Good user design and experience generally means you don’t even recognize it in action. Maybe you’ve experienced some of these tactics yourself, but didn’t think of them in isolation… you just visited a site and thought ‘that made sense’.

If you visited a website recently and were able to find the information you needed easily, you might have been moved along a buyer journey in one of these ways listed below.

A Thoughtful Content Journey – We’ve all read about how marketers should align to a buyer’s journey vs a selling process. Buyers have taken control of the process, the most effective designs are those that accelerate a buyer through their journey. This requires investing adequately to understand your personas and milestone stages in their journey. It also means designing a content journey that allows them to take as long- or as little time- as needed to move through stages, with minimal friction.

“Average number of content sessions per visitor increased 43% for bingers and 13% for non-bingers“

Content Engagement Report, PathFactory

Content Bingeing – A very effective way to both accelerate a potential buyer journey and to create stickiness on your website is to create an easy path to bingeing content. You can create a YouTube or Netflix like experience on your site by promoting ‘next best content’. Not promoting additional, related content can waste the moment of mindshare by requiring a form fill and download that create a content dead end. Here is a great article by Content Marketing Institute that spells this out very clearly.

Asset Bundling – Content bundling can be used in combination with content bingeing or as a stand-alone content consumption option. Depending on the amount of research and education that is appropriate to your solution, it may be appropriate to create a bundle of content that you would typically align to a particular stage in the buyer journey. This might be educational content about your market segment, persuasive, competitive, or related to successful adoption of your solution. Bundled content is an effective alternative when detailed and technical information is best offered in white papers or reports and widely circulated to facilitate a consensus buying decision.

Micro Interactions – Studies show that American attention spans are shorter than that of a goldfish according to Microsoft (Ok, that is widely debated). This means, as marketers, we must get really creative to hold the moments when we have eyes on our site pages. Micro Interactions allow that to happen by movement on that page and creating attention grabbing interactions. Examples of this can be any kind of movement on a page from a scroll bar visualizing progress, a notification jingle, or a jiggle of log in, indicating it isn’t a valid login. Other micro interactions can be prompts to engage with content such as likes, reactions or share buttons.

In Moment Conversions – Micro interactions can also be more definitive call-to-actions to progress someone in their journey and this subset of micro interactions are often referred to as in-moment conversions. In moment conversions can be as simple as moving someone to the next journey milestone by actively toggling a learn more button, prompting a play button on a video, or can be as active as leveraging a personalized chat bot, using a solution like drift.com.

These techniques are foundational to the accelerating movement of human-centered design. Aligning your digital properties to a natural selection process and applying conversational principles will create the most effective and accelerated journey that will leave your visitors thinking ‘that was easy’.