Testing Mind Map Series: How to Think Like a CRO Pro (Part 60)

Interview with Linda Bustos

Every couple of weeks, we get up close and personal with some of the brightest minds in the CRO and experimentation community.

We’re on a mission to discover what lies behind their success. Get real answers to your toughest questions. Share hidden gems and unique insights you won’t find in the books. Condense years of real-world experience into actionable tactics and strategies.

This week, we’re chatting with Linda Bustos, owner & content creator at Ecom Ideas, a comprehensive catalog of ecommerce ideas and articles for product managers, developers, UX designers, CRO pros, agencies, and consultants.

Linda, tell us about yourself. What inspired you to get into ecommerce UX?

I started my career as an SEO specialist for a web design agency which naturally included information architecture, which has a lot of crossover with web UX. I picked up Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” and Jakub Nielsen’s “Ecommerce User Experience” books to up my skills for an ecommerce client I was working with, and it was over for me.

I was hooked on commerce then and there, and within a year I moved into full time blogging about the industry for the Elastic Path blog “Get Elastic.” Since then, I’ve stayed in ecommerce across a variety of roles including conversion consultant, product manager and VP of Ecommerce.

How many years have you been covering the industry?

This year it will be 18 years.

What’s the one resource you recommend to aspiring testers & optimizers?

If you’re just starting out and want to learn basic principles and how to set up tests within a tool, Ruben de Boer from Online Dialogue has great Udemy courses you can take on demand.

Once you have the basics, I built the Ecom Ideas database to keep you brimming with testing ideas to consider (shameless plug)

Answer in 5 words or less: What is the biggest challenge for ecommerce experimenters?

Optimizing mobile PDPs.

What UX features and testing trends are “in” for 2024?

Product finders are trending because brands are trying to overcome challenges collecting cookies and 1p data. They also enable a streamlined way to discover products without fiddling with search, mobile menus and category filters.

But they need to be treated like any conversion flow – too many steps and it’s poor user experience and poor conversion. Too few steps and your results aren’t great. It’s hard to A/B test because so many variables lie inside one multi-step experience, but it’s a big opportunity for teams that dig into it.

The PDP is another area of focus, the bulk of traffic arrives to product pages, not the home page or collections. Pages need to surface the right information and calls to action above the fold, while still providing easy to navigate deep content. Putting product descriptions inside the image gallery (designing “infographic” style image tiles) is a huge area of opportunity.

What UX features and testing trends are “out” for 2024?

CROs need to stop relying on “quick win” tests as a way to keep tests moving through the pipeline and focus on more value-based solutions for identified user problems.

This takes more user research and data analysis and often requires working with product management and development. But solution-oriented changes are more likely to move the needle than iterating on small and simple UI tweaks.

What was the most surprising ecommerce A/B test you’ve been a part of?

I’m not a fan of scrolling marquee bars at the top of the screen, I find them distracting and irritating. But a client pushed to test them against static messages (control) and user-controlled carousel with < and > controls (variant B) and guess which won. Yup, the autoscroll!

Huge thanks to Linda for generously sharing her expertise with us. This kind of hard-won wisdom is pure gold. To all you optimizers out there, hopefully Linda’s insights provided some useful food for thought as you continuously level up your skills.

We have fresh interviews dropping twice a month, so bookmark this blog and check back often. And if you missed any of our previous convos with CRO pros, now’s the time to get caught up and give these a read: Gursimran Gujral, Haley Carpenter, Rishi Rawat, Sina Fak, Eden Bidani, Jakub Linowski, Shiva Manjunath, Deborah O’Malley, Andra Baragan, Rich Page, Ruben de Boer, Abi Hough, Alex Birkett, John Ostrowski, Ryan Levander, Ryan Thomas, Bhavik Patel, Siobhan Solberg, Tim Mehta, Rommil Santiago, Steph Le Prevost, Nils Koppelmann, Danielle Schwolow, Kevin Szpak, Marianne Stjernvall, Christoph Böcker, Max Bradley, Samuel Hess, Riccardo Vandra, Lukas Petrauskas, Gabriela Florea, Sean Clanchy, Ryan Webb, Tracy Laranjo, Lucia van den Brink, LeAnn Reyes, Lucrezia Platé, Daniel Jones, May Chin, Kyle Hearnshaw, Gerda Vogt-Thomas, Melanie Kyrklund, Sahil Patel, Lucas Vos, David Sanchez del Real, Oliver Kenyon, David Stepien, Maria Luiza de Lange, Callum Dreniw, Shirley Lee, Rúben Marinheiro, Lorik Mullaademi, Sergio Simarro Villalba, Georgiana Hunter-Cozens, Asmir Muminovic, Edd Saunders, Marc Uitterhoeve, Zander Aycock, and our latest with Eduardo Marconi Pinheiro Lima.