Try Before You Buy

Your constantly-updated definition of Try Before You Buy and collection of topical content and literature

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What is Try Before You Buy?

Try before you buy is a principle of conversion-centered design that brands use to offer free content (e.g., apps) for limited-time or limited-feature use. It is a measurable strategy to foster brand loyalty. When users sample an item fully or partly, they can see if they should invest their money or information in it.

“I don’t care how much money you have, free stuff is always a good thing.”

— Queen Latifah, Popstar

Try before you buy is common for digital services, but webshops like Amazon use it for physical products as well. See how you might apply it in your own design projects.

Let Users “Test-Drive” Choice Features with Try Before You Buy

Free limited-time or limited-feature use of services or products is a powerful, time-tested user-conversion strategy. A brand that lets users sample what it has to offer can strengthen its credibility and distinguish itself better than one that doesn’t. When you use try before you buy, you should make sure you:

Immediately let users explore an item at their leisure—though with a limited feature set—or enjoy the full version for a trial period.
Provide value to users before you prompt them with a call to action.
Leverage behavioral economics to make users feel greater ownership of an item, which they’ll then be less likely to give up.

The digital forms of try before you buy vary (e.g., music snippets, game demos). However, they all involve the same premise—the power of free. You give users something so they can decide if it’s worthwhile to invest in the privilege of full access or ownership. Try before you buy doesn’t necessarily mean you must entice users to spend money. You can also apply it to encourage them to register personal information. For example, anyone can watch uploaded videos on YouTube anonymously. It’s only when users want to interact more intimately (e.g., comment) that YouTube prompts them to invest—in this case, register. The success of this approach comes from:

Immediate payoff (i.e., watch anything now).
Minimal registration effort afterwards (i.e., no upfront barriers, which deter over 85% of users who would otherwise have become customers).

Netflix prompts users to create an account before the free trial.

How to Entice Users with Try Before You Buy

Users typically dislike registration prompts. They know they may get annoying marketing pitches if they give their email addresses. Some register with false details. It’s perfectly natural for them to be suspicious that brands which are hungry for their information will also be hungry for their money. A good way for you to overcome their suspicions is to treat them as guests—offer generous trial periods and generous access to desirable content. Consider which of the following actions may be suitable for your design project:

Offer guarantees and clear notifications (e.g., about cookies) to reinforce trust and brand loyalty.
Include opt-in/opt-out checkboxes insightfully, so users stay in full control and any persuasion you give them to act is gentle—never trick them.
Ensure users can ignore registration and continue as guests (with the free version) or tell them how many uses they have left before they have to register (with the full version).
Approach users who have sampled but are unresponsive and offer them incentives/deals.
Offer high-resolution previews (e.g., e-book samples).
Let users create drafts using their own content (e.g., writing samples).
Let guest users check out, but tell them about account-holder benefits for their next purchase.
Apply freemium (gaming) features such as paid upgrades cautiously.

Above all, when you offer users free trials of premium items, you should make these last long enough for them to appreciate all the benefits without interruption. For free versions, decide on appropriate levels of functionality. Remember, any free version must still be good enough to represent the brand. Users shouldn’t be dissatisfied with performance. They should want to have an even better premium version. The value you provide users when you give them free samples should drive conversion because it’s a huge part of how they judge what your brand is worth.

Learn More about Try Before You Buy

You can learn more about try before you buy in our course on the psychology of e-commerce: https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/psychology-of-e-commerce-how-to-sell-online

See what UX Planet says about first impressions and try before you buy: https://uxplanet.org/mobile-app-ux-design-making-a-great-first-impression-bed2805b967d

This blog examines the snowballing impact of try before you buy: https://www.hughesandco.ca/blog/leveraging-the-trend-of-try-before-you-buy

Here’s a thought-provoking piece that explores try before you buy and AR: https://blog.prototypr.io/is-augmented-reality-the-future-of-ux-34d20d7d22d7

Literature on Try Before You Buy

Here’s the entire UX literature on Try Before You Buy by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

The Seven Simple Principles of Conversion Centred Design (CCD) and How to Use Them

Oli Gardner – the Creative Director of Unbounce (a landing page builder for marketers), is an advocate of CCD. He says that deploying CCD makes each page you create on a website a piece of “accountable content”. In that you can measure the impact, purpose and success of each page as that page plays a part in converting visitors into customers. Design is often about solving problems. Many of the problems that designers work on are user-oriented problems. However, there is another consideration when it comes to problem-solving; solving business-oriented problems.

Conversion Centred Design (CCD) exists to help designers create user experiences that drive a single business goal. [Tweet this]

That might be as simple as clicking to another page or as complex as ensuring a sale or registration on a website.

Conversely CCD makes it easy to determine when a design is unsuccessful because it fails to play its part in converting visitors into customers. As with all things design CCD is a hybrid between art (the visual, UX and content design) and a science (the measuring and analysing of the results).

Oli offers 7 principles which he says are the core of making CCD work for you on your design projects:

Encapsulation
Contrast
Direction cues
The Use of Lots of White Space
Urgency and Scarcity
Try Before You Buy
Social Proof

Let’s see them in detail and with some examples!

The 7 Principles of CCD

The First Principle of CCD – Encapsulation

Encapsulation is the wrapping that you put the most important content in. Rather like the wrapping paper we use to draw someone’s attention to their present on their birthday; the idea is to make it clear to the visitor that the content is important to them.

What do you wrap in CCD? The content that triggers the action that you desire; it it’s a click that’s required make the button big and interesting. If it’s a sign up; call attention to it.

Examples of encapsulation (social media buttons):

Author/Copyright holder: Free Stock Images. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

The Second Principle of CCD – Contrast

Put a big red button on a bright red background and what happens? It becomes indistinguishable from the background.

In CCD it’s not the colours that you use that matter – it’s the contrast from the background that matters. [Tweet this]

If your call to action blends in with everything else, who will see it?No-one that’s who. Make stuff stand out using contrast. White on black.Green on red.Not sure how to create the greatest levels of contrast? Check out the colour star below (points that are opposite each other offer the greatest levels of contrast):

Author/Copyright holder: Kwamikagami. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 4.0

The Third Principle of CCD – Direction Cues

In CCD you want to make it as easy as possible for your customers to take action that means building your pages so that they point the way to the action you want them to take. You can use arrows to highlight attention to specific areas on screen or triangulate to create a focal point. When you use photos use the line of sight to point out the call to action.

With the photograph shown here – you would want the call to action placed directly in the baby’s eye line to help the viewer know where to go next:

Author/Copyright holder: Pixabay. Copyright terms and licence: Free to use

The Fourth Principle of CCD – The Use of Lots of White Space

The more white space the better, the less cluttered that your designs are – the easier it’s going to be for the view to decide where they are supposed to take action. This also makes it simpler to communicate a single key message to your user.

There’s no better example of the powerful use of white space than the Google homepage.

Author/Copyright holder: Emperyan. Copyright terms and licence: Public Domain

The Fifth Principle of CCD – Urgency and Scarcity

If you want people to take action now; you have to give them a reason to do so. Psychology says that you can drive people to action by limiting their decision making time. You can do this either by making the resource scarce “Only 7 cameras left at this price – then they go up to $999” or by making the time scarce “Only 23 minutes left to order for delivery tomorrow morning!”

Ideally you want to place these messages as close to the call to action as possible.

As you can see in this shot from Amazon’s website – this special price is limited and already 35% of the bundled items have been claimed. The message is clear “take action now or miss out”.

Author/Copyright holder: Unknown. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use

The Sixth Principle of CCD – Try Before You Buy

If you’ve ever been to a supermarket and been offered a sample of a product; you weren’t offered that sample out of the manufacturer’s generosity. It helps you decide to buy a product if you can be sure that you’ll like it. So while it might not be possible to give someone a sip of Cola or a slice of cheese online; you can duplicate this idea digitally.

Think about giving away a synopsis of a report or a sample chapter from a book or the first 10 minutes of your latest training video.

The idea is simple, it provides customers with reassurance that your product is worth their investment. Even when that investment is only an e-mail address.

Here’s an example from The Reading Room which gives away free preview chapters of books that it sells:

Author/Copyright holder: Unknown. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use

The Seventh Principle of CCD – Social Proof

The final key to sealing a deal is for the visitor to trust you enough to make the leap of faith required to become a customer. One of the simplest ways to help build that trust is to deliver “social proof” which is simply feedback on how other customers and visitors have felt about your products and services.

It can be in the form star ratings (like the ones in the Reading Room example above) or full testimonials like the one below from Legal and General (the insurer):

It’s always a good idea (like above) to add just a little explanation with a testimonial to make it clear that that’s what it is.

An Example of CCD in Action – Wistia.Com

Let’s take a look at the landing page of Wistia and see which rules of CCD they follow:

Author/Copyright holder: Unknown. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use

“Create account” is fully encapsulated and it’s clearly contrasting with the background. There’s not much choice on screen at all and that leaves plenty of room for whitespace and clear direction (fill in the form – please). They also offer a try-before-you-buy option “All of our plans come with a 2-week free trial… make sure you’re happy before paying us a dime.”

In fact, the only things missing are a little social proof and scarcity. It’s important to note that you do not have to fit every CCD concept into every page you design – you just need to ensure that you include a focus on enough principles that it evokes a call to action.

Why did we choose Wistia for this example? HubSpot picked it as the best landing page of 2015.

The Take Away

CCD is a new concept in design and Oli Gardner of Unbounce is its leading practitioner. However, the intent of CCD is not new at all. Website owners and companies seek conversions; it’s the number one business issue that they want to tackle.

While your designs still need to appeal to your users, in order for them to be accepted and successful, it’s also important that they tackle real business problems – if they don’t then no-one is going to be willing to pay for them.

Putting CCD into practice is simply a question of using the principles of encapsulation, contrast, direction cues, whitespace, urgency and scarcity, try before you buy and social proof.

References

Want to hear the story of Conversion Centred Design as told by Oli Gardener himself? Find it here http://www.shutterstock.com/blog/the-7-principles-of-conversion-centered-design-for-landing-pages

Want to examine the best landing pages of 2015 and then put them in context with your understanding of CCD? Find the landing pages here: http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/landing-page-examples-list

Learn more about Try Before You Buy

Take a deep dive into Try Before You Buy with our course Psychology of E-Commerce: How to Sell Online .

“Customer engagement is the direct route to every important business objective. It’s the pathway to everything good that a business could want.”

— Customer Experience expert Micah Solomon in Forbes

Online competition is fiercer than ever—and if you want to create a website that outperforms industry benchmarks in a big way, it’s vital that you know how to utilize your design skills to keep users engaged. The more engaged users are, the more likely they are to turn into paying customers—people who will buy your products and services time and time again, remain loyal, and ultimately become ambassadors for your brand both on- and offline.

Executing e-commerce successfully isn't easy: 69% of users abandon their shopping carts before checking out, according to Baymard Institute, a UK-based web usability research organization. That’s quite scary; what about the good news? Well, Baymard also found that many of the problems with e-commerce are solvable with changes to design.

There are many factors in designing great e-commerce experiences. You must know how to capture someone’s attention and present your goods and services in the optimal way. If you want customers who are committed, you’ll have to tell engaging stories and know how to build a long-term relationship.

In order to do all that, you will need to acquire and apply knowledge in human psychology. If you understand how your customers think, you can design for their needs. This course is based on tried and tested psychological techniques that bring together content and design so as to deliver hands-on advice for how to improve your web design and increase your customer engagement.

All Literature

Oli Gardner – the Creative Director of Unbounce (a landing page builder for marketers), is an advocate of CCD. He says t

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