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Have you ever considered what your checkout page would be like in real life?

Google have made a great [and very funny] video that shows what some online checkout pages would be like if they existed in physical form in real life. All this guy wants is to buy a loaf of bread. You’d think it would be simple…

10 days, and over 100,000 views. Check it out:

Have you visualised your own checkout page?

When I first watched this video, I smiled; not because I thought it was funny, but because visualising checkout pages and registration processes is a technique I often use when considering how to improve conversion rates. It’s nice to know that this technique is more common than I previously imagined!

Would your checkout page make sense in real life?

Joking aside, I think this video raises a really good point: far too many online processes are illogical, unnecessarily complicated, and ultimately wouldn’t make sense in the real world. Considering what your process would look like as a physical offline activity might be the most valuable reality check you’ve ever embarked upon!

Be honest: is every step in your online process really that necessary? Really?

Quite often these complications creep in because of some perceived technical requirement or additional business logic requirement that an individual stakeholder managed to shoe-horn into the mix. It takes a really honest and brave development team to stand back and rationalise their processes and to check that each stage and requirement is there because the User needs it, not because the business wants it.

Once you’ve rationalised your process, measure it

Once you think you’ve got a logical process in place that is free of conversion barriers, then you really should consider how to measure your visitors’ behaviour for real. A good tool for this sort of measurement is with visitor heatmaps. Read this post on visitor heatmaps to learn more.

Let’s take action!