Paul Rouke

Paul is a consultant and trainer in usability & conversion optimisation with over 11 experience, working with clients including Speedo, Lakeland, Monsoon Accessorize, Stella McCartney, Bank of America, The Scout Association, Speedy Hire, Butlins and Pentland Brands (who own and manage brands including Berghaus, Kickers and Boxfresh).

Paul runs Manchester based usability and conversion optimisation consultancy PRWD (PRoductivity Without Difficulty), providing services including expert evaluations, user testing (moderated and remote), conversion rate optimisation, in-house consultancy and training to some of the UK’s most respected brands.

Previously he worked for 7 years in user experience at the UK’s biggest home shopping retail group, Shop Direct Group, starting in 1999 when the group first began exploring the potential of selling online to their millions of customers.

A responsive ecommerce masterclass from Nixon: part one

We are being asked more and more by our clients to provide support as they move towards responsive design. In particular our retail clients are aiming to deliver ‘best in class’ responsive ecommerce experiences for their visitors.

Couple this with them being committed to an optimisation strategy, and we are extremely excited about the potential to improve their online performance.

But the challenge is, with so few larger retailers with large product catalogues already having moved to a responsive design (and this doesn’t mean the ones that have are necessarily doing it well) where can inspiration be gained to deliver a best in class experience?

Enter stage left Nixon, which starts its about page text with ‘We make the little shit better’.

by Paul Rouke 29 April 2013 10:52am 12 comments

Will 2013 be the year of conversion optimisation?

For what feels like the last five years it has been predicted that "next year will be the year of mobile."

Well perhaps 2012 was finally that year in many aspects, and long live the multichannel shopper I say. So before I start seeing "2013 will be the year of the tablet", I'm hoping that 2013 will finally be the year of conversion optimisation.

To be more precise this is actually profit optimisation, but let’s not muddy the waters too much and just focus on the big C for now.

Here are the predictions from me and my team at PRWD for what 2013 has in store for the testing and optimisation industry. What do you think?

by Paul Rouke 19 December 2012 13:10pm 14 comments

Eight online shopping behaviour traits of men

Like Johnny Depp was once quoted as saying, I’m fascinated by human behaviour, by what’s underneath the surface, by the words inside people.

By spending considerable time with people using different websites in both their natural and controlled research environments, I’m able to cater for this satisfaction.

As a follow up to my nine women x nine hours = nine usability insights article, I am sharing some of the most prevalent behavioural traits of men when shopping online.

There will always be some differences and many of these have been observed with female consumers, but this list is very much up-to-date and representative of the male population.

If men are part of your target audience, which of the behaviours traits are you triggering or avoiding to persuade them to buy from you?

by Paul Rouke 19 November 2012 11:15am 21 comments

Nine valuable techniques to persuade visitors to buy in 2012

More and more of our time is spent helping our clients not only make their online experiences more usable but developing a persuasion strategy that will run through their online customer journey.

In order for us to be able to develop these persuasive strategies, the majority of our time is spent one-to-one with consumers, understanding what motivates them, observing their online behaviour and understanding how they are influenced to buy online with one retailer over another.

With all this in mind, as a follow up to my previous article, Nine women x nine hours = nine usability insights, this article details an up-to-date list of nine of the most influential persuasive techniques, in no particular order, that retailers are using to encourage visitors to buy in 2012.

by Paul Rouke 03 July 2012 10:39am 13 comments

Lings Cars and the art of persuading visitors to buy

Now and again you see a website so different to the norm that you can’t help but be intrigued. Lings Cars reverses perfectly in to that space.

The easy option here would be for me give the site a good going over with a usability stick, but I wouldn’t be the first to do that and quite frankly I don’t want to have Ling Valentine breathing now my neck and boxing me into submission....

Instead, what I want to hopefully do in this article is identify a wide range of persuasive, psychologically rooted design techniques that this website uses to a) build trust and then b) encourage you to hire.

Stay with me on this, I know when you first see the site you may well have a WTF moment and wonder how anyone would/could find their way around the site, but if you don’t know already Ling shifts quite a few cars over the course of the year: £35m in 2010 in fact.

by Paul Rouke 21 February 2012 10:55am 68 comments

Persuasive checkout best practice from ASOS

As a follow-up to my earlier article, Shopping basket best practice from ASOS, I’ve taken a look at the updated ASOS checkout experience. It includes one change which has reduced their checkout abandonment rate by 50%.

The ASOS website delivers an excellent browsing and shopping experience, and I regularly feature examples from the retailer in my e-commerce best practice training courses.

The updated checkout continues this trend, as the earlier version certainly didn’t fit in well with their highly tuned shopping experience up to checkout.

This article will recap on what ASOS is doing well on its shopping basket, look at how it is handling new customer checkout, and the variety of persuasive checkout lessons we can take from them as well as identifying a few areas of improvement.

by Paul Rouke 30 November 2011 10:14am 45 comments

Booking.com: improving conversion with best practice persuasive design

Persuasive design is something that has been around for many many years, not least in the way high street stores and supermarkets lay out their stores to encourage and entice customers to buy as they arrive and walk around.

In the online world, PET (persuasion, emotion, trust) is an approach that was pioneered by Human Factors International, and alongside usability and user experience, designing with persuasion in mind is an extremely powerful approach to positively impact on conversion rates.

In my experience, one site which has persuasion rooted in its design, content and layout is Booking.com.

In this article I provide a breakdown of some of the key persuasive elements that booking.com deliver.

by Paul Rouke 18 October 2011 11:15am 29 comments

67 questions usability testing can answer

From experience, usability testing is THE most enlightening and powerful activity that brands can carry out to answer an extensive range of questions which can be crucial to how their website performs.

As well as providing genuine evidence of what people are doing on websites, usability testing provides compelling insights as to WHY people are doing what they are doing. OK, stay with me on this, I know I’m not enlightening anyone so far with this statement…

The problem (or opportunity) is the term usability testing, or user testing, whichever you prefer to use. Testing is much more than just testing the ‘usability’ of a website, much more than just testing how affective a website is in achieving its goals.

by Paul Rouke 07 September 2011 13:11pm 5 comments

Checkout best practice revisited

It’s been over two years since I published an article on the Econsultancy blog entitled: Are retailers following best practice to improve conversion rates?

In that article I was specifically looking at the checkout processes of a variety of retailers, and in particular whether or not they have enclosed (or in other words removed site wide elements and distractions to focus the user) the process.

In this article I have revisited the retailers who featured in this article to see which of the retailers who didn’t enclose their checkouts then are now using this approach .

Enclosing the checkout is an approach I almost always recommend my retail clients adopt as a primary way of improving their checkout funnel conversion rate.

by Paul Rouke 07 June 2011 10:50am 1 comment

WTF does usability best practice actually mean?

What constitutes usability best practice for e-commerce? In fact, what makes something/anything 'best practice'?

I’m the first one to say that I regularly refer to ‘usability best practice’ and best practice is certainly a phrase used often enough by Econsultancy. I thought it would be worth starting a discussion on what you think when they hear this term, and what you feel justifies having the label ‘best practice’.

Or perhaps you feel it should just be banished from our industry!

by Paul Rouke 27 April 2011 13:32pm 22 comments