It goes like this. Some journalist was exploring photographs of some old events, the Titanic ship sinking, World War two, and similar historical events, but here when the events started to get interesting, he discovered that there was a person wearing the same clothes, a black hat, and a black coat, appeared in all these eveStillhotographs. Still, I remember this moment of childhood excitement.

- Now, with a spoiler alert -

By the story going, by the end of the movie, the journalist discovers that this mysterious man in the historical photos was a time traveler because (obviously) in the future, there will be tourism companies that organize time travel trips. This man was just a regular customer.

And I don’t even remember how he discovered that… but anyway...

Do you remember watching a movie with a similar plot? I still want to remember it’s name!

Recently I came across this amazing Twitter account @StelfieTT, the creator defines himself as:

"Hi, I'm Stelfie.

I do not exist in real life, in fact I'm a fictional time travel character created in 3d and developed with a joint effort Artist and AI.

Thanks to modern technology I've had the opportunity to build a solar powered time machine and use it to showcase the multiple stelfies I take during my journeys".

That reminded me A LOT of that mysterious movie I told you about.

Some creative and inspiring ideas he introduced (or he and AI to give AI some well-deserved credit).

With AI-generated art, fully or partly booming everywhere, I wish to see similar creative and very well-executed ideas.

Building the Pyramids:

Helping Hemingway writing with ChatGPT.

Hang out with Tesla.

Getting a punch from Muhammad Ali

Einstein doesn’t seem amused.

Same for Freud.

Yet there are single movies that can make you happy for days.

To me, The Hand of God is one of them. The beautiful Italian movie was written and directed by one of my favorite living directors Paolo Sorrentino. It's a semi-autobiography of his life in Napoli during the 1980s, about his relationship with his family, his relationship with books, literature, and music, his relationship with the city, his inspirations, and his relationship with cinema.

Equally important was his relationship with Diego Armando Maradona when he came to play in the Napoli football club. Not just his relationship, but the whole city's relationship with Maradona. He wasn't just a football player joining their club. To the people of Napoli, watching Maradona was a holy act, was a political movement. it was crazy. It was a complete form of love and passion, and more importantly, for the young Paolo to learn perseverance to follow his own path.

This is one of the movies that remind me why I love cinema in the first place.

And definitely, one watch isn't enough to grasp all the details and the stories connected to other movies of Paolo Sorrentino.

Sometimes I need to start a quick project, and I need basic styling for elements like buttons and form elements, without anything advanced that large libraries provide. Projects like Simple.css are helpful in these situations.

TypeScript Cheat Sheets

These days I'm learning TypeScript. On the Typescript website, I found these cheat sheets. They are designed nicely and help to fast recall a feature or a concept especially if many of TypeScript concepts are new to you. ex.:

Could Rust be the Future of JavaScript Infrastructure?

In this article, the author studies the direction of using Rust language at several use cases in the Frontend & JS tooling area. I found it especially useful to make projects like Webpack, ESLint, Prettier, and Babel faster. As I’m using these tools on different projects and it’s obvious when projects get bigger how much it affects everyday development performance.

Also, other exciting projects built with Rust, but I’m not using currently though maybe in the future, like Deno and WebAssembly.

Of course, Rust isn’t the only choice for better performance options for Web tools. Go is also a good choice. Although I see the support from Mozilla and maintainers would go more into the direction of choosing Rust in this area.

In the image above, you can see the number million or the word “many” in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, and according to Wikipedia, it was pronounced as “Heh” or "Huh” in English. I learned this from the book, and I felt this “Huh!” multiple times while reading it.

Last year after reading the book Sapiens (If you didn't read it, highly recommended!), I wanted to read more history books, and the book series The Story of Civilization was on my list for a long time.

The series is eleven volumes (including subseries), and Our Oriental Heritage is the first one published during the 1950s. You can consider it a panoramic view of the history or, as one commented on it in Goodreads, a gift to humanity!

Will Durant did a fantastic job of drawing a detailed picture of the story of civilization, from the pre-history and how primitive tribes lived, ate, slept, married, etc.

Then went throw Egypt, and several areas in the middle east, then to Persia, India, China, and finished the first volume in Japan.

Across all of these civilizations, you can see a complete (or almost complete) picture of how people lived, how the social structure looked like, internal and external politics, and how they saw and tasted culture, literature, and art.

In between speaking about collective societies, the book detours great characters who lived in these civilizations. I especially liked the parts about Gautama Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi, and Confucius. I plan to also read more about them in the future.

Worth mentioning that since the book is almost seventy years old, some facts became outdated, and new discoveries corrected them. However, if you aren't a specialized historian, it wouldn't matter that much to enjoy it still.

I would definitely continue the series. The next volume is The Life of Greece 🏛⛵️

Several quotes from the book that I added to my quotes list:

Fasting is like the eyes but for the internal — Mahatma Gandhi

The aim of learning is not merely to widen knowledge, but to form character.

Don’t let a day slip by without enjoyment, don’t allow yourself to be tormented by the stupidity of others, remember that from its earliest beginnings, the world has never been free from fools. Let us then not stress ourselves or lose our pleasure.

or staying at net cafe's private rooms:

I think all the videos are without the channel creator's voice, so you kind of travel with him and only get his thoughts or notes within English subtitles.

The videos are calm and focus on unique local places, not touristic places.

This is nice and different from other travel vlogs with people shouting and jumping around, showing you the fantastic things they are experiencing.

I wish to visit Japan one day. Until that happens, digital experiences like these are good.

Another travel blog is Walking the World, The first post I read was Walking the World: Bucharest. The blog/newsletter writer here also has a similar approach to our other friend in Japan, but this time in a written format.

He documented his walks around the streets of Bucharest. I liked the attention to detail and the attempt to document what real life in these streets looks like and away from the usual touristic places.

There are other walks documented, but mainly in the US. Worth reading.

Nine is pronounced like the letter Q in the Japanese language, so it’s an alternate title for 1984. The novel runs in multiple realities (or parallel times), one in the normal year 1984 and the other is in year 1Q84.

The two parallel timelines seemed to start to split when Aomame and Tengo were kids at school, then as if the time (and space) splat.

“Life is not like water. Things in life don't necessarily flow over the shortest possible route.”

“What we call the present is given shape by an accumulation of the past.”

I really like the writing style of Murakami. Reading Murakami flow easily, not sure how he does that exactly.

In one interview, he said he tries to write as if he is playing or composing music. So to make writing good, it has to flow easily like music, especially like Jazz.

Murakami also is careful with creating memorable scenes. Even you don’t remember everything after finishing his books; certain scenes will stay in your memory once you remember the book. Not every book does the same.

I wouldn’t consider 1Q84 my favorite. I would rate it 3/5. I think it could have been shorter.

On top of that, of course, comes Twitter.

At one point, I decided to depend on Twitter to follow all the blogs and people I wanted to follow. I mainly use the Twitter lists to categorize that, for example, a list for Tech, Books, Movies, Sports, etc.

But I noticed after some time using Twitter that I stopped reading longer format of blog posts or articles. The only long-form of reading became either kindle books or audiobooks. Twitter makes it easy only to read short forms of writing (well, it’s the main idea of Twitter, you can’t complain about that), but as a side effect, it became harder for me to find and concentrate on reading longer format blog posts.

I'm thinking about using RSS readers again. I missed doing that for a while now. At least the longer reads will become in one place.

I tried Inoreader, and it seems fine for what I want to do. It also has a way to subscribe to newsletters to keep my email inbox a little bit cleaner.

I also found that you can subscribe to Twitter feeds using it. But the reading experience isn't that good compared to Twitter.

Around 2008 Twitter was supporting RSS. At that time, the experience was a bit comparable. But Twitter doesn’t support RSS anymore, and RSS readers still don’t match the reading experience of Twitter. It seems all of the modern RSS readers are still trying to clone the old Google Reader.

Yet, all RSS readers are providing more freedom in how you can sort the content without forced algorithms like in Twitter.

Maybe I will end up keeping both. Keep Twitter for what it is good at. Although it's not a happy solution since it means more time is needed to keep track of things. But each solution isn't good enough alone.

Maybe a better solution will come up. (?)

Adding hit games like Activision Blizzard games to Xbox/PC library is a big win for Microsoft for the current years and their strategic aspirations towards the Metaverse.

Speaking of strategy.

I wish Microsoft would think about publishing new versions in the Real-time strategy genre that Activision Blizzard built then abandoned, like StarCraft 2 and WarCraft (The RTS version).

Out of this deal. I wish for StarCraft 3, and I'm good! 😄

The story (without spoilers) is about Rodriguez, a musician who lived in the United States early 1970s. But he didn't have so much success till he disappeared from the musical scene and continued working in construction work for years!

What he - and no one else knew at the time - (life before the INTERNET). That while the music business gave up on him in the US, his songs were a HUGE SUCCESSFUL HIT on the other side of the world, specifically in South Africa, to the point that protesters were singing his songs in the streets.

They didn't know who this guy was. Someone probably brought a copy of his album via cassette tape with no information about the singer whatsoever!

The idea is just crazy, random, and unfair! but what can you do 🤷🏻‍♂️…

The documentary didn't end there but revealed more twists. So I will try not to spoil it more. It's worth watching. The documentary execution is good, the music is very good, and the story again is crazy.

Some of Rodriguez best songs are here :

A part of the documentary (spoiler alert):

The idea is similar to Geocities - also the designs ❤️ -, it’s hosting websites for independent and creative websites in 2022. > See some examples.

I loved the idea, primarily for nostalgic reasons, but also to encourage the realization of the need to have free creative internet.

Maybe I will try to create a website on it for fun once.

Speaking of technical nostalgia. Recently, I watched this modern review for Sega Genesis, the popular game console released in 1988.

I spent SO MANY hours playing with when I was young, much younger 👴🏼. For me, it was the official gaming solution at home. Just after the end of the Atari era ❤️ and before the start of the PC gaming era ❤️.

I loved the modern review idea and the discussions between people who played with it in the past and younger people who were exploring it for the first time.

Yesterday I was talking with a friend about my memories of Atari. I think that could be a good topic for another post!

More about technical nostalgia (because why not).

The creator of Prince of Persia (oh 👦🏻) talks about the technical challenges to creating the game and how he did a video record of his brother jumping in the garden to make the game's main character. Overcoming the technical limitations of that time was AMAZING when you see with the eyes of today’s technology.

One more nostalgia turn. Then I will finish this post. Here Sid Meier talks about the history of the Civilization game and the decision behind making it a turn-based instead of Real-Time Strategy game. I mean… I mean… Civilization as turn-based is good and a phenomenon on its own. But I could have loved it muuuch more if they had enough money to make to apply their visions—just another one of (the what-ifs).

Well, there is no easy way to say that, but 98% of Facebook revenue is coming from online ads. So it’s not a big surprise that they are one of the most affected companies by both surges of usage as people are using Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp more heavily, and decrease of marketing spend on ads on its platform. So ads for Facebook are basically a matter of existence.

So It is smart - or a strategic necessity as I will explain in a minute - that they are trying to find different revenue streams.

In the last Facebook's earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said:

I have always believed that in times of economic downturn, the right thing to do is to keep investing in building the future, and I believe this for a few reasons. First, when the world changes quickly, people have new needs and that means that there are more new segments to build. Second, since many big companies will pull back on their investments, there are a lot of things that wouldn’t otherwise get built, but that we can help deliver.[..] we’re planning to hire at least 10,000 more people in product and engineering roles this year, so we can continue building and making progress.

Mark Zuckerberg - Facebook earnings call 2020 Q1

Afterward, Facebook invested $5.7 billion for a 9.99% stake in India's Reliance Jio Platforms as the largest single investment in Facebook's history.

Jio Platforms is connecting more than 388 million people in India to the internet. And if we look at the following chart. The number of internet India is so high in comparison with the US and EU.

That is not the first try from Facebook to enter the Indian market. They saw India as the future for growth since 2013. But their attempts failed in 2016 after regulation blockers over Free Internet Initiative and providing payment solution for WhatsApp.

This time they tried a different approach by partnering with Reliance Jio, the largest telecom provider in India, To avoid getting in conflict with the Indian government direction to empower the Indian companies.

This investment has three main strategic advantages:

1- Facebook + Instagram vs. TikTok

In recent years, TikTok, the app owned by the Chinese giant ByteDance has got a market share in India that all the US Tech companies - including Facebook - couldn’t acquire.

In recent years, ByteDance’s TikTok has won users that all of these companies have struggled to reach. TikTok has amassed more than 250 million users in India (as of last year), and the company says it is on track to add another 100 million this year.

TechCrunch

But not just in India. Tiktok already got a significant market share in many different countries as a social platform. And I think Facebook bearly started to take any action against the viral usage of Tiktok, especially between teenagers.

That's the first reason which serves - still - into increasing Ads revenue stream. But in general, Facebook couldn't monetize the increasing users' usage in Asia compared to users in the US and Europe.

So that leads us to the second strategic advantage.

2- E-commerce via WhatsApp and an opportunity for a SuperApp

In one of the future essays, I want to dig deeper into the story of WeChat, the Chinese SuperApp. And this related to today’s essay since Facebook has an opportunity to transfer WhatsApp into a similar user experience in the Indian market. The same try that Careem - now owned by Uber - is seeking in the Middle East. See the market pattern?

Reliance Jio also wants to take on Amazon in e-commerce in India, but to take on Amazon, they can’t play like Amazon! As Brad Pitt stated in Moneyball in a different context about the Yankees.

WhatsApp is already popular in India, but as I mentioned before, Facebook couldn’t pass the regulation to add payment service to WhatsApp to be able to monetize it. But after the partnership, Facebook could enter the e-commerce market in India much more comfortably. Either with more government-friendly WhatsApp solution or via JioMart service. As Mukesh Ambani (Reliance Jio’s largest shareholder) referred to in the deal announcement:

Ambani added that JioMart and WhatsApp will enable 30 million neighborhood stores (kirana) to transact digitally “in the near future.” WhatsApp has been working with the Indian government for more than two years to expand its payments service in India — but the project remains stuck in regulatory hurdles.

Mukesh Ambani

Facebook introduced WhatsApp for business a few months ago. And as they described, the main feature in WhatsApp blog is adding products catalog inside WhatsApp, so users don’t need to go to external websites. Then all from products exploring to payment process (later on) could be done entirely within WhatsApp experience.

Catalogs are a mobile storefront for businesses to showcase and share their goods so people can easily browse and discover something they would like to buy. Previously businesses had to send product photos one at a time and repeatedly provide information — now customers can see their full catalog right within WhatsApp. This makes business owners look more professional and keeps customers engaged in the chat without having to visit a website.

WhatsApp blog

Fun note, the feature demo in WhatsApp blog is for a local Indian store. Good one WhatsApp 😉

3- Reliance Jio + Facebook vs. Amazon

With only about half of India’s 1.3 billion people online so far, e-commerce sales are projected to more than double to $68.4 billion by 2022 from $26.9 billion in 2018

Wall Street Journal

With the promising opportunity in India, someone else was watching. Who knows a lot about e-commerce, Jeff Bezos.

Jeff Bezos visited India recently to announce an extra $1 Billion investment - after the initial investment $5 Billion -, and told a gathering of local Amazon sellers:

The intent is to help more small businesses start selling on the company’s marketplace. The new funds will supplement the $5 billion that Amazon has said it is spending to build out its Indian business [...] We’re making this announcement now because it’s working,” Mr. Bezos said referring to Amazon’s efforts to get India’s legions of mom-and-pop shops connected to its platform. “And when something works, you should double down on it.”

Wall Street Journal

It’s interesting to see and learn from what’s happening in India in the near future since similar competition fields happen in other places like in Africa or the Arabic world while big tech companies are looking to the east for strategic opportunities.

=======

Resources

• Facebook Earnings, Auction Dynamics, Full Steam Ahead

• Mark Zuckerberg Promotes Facebook Growth in India

• Facebook invests $5.7B in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms

• Amazon’s Bezos Pledges New $1 Billion India Investment Amid Pushback

• Facebook Invests $5.7 Billion in Indian Internet Giant Jio

• Inside Facebook and Private Equity’s $8.8 Billion Bet on India’s Richest Man

• Careem Shares Plans To Become The Super App Of The Middle East

• Introducing Catalogs for Small Businesses

What I want to explore here is the discussions around online ads, what does big companies earnings are telling us about the current online ads situation. And what does it mean for the future of online ads?

Let's start with this bold statement:

Morgan Stanley analysts project that online advertising will suffer more this year than during the 2008 financial crisis.

Are we in an online ads bubble that about to burst?

Let's investigate first the big companies earning reports.

Google

Google’s revenue has risen in every quarter of its history.

Alphabet reported total revenue of $41.2 billion for the first quarter, up 13% compared with a year earlier. [...] this was a particularly well-timed reveal for a company that has been a model of growth during its 22 years of existence.

I was wondering how many companies can claim this fantastic continuous growth for such a long period of time. Man, we are talking about 22 years! But let's postpone our remonetize talk about google history into another essay. And let's focus on the main topic of today.

The company makes most of its money from online advertising in areas such as search, where many major customers are pulling back sharply in industries including travel and retail. The YouTube unit, on the other hand, has an opportunity to grab eyeballs, and associated advertising, from homebound users, turning to the video platform in lockdown.

Obviously, with more people staying home, the usage of Google services has increased, especially Youtube, but that didn't increase revenue from ads as one might expect because advertisers are trying to be more conservative with spending on marketing (More about that in a minute). And companies in other sectors like tourism, hotels, airlines, etc. had a significant cut in the marketing budget due to lockdown.

And during the second quarter, it's expected to see the real negative effect from online ads spending cut down.

Facebook

Facebook noted that ad revenue in the first three weeks of April looked flat versus year-ago levels, showing stabilization after sharp declines in March. [...] But for a company so dependent upon small businesses, investors’ optimism could be overblown. Morgan Stanley’s Brian Nowak estimates small businesses comprise 30% to 40% of Facebook’s overall advertising base. He forecasts their ad spending will fall 50% from a year earlier in the second quarter.

Well, there is no easy way to say that, but 98% of Facebook revenue is coming from online ads. So it's not a big surprise that they are one of the most affected companies by both surges of usage as people are using Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp more heavily, and decrease of marketing spend on ads on its platform. So ads for Facebook are basically a matter of existence.

Earlier this month, Pivotal Research Group’s Michael Levine said he expects any rebound in paid advertising to significantly lag actual economic recovery, particularly by small businesses. His March survey of advertisers showed spending continuing to decelerate. In other words, the worst may be yet to come. For Facebook, higher usage alone doesn’t pay the bills.

Facebook tried a quick solution as a temporary pain killer by offering 100 million dollars in cash grants and ad credit to small businesses. But the smart move for them is actually by looking into diversifying income resources in the near future (More about that in next essays).

Twitter

By now you shouldn't be surprised when you read Twitter earning report, as its only revenue stream is online ads:

Twitter warned its financial performance would fall short this quarter as the coronavirus pandemic depresses advertising spending, an indicator social-media platforms may not be able to quickly translate increased user engagement during the global health crisis into financial gain. [...] Twitter on Monday said it would post an operating loss in the first quarter and that sales would decline “slightly” compared with the year-ago quarter when it posted about $787 million in revenue.

Just a side question. Twitter, isn't this the time to start thinking about testing different income models, you know, to diversify your revenue sources? Or you know what, let's talk about this in more detail in future essays. I will not forget.

Amazon

On the more stable side of things, Amazon has a different situation. As a consumer-facing platform, Amazon is conducting different businesses for different types of users. And each of them has different challenges.

1- Selling products: At this line of business, Amazon didn't suffer from a lack of demand. But the issue was to meet that demand. As Ben Thompson explained it:

This, needless to say, falls in the “good problems to have” category. The signaled preference of consumers is that they want more Amazon than Amazon is able to deliver. Theoretically, of course, this also leaves an opening to competitors: what is meaningful about Amazon’s intent on spending whatever is necessary this quarter to meet that demand is it signals the company’s intent to slam that window shut.

2- AWS: In the last essay, I wrote about the power of platforms, and cloud computing is the best example of that. If other companies might lose money due to decreased spending on marketing spending. Cloud services in general and AWS in particular - as the leading player in the cloud service arena - benefited from the surge of internet usage no matter what, due to the pay-per-use model.

"During the Gold Rush, most would-be miners lost money, but people who sold them picks, shovels, tents, and blue-jeans made a nice profit. — Peter Lynch"

3- Ads: Usually, we wouldn't consider Amazon at the online ads category, but it seems like Amazon wants to get more into the online ads business! As a way of income diversification - which gives them a much stronger position in comparison with Facebook and Google, who do mostly depending on ads.

As explained in a report from Business Insider Intelligence:-

Amazon's ad strength will continue to come from its unique ability to target millions of consumers with purchase data from the e-commerce platform, but it will increasingly do so across its variety of popular platforms (Amazon.com, mobile app, Twitch, IMDb TV, and devices (Fire TV, Echo). [...] Amazon will eat into Google's and Facebook's share of the digital ad pie in the coming years, but it won't overtake either player in the near to medium term. By 2023, Amazon could take as much as 14% of total US digital ad sales, up from 9% in 2019, per Business Insider Intelligence estimates, based on eMarketer data.

Microsoft

Microsoft is a perfect example of how a very well-diversified company earning should look. We shouldn't also forget about Microsoft government contracts, which provide them with a stable income source, besides its investments in almost every technology sector. Let's read this carefully:

Microsoft reported strong growth in quarterly sales and profit and said the shift of more activities online amid the coronavirus pandemic is helping propel growth in areas from cloud-computing to videogames. [...] Microsoft said sales rose 15% in the first three months of the year to $35 billion, and it generated a net profit of $10.75 billion. [...] The company said the PC group generated sales of $11 billion, as demand to support remote work and teaching offset some of the supply chain issues. The gaming business benefited from people staying at home, with Xbox sales increasing 2% in the quarter, an improvement from the 11% drop in the previous three-month period. Surface laptop sales rose 1% as demand from people rushing to buy devices to work remotely outpaced supply chain issues. [...] Microsoft’s business social-media network LinkedIn also felt the effect toward the end of the quarter, with reduced advertising spending, the company said, though revenue over the full quarter rose 21% from a year earlier.

In the last part of the report, the ads revenue from LinkedIn rose 21% from a year earlier. The same expectations for the business social network will be affected by decreased marketing spending in the second quarter.

So, it seems like many are pessimistic about the near future of online ads. However, others take it further to be pessimistic about the future of online ads in general and started to say that online ads are a bubble, and it's currently bursting. Maybe because nobody likes ads experience - including me - but let's not mix wishful thinking with reality.

It doesn't make sense that companies will stop depending on online ads as a business model any time soon. As long as companies exist, especially small companies with unknown brands, The demand for online ads will continue.

On the other side, companies that create digital products (apps, games, online content, etc.). On the contrary, They will invest more in online ads. E-commerce, especially small and medium companies, would also need to push more online marketing investment to share a piece of the increasing online shopping market.

Nevertheless, diversify the income sources for companies is always useful. The best example of this is the rise of the subscription-based model that many media companies and newspapers started to adapt. As a result, we are having better content and cleaner user experience. That could work well besides the online ads model, not instead of it.

Because currently, online ads are the only way for companies to provide their platform for free for users who can't afford to pay subscription fees in different areas in the world. Yes, we shouldn't forget about that.

Sources

Google Revenue Climbs, but Company Warns of ‘Tale of Two Quarters’

Facebook’s Usage Is Hot; Future Ad Business Maybe Not

Twitter Issues Profit Warning as Coronavirus Spread Weighs on Ad Spending

Apple Earnings, Amazon Earnings

How Amazon Advertising is eating into the digital ad market currently dominated by Google & Facebook in 2020

Microsoft Earnings Jump, Aided by Cloud-Computing Demand During Pandemic

Watching Paterson tonight with the view of a good director Jim Jarmusch.

A few years ago, I just joined a company. And during the all-hands meeting, the CEO of the company was talking about the conversion rate for our product. Our conversion rate is X. We need it to be Y. He said.

The only little problem was… I had no idea what the heck he is talking about. And what is the conversion rate in the first place? So I asked my product managers colleagues and did a little research to get a rough idea about what it is.

Conversion Rate Is

“The conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to a website who take action to go beyond a casual content views or website visit, as a result of subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.” Wikipedia

In other words. It's about measuring how many users decide to take action towards a specific goal, for example, buy a product or subscribe to a newsletter.

The other problem is ‘How’ to get better in conversion rate is much harder and less clear than the definition. Every product manager has his own ideas on how to do it. So It’s a mix of art and science. And If you are developing a website/app you actually are tackling the topic one way or another.

So here I will list some ideas on how to improve the conversion rate for your product from what I observed at the products I worked on.

What Is The Benefit For Your Users?

“These things might generate revenue in the short to medium run, but if you prioritize this at the expense of actually delivering on the product benefits, then that’s a bad optimization in the long term.” - Andrew Chen

Improving conversion rates and similar metrics at the end is for self-interest gain for your product and company. But before focusing on the self-interest gain, you have to think first about the value you are creating for your customers.

Product Cost

Before everything else. Test different product prices and extra costs (shipping, tax, fees). Accordion to Baymard Institute research that 53% of users decide not to buy products because of extra costs is too high. Think with financial and legal departments in your company of ways on how to reduce it.

Design

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” - Steve Jobs

Make design simple, minimal, and clean. Easy to say, but hard to do. Because it starts in mind, you have to clear your thinking first. Getting ideas for many new features is not that hard. But to know which feature to develop and which not. To know which feature to remove because it doesn’t serve the purpose of the product story. This is the real deal.

Part of the success of any product is depending on how easy the user can navigate towards specific actions. And any distraction from these actions is a failure for product goals. For example, in some e-commerce websites, they are making a mistake to show the users multiple calls to action on the same page. Like add to cart button, Add to wishlist button, Subscribe to a newsletter, and Chat button. Click on ad promotion. All are big shiny buttons. They are leaving the user confused about what to do next. In the end, you have to decide which action you want to focus on and design the page accordingly.

The best is to have one primary action to focus on for every page. For example, the goal of the product page on e-commerce websites is to inform the user about a product to help him decide if he is going to buy this product or not. Any additions to that page should be less important in terms of page sections sizes, font sizes, colors, etc.

Take extra care of image quality and the writing style for product description. Don’t make the user wonder after reading half a page full of long sentences of a product description. You know the best about your product. Make sure you communicate this well to your website visitors. Some companies hire UX copywriters to make sure the message they want to deliver is clear and informative. If you don’t have this talent in house, hire someone to do it.

Navigation

If you are making a content-based website like an online magazine or a blog. You have to think through how to structure categories and subcategories in a way to make it easy for the user to find related content to his interest. Also, think about different paths based on user type. For example, if someone new is visiting the website. Maybe we can redirect him to a landing page that shows the most popular blog posts instead of the usual home page that appears to rest of the users.

Limited time offers

There is a debate around this direction on whether companies should do it or not. But no one can deny the numbers. For example, show how many product items are left in inventory if they are less than 10. Or time-limited newsletter subscriptions. Or give a limited time discount. All these are ways to give a little push for the user to decide soon if he is going to take action.

Experiment

“To set your expectations, teams competent in modern discovery techniques can generally test on the order of 10–20 iterations per week.” Inspired - Marty Cagan

In the end, there is no right answer. You need to experiment and test with many ideas. Test different content, different styles, different layout, and different functionality. Discover what is working for your product and your customers.