nurture leads

It’s crucial to be aware of this: you don’t stop nurturing your prospects once you get them to the end of your funnel. This stage should continue as long as your leads — and eventual customers — are in contact with your business.

Work at your potential customer’s pace

It’s also important to remember your potential customers will all travel at their own pace. Some will be ready to make a purchase sooner than others. For this reason, you should think of your conversion funnel as a process. It isn’t about throwing leads in at one end and spitting them out at the other side but about fostering connections that will help your organization thrive over time.

If you attempt to trigger a sale, but your customers aren’t ready, you should continue to engage and nurture them — and try again further down the line. Similarly, if none of your prospects are buying from you at this stage in your conversion funnel, it’s a sign something needs tweaking — we’ll get back to this in a little while.

Trigger a Sale

Now it’s time to encourage your leads to become paying customers, but how should you do it? As always, there are many options here. Finding the right approach will likely involve some trial-and-error. It’s a good idea to test out a few sales tactics and see what works. For some, a simple email or retargeting campaign on social media might do the trick. But for other businesses, you might need to come up with something more personal or creative.

What makes a good call-to-action?

Calls-to-action are the lifeblood of any effective conversion funnel. But how can you make sure yours are effective? Here are some tips to get you started.

Be clear and concise

Your call-to-action shouldn’t be too wordy. It would be best if you were direct. Use short sentences and tell your audience exactly what you want them to do. Use verbs like “buy,” “shop,” or “download.” Telling someone to “shop the new collection” is likely to result in more sales than something like “our new collection is now live on our website.”

Ask yourself why

As you develop your call-to-action, put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes. Why should they do what you’re asking them to? This is where the copy in the rest of your sales pitch comes in. The call-to-action is the final piece of the puzzle. By the time your lead gets to this part of your content, they should already be ready to hit that button. Make it a no-brainer for them.

The role of the shopping cart

The shopping cart on your website can be one of your biggest assets for driving sales. Did you know you can follow up on abandoned carts with your email subscribers? If not, you’re missing out on one of the most effective conversion tools available to e-commerce businesses. Research suggests around 70% of all shopping carts are abandoned online. Think about it: these are leads that have been through the conversion funnel and are almost ready to make a purchase. What is it that stopped them? It might have been something as simple as an interruption. Get back in touch and ask them if they’re ready to complete their purchase. The results may surprise you.

Evaluating your funnel with conversion funnel metrics

As we mentioned at the start of this post, a conversion funnel isn’t something you can create and then forget about. It’s an ongoing, interactive process that you must refine over time. The digital marketing world is dynamic and ever-changing — and your conversion funnel will need to evolve alongside industry trends and technological advances. Evaluating your funnel is an essential part of this, enabling you to improve each stage of the process to generate more qualified leads and convert more of them into paying customers.

Your first step should be to set up Google Analytics to track your conversion funnel. When you do this, you can track a lead from the moment they join your funnel until they make a purchase. This gives you an overview of how well your funnel is performing, as well as helping you access some of the key conversion funnel metrics that help you decide what to focus on next, such as:

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

Marketing costs money and the expenses associated with your conversion funnel can quickly mount up. It’s vital to understand the benefit these investments bring. What is the return on investment (ROI) associated with your conversion funnel? To understand this, you need to calculate your cost per acquisition. To calculate this, divide the costs associated with your conversion funnel by the number of paying customers the funnel generated in the same time period. For example, if you invested $500 and generated 10 paying customers, your CPA would be $50.

You can then compare this with the average spend to figure out whether your conversion is profitable or not. Using the example above, if the average customer spends $200, your funnel is profitable. On the other hand, if the average lifetime spend is $20, the funnel is operating at a loss.

Conversion rate

Google Analytics calculates your funnel’s conversion rate by working out how many of the visitors went to the goal page (e.g., “thank you for your purchase”) as well as one of the pages associated with the earlier stages of your conversion funnel. This provides you with useful insight into how well your funnel is working over time, which can help you evaluate any changes that you make to optimize the funnel.

Are you ready to optimize your funnel?

In summary, conversion funnels are an essential asset to all e-commerce businesses. If you want to improve sales, optimizing your funnel is often the best place to start. What steps will you take after reading this post?

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Article

May 11, 2021

18min read

Using Serial Position Effect in UX Design

AB Tasty

You may not be aware of this, but it’s likely that you’ve come across the serial position effect on more than one occasion.

A concept coined by renowned psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus, the serial position effect refers to how the location of an item in a sequence influences a person’s memory or recall.

The concept dictates that people usually remember items at the beginning or the end of a list or sequence with greater accuracy than those in the middle.

User experience (UX) designers leverage the serial position effect to improve their designs and create a richer, more seamless experience for consumers. This approach to digital design is present in the websites, apps or landing pages of iconic brands such as Apple, Nike or Electronic Arts (EA).

Here we’re going to explore the serial position effect in more detail, explore some notable design examples, and consider how you can use this powerful principle to improve your brand’s UX offerings.

What is the serial position effect?

When it comes to UX optimization, the order of things matter. As humans, we do indeed tend to remember the items near the start or end of a list — much like our brains respond well to storytelling.

Hermann Ebbinghaus coined the phrase based on in-depth studies on the short as well as long term memory and its impact on how we remember or perceive information. These studies were further developed by psychologists B.Murdock in 1962 and Glanzer & Cunitz in 1966.

These extensive studies resulted in the two vital serial position effect concepts: the primacy effect and the recency effect.

Primacy effect

The primacy effect is based on the discovery that an individual is likely to recall items, assets or information from the start of a list.

For instance, when someone attempts to remember something from a long list of words, they are likely to recall the terms words listed at the beginning, rather the middle.

As such, the primacy effect helps a user to remember the information they absorb first better than the information they see later on in their journey (further down a landing page, for example).

Recency effect

Essentially, the recency effect is a concept contrary to the primary effect. Rather than recalling information absorbed earlier on, the recency effect is based on the notion of people remembering the information they see last with more clarity. This model is dependent on short-term memory.

A mix of studies suggests that the recency effect is prevalent in the courtroom. In many cases, jurors are more likely to recall, and agree with, the argument or conclusion they hear last.

In a UX design context, for instance, a potential customer will recall the last two items they saw on a personalized product recommendation carousel and purchase one of these products as a result.

The primacy and recency effect combined make up key elements of the serial position effect, which brings us onto our next point.

Applying the serial position effect to design

Now that you understand the fundamental concepts of the serial position effect, we’re going to consider how you can apply it to design — or more specifically, to user design interfaces.

Both the primacy and recency effect can have a significant impact on the design of user interfaces. Extensive lists of information put a strain on the human memory, often hindering perception and recall; and, by utilizing both ends of the serial position effect spectrum (primacy and recency), you can enhance your designs significantly.

By understanding that items or assets in the middle of a sequence are usually absorbed the least, it’s possible to leverage the serial position effect to minimize the loss of information. In doing so, it’s possible to create interface designs that are richer, more valuable, and easier to navigate.

Considering that 38% of consumers will bounce off a web page if its layout is poor or unattractive, getting your design right will prove critical to your long term success.

Applying the serial position effect to your interface design process is at its core, down to ensuring that users can navigate the items or information on your page intuitively.

If your design is digestible, fluid, and seamless, users will recall vital information with more clarity while taking desired actions like signing up to a newsletter or buying a specific product.

Here are four essential principles of applying the serial position effect to interface design:

1. Provide practical, task-relevant information

Adding and maintaining task-relevant information to your interface will not only make your design more engaging, but it will reduce the strain on users’ focus or recall.

Medium User Interface

Medium User Interface (Source)

Publishing platform Medium, for instance, has designed its user interface to simplify its interactions from a reader’s as well as a writer’s perspective.

With a host of visual tools tailored to the users’ preferred topics or interests, you gain a visual snapshot of information that offers access to relevant content and to your reading list, and allows you to create a new piece of content with swift, seamless actions.

2. Add recognizable cues

Adding dynamic cues to your user interface design minimizes cognitive strain while facilitating informational recall.

Audible notifications (e.g. pings when you receive a message) or textual cues (e.g. small informational pop-up boxes) create a real sense of recognition. Video games like ‘Need For Speed’ or ‘Broken Sword’ are excellent examples of cue-based design for user interfaces.

Plants vs Zombies EA video game

Plants vs Zombies EA video game (Source)

EA Games’ once popular ‘Plants vs Zombies’ game, for instance, utilizes a multitude of recognizable visual and audio cues to help players navigate their way through the game and remain ‘in the moment’ without pushing them to their cognitive limits.

Foley-style sounds unique to each move the player makes (planting sounds, digging sounds etc.), text-based captions that tell the player what to expect next, and visual icons at the top of the screen all work cohesively to make the user experience feel as natural as possible. You can apply similar cues to e-commerce sites to enrich your designs and make them more intuitive.

3. Reduce the level of recall required

The human attention span has its limits and, typically, can only retain five pieces of information at any one time.

If you prioritize limiting the necessity for recall, you will guide users through their journey in a way that helps them remember relevant information as and when required.

Apple website's information selection

Apple website’s information selection (Source)

Technology colossus Apple utilizes a visual grid system with informational titles and scannable dropdown boxes to help its customers comprare models with ease and pick a product that suits their specific needs. At any one point in the interface journey, users are only presented with the information they need — details including essential specs, main comparisons, and price.

This simple yet effective design prioritizes the most valuable information, minimizing the need for recall in the process.

4. Emphasize essential information at the start and end

Playing directly into the hands of the primacy and recency effect, highlighting or placing the most essential information at the start and the end (or the top and bottom) of your interface, placing the less important items in the center.

Amazon Homepage

Amazon Homepage (Source)

World-renowned e-commerce leader Amazon, for example, displays digestible personalized prompts, commands, and information at the top of its homepage.

In the center of the page, you gain access to trending products and deals. At the bottom of the page, or interface, you’re presented with personalized suggestions based on your shopping history or browsing behavior:

Amazon cross-selling

Amazon cross selling (Source)

This design technique maximizes the potential for users to recall the information that offers the most value or is likely to prompt further engagement. An effective approach that enriches the user experience while increasing the chances of regular consumer conversions.

“Design used to be the seasoning you’d sprinkle on for taste; now it’s the flour you need at the start of the recipe.”
— John Maeda, design & UX expert

Serial position effect for landing page UX

From the user interface design methods we’ve explored, it’s clear that the order, as well as the way you present information, have a significant impact on how people interact with your brand or business.

In today’s hyper-connected digital age, your UX offerings count more than ever. 88% of users are unlikely to return to a website or landing page after a poor user experience.

To enhance your landing page UX and create an experience that will increase engagement while encouraging customer loyalty, you should consider implementing the serial position effect.

To reiterate the impact the serial position effect can have on landing page UX, here’s a visualization of the serial position curve.

Serial position curve

Serial position curve (Source)

From a digital marketing perspective, the serial position curve clearly demonstrates that people recall information towards the start and end of an informational sequence, with items or messaging in the middle of a landing page absorbed least. It’s a steady consistent curve that can offer a practical framework for your landing pages’ UX designs.

Russian e-commerce brand, Marc Cony, uses the serial effect methodology to increase new user engagement through its primary landing page.

Marc Cony homepage highlighting discount information

Marc Cony homepage highlighting discount information (Source)

Here, you can see that the landing page design is clean and minimal to simplify user navigation while highlighting its most engagement-driving messaging as soon as you visit.

As you navigate your way down the landing page, there is a clear hierarchy of information. Scroll down and you’re presented with the opportunity to personalize your shopping experience, before viewing content surrounding the brand’s blog and social media pages.

Finally, there is a clean, concise call to action (CTA) button that prompts you to sign up to the brand’s newsletter and ‘convert.’ This is an excellent example of how using serial effect principles can create a seamless user experience while guiding consumers towards a desired action — in this case, viewing sale items or becoming an email subscriber.

Online retail innovator, Thread, offers an interactive and visually-rich approach to reduce consumer recall and optimize its landing page for increased brand engagement.

Thread’s clean, grid-based design is easy to scan and it’s above the fold messaging prompts the user to take action without having to second-guess themselves.

Thread homepage visually-rich approach

This interactive approach offers personal value while offering an incentive to interact. Clicking on preferred styles requires minimal recall and, as such, keeps the information at the top of the page fresh in the mind of the consumer.

Thread website, subheadings navigation

Once you’ve selected your preferred styles, you’re directed to a new landing page. Clear subheadings help you navigate your way through the page with minimal cognitive strain, and once you reach the bottom, the ‘Next’ CTA tells you what to do.

This approach to the serial position effect helps to streamline the user experience while keeping consumers engaged in the brand at all times.

A well-crafted informational hierarchy and interactive visual approach is a testament to the power of presenting information effectively without overwhelming the user with unnecessary data. This is definitely a driving force behind the startup’s ongoing success!

Thread’s landing page is a solid example of a UX-boosting concept known as ‘priming’. Read our practical guide on priming users expectations to improve UX to find out more.

Whether you’re selling goods or services, applying the serial position effect will help you improve your landing pages’ UX and increase your conversion rates.

The Digital Marketing Institute, primacy and recency effect on Homepage

The Digital Marketing Institute, primacy and recency effect on Homepage (Source)

Digital marketing course provider, the Digital Marketing Institute, utilizes both the primacy and recency effect to UX optimize many of its landing pages.

The DMI’s homepage, for example, includes a clearly labelled ‘Download Brochure’ button at the very top of the page. The main banner tells the user exactly what the brand does and how they will benefit from enrolling (using a second ‘Download Button’ to prompt action), thus leveraging the primacy effect to encourage conversions.

At the bottom of the landing page, the Digital Marketing Institute includes graphics showcasing its top-level clients to create a sense of brand authority that sticks in the consumers’ mind while providing clear, concise FAQs in a clean dropdown format.

This recency effect-style approach ensures that visitors can recall essential details about the courses the DMI provides while remembering the impressive clients that brand has served.

Applying the serial position effect to your landing pages will give your UX design and content concepts definitive direction, improving navigation and boosting engagement in the process.

To build on the examples we’ve explored, here are some additional tips based on the serial position effect to help you improve your landing page UX:

Place your most expensive items or services at the top of your landing page to make your mid-range items or services appear less expensive and increase your average order value (AOV).
Add an alluring image, strapline, and CTA button to your top of page banner to deliver important information in a way that minimizes cognitive strain and increases consumer conversions.

Break up the text in the middle of the page with subheadings, images, bolded or italicized font, bullet points and small chunks of text to make your UX design more navigable. Doing so will also increase your chances of leading consumers to important information further down the page.

Position valuable information and USPs towards the bottom of the page and use informational CTA buttons to tell the user what to do next.

Always ensure that your landing page design is clean, logical, and easy to navigate. If you don’t put functionality first, it’s likely that your UX offerings will be poor and your visitors will not retain any information.

How to use experimentation in design

Applying effective design and copywriting principles to your various digital touchpoints while leveraging the serial position effect to deliver valuable information to your consumers will accelerate your commercial success.

But, in an increasingly saturated digital age where the consumer has a wealth of their fingertips, how do you know if your design and serial position effect-based efforts are working as they should?

A range of factors including color, layout, design elements, and even a consumer’s cognitive bias can impact landing page browsing behavior. So, the best way to understand if your initiatives are working and experiment with design effectively is though A/B testing. With a combination of effective data and the right A/B testing platform, it’s possible to pinpoint a specific landing page or user interface’s strengths or weaknesses.

By developing two versions of the same landing page, you can drill down into specific page elements and discover which performs best.

For example, you might find that version ‘A’ of a landing page is earning more engagement above the fold due to the design or placement of a ‘Shop Now’ button. Through testing, you might also find that version ‘B’ is converting more email subscribers as a result of a particular piece of copy or messaging.

If you hone in on this wealth of comparative information, you will gain the power to experiment with every design element imaginable, taking the best-performing elements to create a fully-optimized version of a specific page or touchpoint.

A/B testing will give your design experimentation activities shape while protecting your marketing budget.

If you understand which messaging or design elements to focus on, you can get to the root of the issue and make tweaks for optimizations that are likely to offer the best possible return on investment (ROI).

Concerning the serial position effect, through A/B testing and experimentation you will be able to flatten the serial position curve to balance the information on your interfaces or landing pages.

By balancing the information elements on your interfaces or landing pages, you can make your UX designs easier to navigate while improving brand engagement. You will also gain the ability to experiment with design elements to emphasize the information or assets featured at the top or bottom of your digital touchpoints.

Essentially, if users aren’t engaging with the information at the top or bottom of a specific page, it will become clear that your serial position effect-centric efforts aren’t working. From there, you can experiment with the hierarchy of your information in addition to design elements including buttons, color combinations, imagery, copy formatting, and text boxes.

At this point, it’s worth noting that in our ever-evolving commercial landscape, experimentation never stops. What works today may not tomorrow — and to optimize your digital touchpoints for sustainable growth, constant testing and evolution is essential.

“Design creates culture. Culture shapes values. Values determine the future.”
— Robert L. Peters, Graphic Designer

Final thoughts

We’ve outlined the fundamentals of the serial position effect and looked at how to apply the concept to UX and landing page design while outlining the importance of experimentation and testing.

Reflecting on our journey, what is crystal clear is that, in order to deliver the very best designs and UX offerings to your consumers, you need to reduce cognitive strain as much as possible.

The serial position effect helps us to understand human limitations in terms of both long term and short term memory, as well as the importance of ordering your information effectively.

As designers, when applying the serial position effect, it’s critical to empower the user by providing task-relevant information on the screen where possible, sharing concise prompts or cues, reducing the level of recall needed across the user journey, and highlighting the most valuable information at the start and end of a sequence where necessary.

When interacting with your digital touchpoints or interfaces, your users shouldn’t be overwhelmed with information. They should be able to navigate every aspect of your interfaces or landing pages intuitively, with little additional thought, while understanding what to do next and why they are doing it.

Your UX and design offerings should deliver relevant, valuable information to your users in a way that is completely seamless — and, by using the serial position effect to guide your decision, you will set yourself apart from the competition.

Discover more business-boosting advice, read our complete guide to A/B testing.

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Article

May 4, 2021

3min read

ISO 27001 certification cements our commitment to the highest standards of security

AB Tasty

At AB Tasty, security is fundamental to delivering the best-in-class customer experiences. This is not only a belief that we share with our clients but have also woven into the fabric of our company operations.

AB Tasty’s firm footing in the world of tech innovation entails upholding the highest standards of security and data protection. To that end, the company has successfully completed ISO 27001 certification — a feat that not only cements our level of excellence in information security but as well points to a strong privacy ecosystem.

The ISO 27001 certification, alongside our GDPR compliance as well as PCI-DSS and SOC 2 practices, is among the many layers of AB Tasty’s ambitious security program — designed for continuous review of how we handle sensitive data in our procedures and systems.

A people-first approach to security

Prior to establishing any policy or systematic implementation, the team knew they had to evangelize the central role of security. With that in mind, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Matthieu Chaignot united the IT, infrastructure and legal teams to be fervent defenders of security before all else.

“The truth is we are only as strong as our weakest link so we need to make sure that everyone understands the importance of security and be conscious of how they are coming across data or assets. It wasn’t enough to design the best processes or implement new tools, we needed to turn everyone into security addicts.”
Matthieu Chaignot, Chief Information Security Officer

The cross-functional approach to security ensured that while the tech and engineering experts were behind the deployment of all critical domains, the employees were the frontline protectors.

The road to ISO 27001 certification

The highly sought-after ISO 27001:2013, created by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), represents the global standard in information security. Specifically, the group establishes guidelines on how companies manage their information systems and secure their assets.

AB Tasty’s client- and server-side experiments enable businesses to launch better products faster and drive more conversions, engagement and revenue across multiple platforms. The ISO 27001 certification of both products was fundamental to building on the trust we have with our customers.

The certification confirms that we have not only identified all the potential risks, but we have implemented the right information security practices to address those risks. The ISO 27001 certification ensures that we have:

Implemented IT security policies and procedures to uphold business continuity;
Mitigated risks through formalized security controls and countermeasures; and
Maintained and continually improved ISMS (Information Security Management System).

Building a reliable security infrastructure

When it comes to security, it’s more than a set of measures. It’s a mindset. The data protection of employees and clients is crucial to any successful business relationship. From our information security management systems to our products, they are built with the highest standards of protection. It also means that as our company continues to scale in volume, the security controls we have in place will become more robust over time.

“From the very beginning, AB Tasty has effortlessly worked to ensure privacy and compliance. The accreditations and industry-wide recognitions do not change our approach, but rather highlight our commitment to the security of external and internal data on a daily basis”.
Remi Aubert, co-founder and president of AB Tasty

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Article

Feb 23, 2021

8min read

What Does Feature Rollback Mean and How To Do It

AB Tasty

When it comes to feature testing, you’re in a bind.

On the one hand, you need real-world data and feedback from real-world users. You know that every new feature you develop is, at best, an educated guess about what your real-world users want from you. No matter how educated that guess might be, and no matter much internal validation you perform, you can only generate meaningful data and feedback on each new feature you develop by releasing it to real-world users to test out in their real-world environments.

On the other hand, it’s risky to give real-world users an unproven feature. You know that every new feature you release might have something wrong with it. Maybe there’s a technical issue you missed during development. Maybe it just doesn’t align to user expectations as closely as you hoped. No matter the issue, releasing an unproven feature can cause real harm to your brand’s user relationships.

This is a tricky problem and one that is never going to be fully solved. But, thankfully, there are methods you can follow to minimize the problem, and collect real-world data and feedback while mitigating the impact when something (inevitably) goes wrong.

In this piece, we’ll explore one of these methods— rollbacks.

What is a Feature Rollback?

It’s a simple practice, with powerful implications.

When you perform a rollback, you take some code out of a live environment. Back in the day rollbacks could be truly massive. Software products used to be updated in giant new releases that could include a wide range of changes— including multiple new features and significant changes to existing features. If one of these huge releases had some fatal bugs in it, or just wasn’t well-received by users, then the entire thing might need to be rolled back (even if the issues were contained within just a few elements of the release).

All of this has changed with the adoption of Agile methodology. Releases keep getting smaller and more incremental, and so do rollbacks. Most modern Product Managers have adopted phased release plans, where they only release a single new or upgraded feature at a time— and often only to individual segments. And when modern Product Managers do release multiple new or upgraded features at once, the different features are separate from each other.

This evolution has changed the way rollbacks happen. After a new release, Product Managers can now isolate the individual feature(s) that have proven unfit for live usage and perform a targeted rollback on them, and them alone. The whole rollback process is now much faster, much nimbler, much more precise— and delivers much greater benefits.

Why Should Product Managers Perform Rollbacks?

When a Product Manager properly structures and deploys rollbacks, they improve their ability to test new features in a real-world environment with real-world users with a minimal level of risk. An imperfect feature is no longer the end of the world. If a feature has development issues or poor alignment with user requirements, you can perform a rollback and remove it from a live environment in real-time with just one click.

For Product Managers, this changes the game. The more mature your rollback capability, the more you can afford to make mistakes. Your risk shrinks, giving you the freedom to test more features with more users earlier in the development cycle, ultimately leading you to iterate your products faster and faster.

Now, rollbacks are not a silver bullet. They don’t absolve you from doing everything you can to develop the highest-quality features possible before you test them. But rollbacks allow you to test new features with greater confidence and reduced concerns about creating problems for your users.

When Should You Perform a Rollback? Two Common Use Cases

For most Product Managers, there are two common use cases why you might need to perform a rollback.

Rollback Use Case 1: Your Feature has a Bug

This first use case is pretty self-explanatory.

You might have the most robust and thorough QA and testing processes in the world. It’s still highly likely your new features will still have one or more bugs in them when you release them into a live environment. Maybe they’re issues you just didn’t think to search for or didn’t know how to search. Maybe they’re issues that only show up in live environment after hundreds of real-world users tool around with the feature.

Regardless of the reason, if significant technical issues pop up in your new feature, then you’ll likely want to perform a rollback on that feature to fix it. With the right rollback process, you can react to these errors in near-real-time and remove the feature—and maybe even fix it—in minutes before it impacts too many users.

Rollback Use Case 2: Your Feature is Poorly Received

This second use case is a little more sophisticated.

Essentially, after you release a new feature you monitor how users respond to it, and how well it’s hitting your business KPIs. If your new feature is not performing as expected, and is generating negative usage data and user feedback, then you can perform a rollback to remove it from its live environment. If it isn’t hitting—or at least tracking towards—its business goals, then it might not be worth keeping live.

After you roll back your feature, you can either utilize the data and feedback you collected to fix the feature and help it better align to user expectations and business requirements, or you can decide that the feature was fundamentally misguided and just needs to be retired.

With the right rollback process, you can also review and respond to the usage data and user feedback you receive in near-real-time, and prevent too many users from getting too disgruntled about receiving a feature that misses the mark.

What Do These Two Use Cases Have in Common?

In one word: speed.

In both use cases, rollbacks are most effective—and mitigate the most risk—when you are able to first monitor feature performance in real-time, to then translate that performance into a quick “yes/no” decision to rollback (or not), and finally to execute on that rollback decision as rapidly as possible.

The faster you can go through this entire process, the lower the chance that you will create a prolonged negative user experience. In some scenarios, the decision to perform a rollback and the execution of that rollback need to happen in minutes.

It’s a daunting mandate, but here are a few tips to help you meet it.

How to Make Faster Rollback Decisions

It’s challenging to decide—in the moment—whether or not to rollback a feature. Even the best feature release can be complex and chaotic.

There are multiple moving parts to monitor…

There are many different data and feedback points to take into consideration…

And there’s a lot of emotion at play…

You and your team just spent weeks, maybe even months, pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into designing and developing the new feature that you’re testing. If your users love it, then you get that sugar high of knowing you just completed a job well done, and you can just sit back and watch the good data and feedback roll in. But if your users don’t immediately respond as positively as you hoped, then it’s easy to experience an emotional crash and to want to rollback the feature before you even know if the bad response is consistent, let alone what you should do to fix your errors in the next iteration.

For these reasons, and many more, it’s hard to make the right rollback decision in the moment during a feature release test. Instead, it’s better to make your rollback decisions before you release your new features into the wild.

Here’s what we mean.

Basically, before you release any new features to any real-world users, you first decide what success and failure looks like for this feature in objective, data-driven terms.

Then, you decide how much data your release will need to generate before you can make an accurate call about whether the feature is a success or a failure.

Finally, you use these parameters during your release to make objective “yes/no” decisions about whether or not you should rollback your feature at any point. Instead of getting caught up in the moment, you just monitor the performance metrics that you decided were most important, and once they hit the thresholds you set prior to release you simply follow the plan and you either rollback the feature or you don’t— no real-time agonizing required.

How to Execute Rollbacks Faster

In the past, it was near-impossible to perform a rollback quickly from a technical perspective. You needed to have a technical team standing by, waiting to dig into the code to turn off live features, or to revert to a prior state of the entire platform. The entire process was slow, it was labor-intensive, and it took your technical teams away from their valuable development work.

Software has solved all of these problems. With our own feature management platform, you can rollback a feature in real-time by just toggling a single field with just one click. You don’t need any technical expertise to do so. You don’t need to develop and test a complex rollback process prior to feature release. You don’t even need to think about the technical details— you can save all of that thinking to create the right strategic decision trees that we outlined in the prior section.

AB Tasty also gives you—or any non-technical user—the ability to perform sophisticated feature releases and rollbacks. You can release multiple features at once, monitor how each feature is performing individually, and only rollback the features that aren’t delivering. You can roll out a feature to multiple user segments and only rollback that feature to the individual segments that aren’t responding well to it. We designed our server-side solution to make the execution of rollbacks faster, easier, and far more intuitive than they ever were before.

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Article

Feb 12, 2021

5min read

How Continuous Development Turns Product Managers into Experimenters

AB Tasty

20 years ago, tech companies were hit with the ‘Agile Revolution’. The idea? Shipping working software every week or two would help teams deliver better products, even if this method implied more risk. In other words, the ‘move fast and break things’ mentality reigned.

But that was two decades ago. Today, agile is mainstream, and new philosophies, building on the agile movement, have come to the fore; namely, Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment, largely geared towards DevOps teams. Their big draw is that these processes and tools automate quality assessment, assuring that when code is merged in piecemeal fashion – and not on one big bang release day – it works. Even better, software can be deployed to the product environment at any time, by anyone. Now, your product manager can take the reins.

Today, the market is ready to go a step further. From Agile to Continuous Integration, Delivery and Deployment comes a thirst for Continuous Development. Continuous Development – we could even call it Continuous Activation – encompasses all of these ideas, but takes the logical next step. It puts even more control and autonomy in the hands of Product Managers. It allows them to not only deploy software themselves, (with mitigated risk), but also to pick and choose according to their own prerogatives which audiences are exposed to a given feature. In other words, they can run experiments, personalize the user experience, and exercise complete rollback control based on real-time data.

Continuous Development platforms and processes transform the Product Manager into a Chief Experimentation Officer, and there are many reasons to embrace this new paradigm shift:

Move Fast, Risk Less

‘Move fast and break things’ only works if you’re willing to accept the consequences of what you’ve broken. Most software developers would still like to move fast, but without the risk.

Continuous Development and the tools that support it factor in risk assessment. By avoiding code merges on one big release day, and by enabling progressive rollout techniques (canary deployment, ring deployment), developers can avoid putting all of their metaphorical eggs in one basket. If your system has a feature flagging or rollback KPI embedded in the platform, switching off a defective or negative feature can be done instantaneously and painlessly.

Your Customers, Not Your HIPPOs, Decide

How do decisions get made in your tech company? Chances are, HIPPOs, new bosses, vocal salespeople, consulting groups or the noisiest Product Manager in the room dominate that discussion, letting their personal experience, gut feeling or intuition determine the road map.

With Continuous Development platforms, the focus shifts from subjective ideas to customer feedback and data. Early adopter programs, beta testing, progressive deployment, A/B tests… all of these methods, enabled by feature flagging and other Continuous Development techniques, make your main measurement of success the behavior and opinions of your customers.

In a B2B context, this might look like extensive interviews with early adopters. In B2C, it’s likely your support teams or community manager who will pick up on positive or negative feedback around a new feature launch. Either way, Product Managers get direct access to the Voice of the Customer and can form data-driven arguments for why to rollback, stick with or modify a new feature.

Get off the Ford Line

If your team is project-driven, chances are your Product Managers and developers feel they need to keep their heads down and noses to the grindstone, working on their piece of the software production puzzle. They might be productive, they might be agile, but they might also not really feel the business impact of what they’re working on 40+ hours of the week.

When you can experiment with and test the features you’re developing; when you can get direct user feedback and adjust your work accordingly; when you have clear, measurable KPIs that determine success, your work all of a sudden feels a lot more meaningful. This keeps teams motivated, fresh and loyal.

Marketing and Product Manager Alignment

When you give your Product Managers more control, it’s easier for them to align with the teams around them, especially the Marketing and Communication departments. A new feature release, especially depending on the size and importance of your company, can mean a big web of marketing and communications campaigns. Emailings, press releases, articles, social network posting, corporate website updates…retroplannings and shifting deadlines are much easier to manage when your Product Managers are in the driver’s seat and not beholden to developer teams that have other priorities and are even more far removed from your marketing and communications personnel.

Developers Focus on Core Business Objectives

If you have a robust developer team, there’s a chance you could set up these types of feature management systems in-house, without the need for a dedicated platform. But this is time-consuming, and one could argue that it diverts skills and resources away from your core business objectives.

I believe that the time is now for Continuous Development. By turning our Product Managers into Experimenters, we’re able to build a better product and bring it to market faster, with less risk; we continue in the vein of ‘customer obsession’; we keep our teams creative and motivated; and we generally build up what, at AB Tasty, we’ve been advocating for since our founding – a test and learn, experimentation culture.

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Article

Feb 9, 2021

10min read

Use Case User Onboarding: What Impact Do Release Teams Have on UX?

AB Tasty

According to a PWC survey, one in three customers would leave a brand after just one bad experience. Hence, your company may invest a lot of time and money optimizing your digital product to stay relevant in today’s often crammed markets.

A critical part of the overall product experience is user onboarding: get it right and win loyal customers, but get it wrong and lose those users forever.

So it makes sense to continuously tweak the user onboarding process – the perfect job for a product team. Such a team often consists of 5 to 8 people, including product managers, designers, and developers. Different companies work with various product team sizes and configurations – whatever is best for their use case. However, we rarely see DevOps engineers in these teams because many view DevOps as just a vehicle for successful feature releases.

Ultimately, however, these DevOps engineers have to get up at night to fix a newly deployed feature that crashes the app every time a user navigates through the onboarding process.

We want to ask you: Can an app whose onboarding process doesn’t work technically be successful, and do release teams significantly impact UX after all? Let’s find out.

In this article, we’ll be exploring how to:
[toc content=”.entry-content”]

Make users feel right at home with a great onboarding experience

Most apps require an onboarding process to show new users how to achieve their goals as efficiently and conveniently as possible.

For this, we need to keep in mind that the onboarding experience can affect your relationship with prospects – both positively and negatively.

No matter how good your app actually is, the first impression counts!

Large companies like Slack or Dropbox also frequently overhaul their user onboarding to ensure users have a comfortable, fun, and productive start to their product. But see for yourself. The following images show an excerpt from Slack’s onboarding process from 2014 and 2021. Of course, the design has changed drastically, but you can also see that instead of reading where the team name comes up in the Slack interface, we actually see the user interface and our team name on it. These improvements are certainly not the results of guesswork but of meticulously coordinated optimization workflows.

Slack Team Name

–

Slack Company Name — The evolution of Slack’s onboarding process (Source)

As even big enterprises invest in optimizing their onboarding processes, we realize that we should do the same and not rest on our laurels. The question remains, how do you make sure you are building the right onboarding experience in the right way?

And this is where cross-functional product teams and Flagship come into play!

Leverage Flagship to unite product teams and ensure great UX

At AB Tasty, when we work towards a great user experience, we focus on two main themes:

Release the right feature: We step into our users’ shoes and conduct experiments and tests to ensure that the feature delivers value and looks and feels good.
Deploy the feature right: It’s not just about functionality and looks. We utilize feature management to ensure that what we’ve created works flawlessly at all times and on different platforms.
–

Flagship chart — Flagship provides a shared environment for experimentation and feature management

–

Flagship gives you the means to get the most out of both: data-driven experimentation and feature management to create and release features for great customer experiences. So we see release teams as an integral part of creating value for our users. This may not be the most popular opinion. Still, now we’d like to tell you more about why we think DevOps should be more closely integrated with product teams.

It’s no secret that teams that work toward a common goal are more likely to reach their true potential than those that don’t. By isolating DevOps from product teams, you probably can’t count on the positive effects of unity and passion necessary to create and release great products. For this reason, we encourage product teams to work more closely with DevOps. Release teams also care about delivering value and great experiences to users. And they bring the skills required to do so to the table.

Flagship provides product managers, developers, and DevOps engineers with a shared environment for experimentation and feature management. You get easy access to all the data and tools needed to have a productive conversation about the product optimization process in a common data-driven language. Simultaneously, instead of isolating specific roles and responsibilities in silos, each member of the product team can focus on doing their job while continuing to work as a collective force.

Now, let’s take a look at how Flagship’s experimentation and feature management capabilities enable product teams to deliver outstanding user experiences.

Deploy the feature right with feature management

First, let’s talk about a few examples of how feature management and releasing a feature right can positively impact your users’ onboarding experience.

Suppose you want to add tooltips to your onboarding process to help users navigate your product’s dashboard confidently. The product team prepares the new feature accordingly and thoroughly tests the functionality on the test servers. After everything seems to be working, they roll out the new feature for all users in one fell swoop. Hopefully, it’s not Friday afternoon, as the changeover could cause unforeseen problems on the production server, like:

Your user is stuck in an infinite loop that they can’t exit
User input isn’t saved, e.g., in a form
The app crashes repeatedly
The user is sent back to the start for no apparent reason

Just imagine what such behavior means for users going through your onboarding process and looking forward to finally using your product when it suddenly stops working. Poof, the magic moment has passed. The user has most likely lost confidence in your app due to bad UX.

Flagship makes code deployments stress-free

With Flagship’s feature management capabilities, your product teams can publish new features with ease – even on Friday afternoons.

Feature management enables release teams to provide the new tooltips feature to a selected target group before continually rolling it out to everyone. This way, you can be sure that the new feature works under realistic conditions, i.e., on production servers with real users.

Through controlled and monitored rollouts, DevOps teams immediately know whether something isn’t working correctly. This enables them to react on time and be glad that only a few users have noticed the error.

For example, suppose the developers wrapped the tooltip feature in a feature flag (which they really should be doing). In that case, they can quickly deactivate it via the flagship dashboard if a problem occurs. Of course, they can also configure automatic code rollbacks based on KPIs to react even faster.

Proper feature management can de-stress your release teams: Gone are the sleepless nights spent dealing with damage control! If you want to learn more about the benefits of feature management for tech teams, we recommend our blog post here.

Release the right feature with experimentation

Perhaps you have great empaths on your product teams and feel like you know your users pretty well. Still, it is wise to experiment and test to create an onboarding process that your users will love.

Let’s look at the tooltip example from before again. Suppose that after your product team successfully integrated the tooltips into user onboarding, your analytics data shows that something must be wrong. Many users still don’t know how to use your app and abandon the process midway through. If you can’t identify and resolve the problem right away, you need to leverage other means to improve the tooltip’s user experience.

First, make sure that everything is fine from a technical point of view. Next, your product team should start working on possible variants to improve the tooltips’ presentation and functionality. You can then experiment and test with Flagship to determine which of these variants and ideas offer the best user experience.

For example, you could utilize A/B tests to see if showing a how-to video before displaying the tooltips helps users get started with your product. Or experiment with different tooltips sequences – perhaps the process is easier to understand if you change the tooltips’ order.

You’re also free to experiment with different colors, copy, UI elements, call to action, and so on. To make your experiments as meaningful as possible, you can define which users see which feature variant and track user acceptance, test results, and KPIs in the Flagship dashboard.

Another advantage of Flagship is that you can utilize 1-to-1 personalization based on audience segments to provide users with unique experiences. For example, after a user registered for a paid subscription, show them a customized welcome message and add more value to their onboarding experience.

… What about client-side tools for experimentation?

Many client-side experience optimization tools, such as our AB Tasty, can also perform most of these experiments – without code deployments. However, the advantage of coding your experiments for a critical process such as user onboarding is that you don’t potentially slow it down with automatically generated UI overlays. Instead, tests and experiments with Flagship are fast, secure, and flicker-free, as they come directly from the server and don’t have to be calculated in the user’s browser. Of course, client-side tools still have their justification and unique uses – Flagship is a great tool to complement your client-side strategy.

Wrapping up

If you want to provide users with the best possible onboarding experience, you need cross-functional teams who know how to release the right feature and how to release a feature right. One of our goals is to advocate the importance of release teams to great UX – whether a product technically works is as important as how it looks and behaves.

Using Flagship’s experimentation and feature management capabilities, product teams can benefit from a shared platform to collaborate on improving the onboarding experience in a productive and data-driven way.

Would you like to try Flagship for your product teams? Book a demo and see how experimentation and feature management can transform your users’ onboarding experience from okay to Yay.

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Article

Jan 22, 2021

8min read

Why You Should be Testing in Production

AB Tasty

In a perfect world, you release a product that is bug-free and works exactly as it should and so there is no need for further testing.

However, both product managers and developers know that it’s not as simple as that. They need a way to make sure that there is a process in place that reveals any issues in code in a live production environment.

This is where testing in production comes in.

But it’s also one of the highly debated topics out there with those who say you should always test in production, and those who are more wary of the concept and say you never should.

In this article, we’ll look into these two different perspectives and share our own point of view on this controversial topic and we’ll guide you through the best ways to reap the benefits of this type of testing.

What is testing in production?

To keep it short and simple, testing in production is a software development practice of running different tests on your product when it’s in a live environment in real time.

It allows you to test new code changes on live users rather than a test or staging environment.

This type of testing is not meant to be a replacement for your QA team or eliminating a unit test or integration test. In other words, it is not supposed to replace testing before production but to complement these tests.

To do or not to do: That is the real question

These are big benefits, and they are enough to create consensus among many developers and product managers who say “Yes, always!” to the practice.

But there’s also another group of developers and product managers who say “No, never!” to testing in production.

On the one hand, they admit all of the great benefits that testing in production can deliver. On the other hand, they also believe that the practice carries too many potential downsides and that its benefits just aren’t worth taking on the risks the practice can bring.

Which side are we on?

We believe testing in production is a cornerstone practice for anyone in the software development world. And we believe it is particularly important for Product Managers, as it gives them a powerful method to generate real-world feedback and performance data they need to make sure they are always building a viable pipeline of products.

You can also check out our memes and gifs for test in production.

But even though we are great advocates of this practice, we still want to consider the point of view of those who are “No, never!” when it comes to this type of testing.

Once we acknowledge these issues, we can start to map out some ways to mitigate the practice’s potential downsides and focus on its benefits instead.

What are the big risks of testing in production?

To be blunt: a lot of things can go wrong when you test in production.

You risk deploying bad code
You may accidentally leak sensitive data
It can possibly cause system overload
You can mess up your tracking and analytics
You risk releasing a poorly designed product or feature

The list goes on and on. Anything that can go wrong, could go wrong.

Worst of all— if something does go wrong when you are testing in production, your mistake will have real-world consequences. Your product might crash at a critical moment of real-time usage.

You might also end up collecting inaccurate KPIs and creating issues with your business stakeholders.

Worse case scenario: your poorly designed product or feature might result in multiple paying customers leaving your product for a competitor instead.

Those who say “No, never!” to testing in production are correct to consider the practice highly risky, and we understand why they stay away from it.

And yet, while we acknowledge these concerns, when it comes down to it, we believe that this form of testing is an essential aspect of modern software development.

Why should you still test in production?

When done properly, testing in production gives you some great benefits that you just can’t get through any other method.

Collect real-world data and feedback

Testing in production allows you to collect user data in terms of users’ engagement with your new features. This enables the collection of valuable feedback from the customers that matters the most, which in turn would allow you to optimize the user experience based on this feedback.

This will also allow you to brainstorm ideas for features that you may not have considered before.

Uncover bugs

Since you’re testing on live users, you would be able to discover any bugs or issues that you may have otherwise missed in the development stage. Thus, you can ensure your new products and features are stable and capable of handling a high volume of real-world usage.

It is worth noting that there are certain technical issues that will never show up until you put your product or feature in front of real-world users.

Therefore, you can monitor the performance of your releases in real life so that developers can analyze performance and optimize the releases accordingly.

Higher quality releases

Because you’re receiving continuous feedback from your users, developers can improve the products resulting in high quality releases that meet your customers’ needs and expectations.

Additionally, you can verify the scalability of your product or feature through load testing in production.

Support a larger strategy of incremental release

Testing in production helps facilitate an environment of continuous delivery.

This is especially true when you roll out your releases to a certain percentage of users so that they may no longer have to wait long periods of time before they have access to your brand new features.

This way, you can limit the blast radius as with incremental releases, you would not have affected all of your users.

Perhaps, most importantly: you already are testing in production, even if you didn’t know it!

Most of Agile development and product management’s best practices are forms of testing in development. We’re talking about very common practices like:

CI/CD
A/B Testing
Phased Rollouts
Canary Deployments
Blue/green deployments
Usability Testing
Smoke & Sanity Testing

If you are following any of these practices—and many more like them—then you are already running tests with real-world users in a live production environment.

You are already testing in production, whether you call it that or not, even if you thought you were in the “No, never!” camp this whole time.

Testing in production done right

If testing in development is inevitable these days, then you should spend less time debating its pros and cons, and more time finding the most effective and responsible way to follow the practice.

We believe in this perspective so strongly that we’ve built an entire product suite around helping product developers gain all of the benefits of the practice while minimizing their risks.

Feature flags – a software development practice that allows you to enable or disable functionality without deploying code – are at the core of this new platform.

By wrapping your features in a flag and deploying them into production without making them visible to all users, you can safely perform all of the testing in production that you need.

With feature flags—combined with the rest of AB Tasty— you can:

Deploy smaller releases that minimize the impact of failure.
Only test your new features on your most loyal and understanding users.
Personalize their tests so they know to expect a few hiccups with the release.
Immediately toggle off underperforming features with a single click.

Read The Many Uses of Feature Flags to Control Your Releases for more use cases and examples.

With feature flags and a little planning, you can dramatically reduce the risk and increase the sophistication of the testing in production you are already performing.

This means more real-world user data, more reliable products & features, and less worry about seeing how your hard work performs outside of the safe confines of development and staging environments.

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Article

Jan 7, 2021

3min read

Digital Experience: A Chat with REO

AB Tasty

Our UK partner series continues with Andrew Furlong, Managing Director at REO.
In this interview, we asked him the following 3 questions:

REO agency

At REO, you “believe digital experiences can always be better” – what does that mean?

Like with most things, there is always room for improvement. The growth of AB testing and Personalization is because brands and consumers believe and demand a better experience. So, what we mean is: no matter how good you think your digital experience is, it can always be improved. And we are here to help if you are not sure how!

What are you most proud of at REO?

This one is easy… the team! They are great to work with, they are challenging and speak their mind to help REO be the very best it can be. Having such a brilliant team pays off as shown with our latest client satisfaction score of 8.5/10.

Which ultimate tip for experience optimization do you have for our readers?

It is important to always have multiple streams of optimization running, I am not talking about concurrent tests, although where feasible that should be done. I mean having a fallback strategy so that if a test is delayed for reasons beyond your control, you can quickly pivot to a different part of the site for example.

About REO

REO is a digital experience agency. We are an eclectic mix of bright and creative thinkers, embracing the best of research, strategy, design and experimentation to solve our clients’ toughest challenges. We work across a variety of sectors, with companies such as Amazon, M&S, Tesco and Samsung. To fearlessly transform our clients’ businesses and reputations by evolving the Digital Experience for their customers. We achieve this through:

Our curious and relentless drive to gather insights that matter.
Our proactive mindset and forward thinking to deliver lasting value.
Our adventurous approach to adapt and learn quickly.

Want to learn more about REO? You can reach out via info@reodigital.com, call on +44 (0) 203 827 7539 or visit their website https://www.reodigital.com.

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025

Subscribe to
our Newsletter

Article

Jan 5, 2021

14min read

What is Eye Tracking & Why You Should Use it For Your Business

AB Tasty

In an increasingly cutthroat digital age, standing out in your niche while meeting the exact needs of your consumers is essential to business growth and longevity.

By getting under the skin of your customers, you can tailor your messaging, applications, and touchpoints to meet their exact needs —that’s where eye tracking enters the mix.

Consider this for a moment:

You’re running a usability test on a product landing page for a new range of gym shoes. Your test subject, Nancy, browses the page and chooses a shiny new pair of gym shoes with ease. But, on the next page, there is a snag. She hesitates and eventually abandons her cart because the journey was confusing.

You take notes based on Nancy’s feedback and think about how you can improve your checkout journey. But, if you could view her movements— or see what she sees—you would have the power to make informed improvements that will ultimately increase conversions and drive more sales.

With eye tracking, you can. But while this widely-used sensor-based technology offers a deep glimpse into user browsing behavior, some industry experts believe that eye tracking is an unnecessary expense.

Like many platforms and digital innovations, with the right approach, eye tracking will give you the tools to offer your customers a seamless level of user experience (UX)—the kind that will increase loyalty while helping you boost your bottom line.

Here we explore the dynamics of eye tracking and explain why it could make an excellent investment for your business.

So, what is eye tracking?

Eye tracking is a type of sensor technology that gives a computer or mobile device the tools to understand and trace where a person is looking.

An eye tracker can detect the presence, attention and focus of a user while engaging with a specific app, touchpoint or website.

From a marketing perspective, eye tracking dates back to the 1980s, where it was used to test and measure the value of ads in print papers or magazines.

An effective alternative to lie detection-style techniques such as voice stress analysis and galvanic skin response (neither of which offer truly reliable results or data), eye tracking gave the advertisers of the day essential insights into which elements of a page people read as well as how long they spend engaging with specific pieces of content.

The popularity of the eye tracker rose over the years and the rapid evolution of digital technology paved the way for a wealth of innovative developments.

Now, eye tracking technology is able to offer deep-dive insights into user behavior and dynamic page as well as app design as well as offering intuitive tools that enhance the user journey for disabled people.

In the modern age, one of the most prominent features of eye tracking is a little something called Facial Expression Analysis (FEA).

Based on ‘points of fixation’—times during the user journey when someone stops and focuses long enough to process the content before them (commonly known as a ‘saccade’)—FEA technology helps marketers gauge the effectiveness of their page design and messaging.

But, how does this apply to business and why is it so useful? Let’s find out.

Eye tracking and consumer research — Source

Why is eye tracking useful in the digital age?

As a marketer or business owner, the more you understand your target audience, the more chance you have of creating a fluent and engaging customer journey across platforms.

As eye tracking provides a visual map of how your users engage with your website, landing pages, and mobile applications, you can identify strengths and weaknesses related to user experience (UX) and content placement.

An essential part of the consumer research process, eye tracking is a powerful medium as it taps into the fact that 95% of human decision-making (particularly online) is carried out sub-consciously.

By using eye tracker tools to trace navigational patterns, you can adopt your customers’ vision, uncovering information that will help you to make improvements that boost engagement, improve your customer experience (CX) offerings, and ultimately, accelerate the growth of your business.

From heat mapping to task-based usability tools, there are a wealth of eye tracking innovations available to businesses in today’s digital world.

Invest in the right eye tracking tool for your business and you will:

Understand what your target audience is looking at and for how long
Identify redundant or disruptive visuals or design elements
Document how users scan and interact with your web pages or apps
Gain a practical understanding of what works and what doesn’t
Prove the value of certain marketing strategies, techniques or campaigns
Continually improve and evolve your efforts in a landscape that is ever-changing

Eye tracking is an effective means of seeing through the lens of your customers. But, as powerful as it is, eye trackers alone are unlikely to give you a complete insight into the content that really sticks in the users’ mind.

To gain additional context on how to use your data to improve usability and drive engagement, eye tracking should be a pivotal part of your consumer research strategy rather than a sole means of information.

That said, if you use it the right way, eye tracking can help you understand your customers in ways that can give you an all-important edge on the competition.

How eye tracking can help you understand your customers

Using eye tracking to understand your customers on a deeper level boils down to adopting a cohesive mix of the right tools and techniques.

Eye tracking tools and software provide a visual representation of your users’ focus points—returning data based on:

Fixation points or saccades: information that can tell you how engaging or eye-catching particular elements or pieces of content on a webpage are to your customers.
Navigational patterns: by understanding common navigational patterns, you can see how people scan or interact with your page. This level of knowledge will give you the data you need to optimize your content and design for increased engagement and conversions.
Problematic elements As mentioned, an eye tracking test will return invaluable data based on any images, graphics, calls to action (CTA) or command buttons, informational content or design elements that hinder the user experience and prevent customers from either getting what they need from your page or carrying out a desired action (clicking through to a specific product page or signing up to an email newsletter, etc).

Automotive repair and wreckage company, Truckers Assist, conducted eye tracking tests to track the performance of its homepage.

This test showed that while the ‘NO FEES’ graphic (the red point on the image) was gaining a lot of attention, it wasn’t clickable. As a result, many users were focusing their attention in the wrong place, steering them away from more valuable information as a result.

To fix this glaring issue, Trucker Assist improved its homepage design, removing the ‘NO FEES’ banner and placing focus on its contact information and service search bar.

Conducting successful eye tracking testing takes consistency as well as a clear cut goal. Do you want to improve the user journey of your new mobile app? Are you looking to drive more revenue through a specific product page? Perhaps you’re trying to understand if your general messaging and branding is performing the way it should?

There are many actionable insights you can gain from eye tracking—and outlining your specific goals will give your tests or studies direction.

This hand-picked video offers practical advice and information to help you get started with eye tracking:

How eye tracking benefits UX optimization

88% of consumers are less likely to return to a website after a poor user experience. Today’s consumers expect a seamless level of UX from brands and businesses—anything less and you could see customer loyalty as well as sales drop through the floor.

Eye tracking and UX go hand in hand. Through eye tracking, you will gain access to objective and unbiased insights that will show you where improvements are necessary.

With eye trackers, you can drill down into a specific UI element (is it facilitating the right interactions or are your consumers missing it altogether?) to test whether it fits into the user journey while getting to the very root of any distracting, problematic or misleading page elements.

This perfect storm of on-page information will empower you to make very specific improvements to any app, web or landing page—enhancing its usability and performance significantly.

How eye tracking works in a nutshell

As a concept, a significant part of eye tracking is based in Fitts’ Law. Essentially, every visual object or element carries a certain amount of ‘weight’ and this determines the amount of attention as well as clicks it ultimately earns.

Concerning eye tracking and UX, Fitts’s Law is important because it can help you predict the amount of time taken to move the eyes or cursor to a specific target.

Armed with this information, you can establish a visual hierarchy and optimize your webpages or applications to ensure consumers can connect with the right functions or information at the right times within their journey.

To get your eye tracking tests off to the best possible start, giving you users clearcut instructions while ensuring good lighting and consistent positioning is essential. Doing so will give you reliable data, as detailed in this infographic from IMOTIONS:

Essential eye tracking methods & techniques

There are thousands of eye tracking tools and countless ways of approaching this most powerful approach to user testing.

To guide you along the right path, here we’re going to explore the most essential eye tracking methods and techniques.

Heat maps

A branch of eye tracking, a heat map is a dynamic tool that offers a definitive visual representation of where users focus their attention and how they navigate your website based on their on-page interactions.

Heat mapping platforms provide color-coded data to give an indication of the areas of a website or mobile page users are interacting with the most.

As you can see from the image above, the red spots show the areas where users focus their attention most while the lighter colors are the areas with the lowest engagements.

Heat mapping technology also serves concrete data based on how much particular buttons or links are clicked by users on a page while offering navigational information such as scroll rates to show how far people move down the page before bouncing off.

To gain a full working insight into this effective optimization tool, read our full guide on using heat mapping to uncover areas of improvement on your website.

Focus mapping

Essentially an inversion of heat mapping, focus mapping provides digestible visual insights on the main fixation points on a specific page.

With focus maps, the page is blanked out except for the spots that receive the most attention or fixation.

A visual technique to complement additional eye tracking tests and consumer research strategies, with focus mapping you will get a panoramic view of which elements are working as well as the content you need to improve to encourage focus and engagement.

Gaze path plots

As sensory-based technology, eye tracking can provide a wealth of valuable insight in a single browsing session.

By adding metrics related to time as part of your eye tracking strategy, you can follow the path a user takes on a webpage and the time they spent on each element.

As you can see from the ‘Where’s Wally’ video, gaze plots make an effective eye tracking technique as they offer a dynamic interpretation of how users interact with your site or mobile app.

If you follow these paths, it’s possible to get a real-time insight into the eyes of your audience. This wealth of visual eye tracking data will empower you to drill down into specific areas of a web or app page, making design or content tweaks to optimize the overall user experience.

Eye tracking metrics

In addition to diversifying your approach to eye tracking and working with a mix tool or platforms, focusing on the right metrics will improve your chances of success exponentially.

Here are the main eye tracking metrics you should work with during your user research tests and studies:

Areas of Interest (AOIs): Before running an eye tracking test or study, you should determine your AOIs. Mapping out your main areas of interest on a particular web or mobile page will give your test definitive direction while ensuring you only collect or concentrate data to provide answers to the right questions.
Dwell time: This metric is focused on the actual amount of time a user or test subject spends interacting with a predetermined AOI. You can, for instance run A/B testing to compare two versions of a webpage to see which one returns the healthiest AOI dwell times and thus, offer the best return on investment (ROI).
Fixation count: Like dwell time, fixation count can offer interaction data based on your AOIs. But, rather than quantifying time, fixation count records up how many fixations your AOIs receive during a test or time period. As such, you can compare fixation and dwell time data to identify a correlation while painting a panoramic picture that will make your optimization efforts more successful.
Ratio: In an eye tracking context, ratio will tell you how many users or test subjects have guided their gaze to a particular AOI. Tracking ratio will give you an insight into whether you need to alter a specific piece of content or design element to capture the attention of more users and streamline your site navigation.
Revisits: Based on your AOIs, revisits determine how many times a user returns their gaze to a specific point during a test or browsing session. This metric is beneficial for understanding whether your design and layout make it easy for people to navigate a page or not. If you find that a particular AOI is showing a high rate of revisit rates, it might be that your content is a little confusing or that there is a design element causing distraction.

Getting started with eye tracking: best practices

Now that you understand how eye tracking works and you’re acquainted with essential techniques, we’re going to look at some top tips to help you get the most from your eye tracking test efforts:

Once you’ve established the aims and criteria of your test, allow your users to complete the process uninterrupted. Asking questions during the test itself is likely to distract your test subjects, skewing your results in the process.
Make sure that your participants remain within the monitoring range from start to finish. If a subject falls out of position, halt the test to ensure they are back in the monitoring range. Doing so will ensure the best quality data.
For qualitative testing and manual eye tracking, around five test subjects will typically offer the level of insight you need for the job. For heat maps and broader eye tracking studies, it’s recommended to use at least 39 test subjects for well-rounded and actionable results.
For mobile optimization tests, you should focus on the performance and value of your functional icons across devices; the precision of your error messaging; and the consistency as well as responsibility of your mobile design and layout.
To maximize your eye tracking efforts, working with customer experience optimization experts will help you run successful eye tracking-type tests that will return data that is aligned with your specific strategies and goals.

Final thoughts

“You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created. You have to rise above it to the next level.”

—Albert Einstein

Niche or sector aside, without knowing your audience and understanding how they interact with your business, you are merely shooting in the dark.

In an ever-evolving digital age, a data-driven approach to consumer research and UX optimization will help you meet your users’ needs head on while empowering you to adapt to constant change.

Eye tracking may not be the answer to all of your consumer-centric needs but this most innovative of sensor technology could easily play an important role in your ongoing marketing and development strategy.

There is no one-size-fits-all way to approach eye tracking—success will depend on your goals and needs as a business. But, by embracing the methods and techniques we’ve discussed, you will open yourself up to a treasure trove of data-driven insights that will accelerate the growth of your business.

We hope our guide to eye tracking has helped you on your way and for more business-boosting pearls of wisdom!

You might also like...

See all

Article

9min read

Heatmaps: Your Team’s Secret Weapon for Uncovering Website Gold

AB Tasty

Jun 24, 2025

Article

6min read

9 AI Features that Transform How Digital Teams Test, Learn, and Grow

Emily Healy

Jun 20, 2025

Article

7min read

From Search to Checkout: 10 Data-Driven E-commerce Trends for 2025

Maddie Ostrander

Jun 17, 2025