Career Changes: Holiday Distractions

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

As 2020 winds down, I fluctuate between feeling relief that the year is coming to an end and being afraid of what 2021 holds. It kinda feels like the end of a horror movie when the hero finally kills the monster but doesn’t believe it’s truly dead and has to shoot a few extra times just to make sure.

Especially with the vaccine being still so far off from reaching the masses, I’m worried about a second outbreak. I’m concerned about the economic fallout of being shut down for the better part of the year. I’m worried about my elderly relatives who are vulnerable to being infected.

The pandemic is like nothing I, or anyone, has ever seen before. So I’m having trouble being optimistic about 2021.

However, I’m oddly confident that things couldn’t possibly get any worse than this. Like what could happen that’s worse than what we’ve already been through? A zombie apocalypse? I don’t believe in Zombies. Aliens invade the earth? The nearest planet is millions of miles away. We’d see them coming (I think).

Famine and pestilence? If there was going to be a food shortage, I think we’d already see the signs. Also, what are the chances of a second outbreak of disease in my lifetime? Pretty low, judging from history.

While I’m worried about the future, I’m cautiously hopeful about the future.

The Saga Continues: Holiday Studying

Trying to study during the holidays is becoming more and more difficult as the year advances.

It’s not like I’m bouncing from party to party. I’m not (social distancing and all). This week my distractions came in the form of Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

I knew companies were going to be having unbelievable sales. Boy, was I not disappointed. CXL offered an additional 30% off of their training programs on Cyber Monday. I squeezed out the funds for an annual subscription. Yay!

Their prices were already low, so I was surprised that they were offering further discounts. But I moved to quickly snatch it up. Now I have access to all their mini degrees. I can’t wait to finish up the Conversion Optimization mini degree and move on to the next one on my list, Technical Content Marketing.

One thing that I’ve learned in 2020 is the importance of having skills that you can use to make money, with or without a job. For me, being dependent on a single job is a recipe for disaster. So I continue in my quest to be the best Conversion Copywriter that I can be.

User Research

Photo by Anna Auza on Unsplash

This week I started the User Research course. User Research focuses on understanding people’s goals, needs, and wants.

The goal of User Research is to understand who your users are, what they do, what they believe, and how you can use that understanding to create better experiences and deliver greater business value.

While I 100% percent agree that User Research must be done in order to deliver better value to customers, I do wonder if the course delves too much into the product development side of things. I was left wondering where I’m supposed to draw the line between research for a landing page, for example, and research for improving the user experience for product usage. As a conversion copywriter am I supposed to even be involved in that?

Why Everyone Should Be Doing More User Research

This module started off by explaining what User Research is (understanding our users so we can build better experiences for them) and what it is not (Market research).

It highlighted the benefits of User Research, which has shown to help:

• increase user productivity
• increase user satisfaction
• increase retention
• improve the quantity and quality of customer referrals
• increase sales
• decrease development costs
• reduce user errors
• lower training and support costs
• lower the amount of time to meaningful user activation

I learned that User Research allows you to uncover insights and behaviors about your users that you wouldn’t have understood or gotten from any other method.

How Different Research Techniques will Help You Answer Different Questions

In this module, I learned that research is not valuable unless it helps your organization achieve its goals. You may find out a piece of information that is interesting, but if it doesn’t lead your company closer to achieving its goals. Therefore, it’s useless.

I like how everything in research ties back to meeting organizational goals. So when developing research questions you must start with goals, as they help define the questions.

After that, we moved on to the different types of questions to ask. Different questions require different tools to gain insight, such as:

• Behavioral Research Methods
• Attitudinal Research Methods

Finally, we looked at different methods and the different times to apply them. Essentially, you do research at whatever stage you are at and the earlier you research, the better.

Listening to What People Say

We looked at how and when to use interviews and surveys as research methods. Interviews are really good at helping you uncover things you didn’t know before. While surveys take existing insights or beliefs about people’s demographics or attitudes and try to generalize them across a population.

We looked at the 3 step plan for conducting a useful interview, which are:

1. Define your goals for your interview
2. Create a data collection template based on these goals
3. Conduct the interview. Let the conversation flow. Ask “why” a lot.

We also looked at sources of errors in surveys, such as:

1. Coverage error — occurs when you are not able to survey a representative sample of the population you are studying.
2. Sampling error — Arise from the fact that you are not measuring everyone in the target population; you are only surveying a portion of them.
3. Measurement error — occurs when the way you choose to measure something leads to inaccurate data
4. Non-response error — occurs when some groups within your survey complete the survey less than other groups.

Watching What People Do

This is where I feel the course delves a bit into the product development side. Here we’re looking at building useful, actionable tests to make sure we’re building a product that delivers a great experience.

In conversion copywriting I’m used to hearing about understanding customers’ pain points, wants, and desires in a bid to refect it on a landing page, for example. But this course is looking at user research with the goal of improving the product. I feel this will take me off course and increase the scope of a project exponentially.

With that being said, I find this aspect of product development very intriguing. Researching your users before product development, during product development, and after product development would probably reduce the amount of time and money, a company stands to lose in the long run.