Designing for Conversion: A New Course Series to Level up Your Skills

Client retention is critical to any design business. Not only do you want to deliver improved design to clients, helping them find success, but you *also* want to see that client go on and make more sales, helping ensure they have the budget to re-hire you.In an effort to help you build a successful and sustainable business, we built Designing for Conversion—a new series of three courses, part of the Shopify Partner Academy.

Client retention is critical to any design business.

Not only do you want to deliver improved design to clients, helping them find success, but you want to see that client go on and make more sales, helping ensure they have the budget to re-hire you.

In an effort to help you build a successful and sustainable business, we built Designing for Conversion—a new series of three courses, part of the Shopify Partner Academy.

This collection of courses will help you and your team learn how to maximize sales and conversions through copywriting and informed ecommerce design. You will walk away with a core understanding of how to apply the principles of psychology to your designs, optimize the user experience on your clients’ stores, and increase conversions.

Why is design important to conversion?

Learning to design for conversion reduces your chances of delivering an email subscriber form at the wrong time, upselling that causes cart abandonment, and over use of persuasion techniques that cause buyers remorse or leave the customer feeling manipulated.

Instead, you will design sites rooted in an authentic and holistic experience. You will understand how user decisions are made and how an iterative approach to design can boost a website’s usability. By taking Designing for Conversion, you will walk away knowing these techniques and immediately apply them to your design services.

3 courses that will help you design to convert

Designing for Conversion contains three separate courses. Each course takes roughly 30 minutes to complete, and can be accessed in any particular order, so if you’re an expert on Shopify but need to brush up on pitching Shopify Plus, you’re able to access the course materials based on your needs.

Why take these courses?

As a business, you want to deliver a great redesign for your client and you want to see them go on to be a successful ecommerce business. Learning to design to convert ensures your design services have a better ROI.

If you’ve made a recent hire, taken on an intern, or are training internal staff, you can use Designing for Conversion to level up your staff to:

• Teach a business philosophy that boosts revenue for you and your clients through informed ecommerce UX
• Drive sales conversion with powerful copy that elevates your design and encourages action
• Maximize the value of your design work by focusing on evolving, testing, and optimizing store or app designs

What you will learn

In this series, you will learn how to test, iterate, and evolve your design process so that it’s focused on delivering sales for your clients.

Learn copywriting principles that encourage buyers to take action by creating a deliberate buyer’s journey. Know how to avoid creating friction and other harmful techniques, like dark patterns, that can leave buyers feeling manipulated. Learn these concepts to create a win-win situation for your clients and their customers, because great design doesn't always equal effective design.

Each course in this series contains quiz questions sprinkled throughout to test your knowledge, help you retain ecommerce design theories and concepts, and showcase informed examples using design principles so that you can clearly understand what to do and what not to do. These quizzes will help you confirm your understanding and retain the knowledge you’ve gained.

Read on to learn about each course, and how they will help you build strong designs for clients.

1. Introduction to Design Psychology

In this course, you will gain a deep understanding of the psychological principles that are essential in designing for conversion. Become a master of persuasion and design to increase conversions and boost sales on your clients' stores. This course will teach you how to:

• Influence decision making. Good design understands that we are not always logical. You will learn what makes for compelling ecommerce design; from having a logical information architecture to engaging visitors emotionally, you will walk away with a solid understanding of how to influence decisions with design. 
• Design for cognitive load. If users are required to over-think, they routinely miss essential information because they are busy decoding information that requires effort to process. You will learn to meet visitors where they are, reduce cognitive load, and help streamline the user experience on a site. 
• Leverage defaults. Designers use defaults when they know that most users will answer in a certain way (e.g. installation wizards for new software). Learn how to use default settings on your clients' sites, create smart defaults to reduce cognitive load, and make decision making easy for users.
• Be more persuasive. The pressure to increase conversion rates on ecommerce sites is relentless. There is a fine line between persuading users to buy more with ethical persuasion practices, and leaving them feeling frustrated and manipulated. You will learn how to align your tactics with the needs and expectations of the audience, and how to use behavioral psychology to persuade users to purchase without having negative consequences.

2. Design Principles and Techniques

Design is just one element of a finely tuned ecommerce site optimized for conversion; another critical aspect is copywriting. In course two, you will learn the art of compelling copy that encourages users to take action as well as how to consider and implement practical design elements. This course will teach you how to:

• Drive user action. A well-designed ecommerce site is a lot more than an obvious add-to-cart button. You will learn how to cement a brand in a user’s mind, remove distractions, and deliver a call to action at the right time in a user’s purchase journey.
• Create compelling copy. Whether you are trying to encourage social signups or the purchase of products, the copy associated with that call to action is crucial to conversion. Move past verbose copy and learn how to craft copy that converts.
• Maximize call to action visibility. If a user is in a rush, distracted, or overwhelmed by a site, it can be easy for them to miss a call to action. You will learn how design animations, contrasting, and coloring not only draws the eye, but how negative space, positioning, and imagery can funnel users towards call to actions.
• Counter cart abandonment. Cart abandonment is what makes or breaks an ecommerce business. You will learn how to remove distractions, streamline the checkout process with positive reinforcement, and create a sense of positive progression that fuels action for your clients.

3. Design Testing and Iteration

In course three, you will discover what it takes to test, measure, and iterate on your designs. Learn techniques you can use to improve conversation and boost sales, including a deep dive on usability testing and multivariate testing. This course will teach you how to:

• Optimize through user testing. Identify any usability hurdles and explore ways to address underperforming parts of a website. Learn how to use usability testing in-person or remotely at any stage of the development process, from testing a users response to hand-drawn wireframes to production-ready code.
• Make usability a priority. Usability of a website is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful one. Learn usability measurement techniques to know how to benchmark task success rates, task completion, and error rates that help you design websites that result in increased conversions.
• Master analytics. Analytics give you quantitative data that provides insights into the conversion funnel of an ecommerce purchase journey. Identify what’s responsible for a decline in sales, whether that’s offsite advertising or drop-offs on the credit card entry page.
• Optimize after launch. How do you keep a well designed site delivering conversions after launch? Measure and optimize! Learn how to use tools like a session recorder to gather vital insight into how customers use a client’s site, see what users are doing on a page and identify specific stumbling blocks. Setup A/B or multivariate tests, and see what level of discount delivers more click rates or conversions.

To view a list of all three designing for conversion courses, login to your Shopify Partner Dashboard, and visit the Resources section.

Get started with Designing for Conversion today

Get clients started on their trajectory to becoming a successful business by optimizing their website for conversion through design and great copy. A well designed and written website is a powerful tool in any business. Learning these skills can be your business’ competitive edge that wins you new clients and keeps current ones on retainer.