Appsense - Behavioral Science Research

AppSense

Turning a Website into a Conversion Machine

AppSense is the global leader in User Environment Management (UEM). Their solutions help IT teams give users the experience they expect while keeping the enterprise’s physical and virtual desktops both productive and safe.

Challenge

AppSense enhances enterprise technologies and works across all devices, environments and operating systems. In high esteem by the enterprise customers already using their solutions, they were having difficulty gaining market share among newer prospects. Their IT solution was far superior, but buyers weren’t biting until they got a demo. How could we get the website to do more lifting?

Solution

Even though AppSense creates user-centric solutions, a high bounce rate meant their website was not taking a user-centric approach. We researched personas and their unique needs in order to come up with the strategy and messaging that would simply resonate with a complex suite of buyers, influencers and end users.

600%
Increase in Web Inquiries

Behavioral Science Assessment

We immediately saw that key Behavioral principles were missing. Working Memory refers to the fact that most adults can only handle 5-9 chunks of information at a time. Give too many messages at once and nothing gets through. Cognitive Fluency refers to how easy you make it for users to quickly process information.

This overly complex design and jargon-y language made it harder for users to understand the solution. The final “Just Do” we uncovered was Narrative Bias, the idea that the human brain evolved to understand complex ideas through stories, not statistics.

Qualitative User Research

When we spoke to clients one thing became very clear: clients and prospects were only interested in this solution if they were undergoing one of four major IT projects inside their organization.

This insight shaped how we’d use Narrative Bias as a strategy. Because stories, not statistics, help users quickly digest complex information, we used Narrative Bias to help users see just how the solution would help, based on where they are in their journey.

Titles
  • IT Manager
  • CEO, CTO
  • Chief Security Officer
Personas
  • Champions
  • Decision Makers
  • Influencers
Companies
  • Enterprise
  • Mid Market
  • Multiple Industries

Quantitative User Research at Scale

Because we’d uncovered key “Just Do’s” and Best Practices in the Behavioral Assessment, we were able to bypass experimentation and go straight to creative execution.

Simply applying Working Memory, Cognitive Fluency, Relative Choices and Narrative Bias would make a measurable impact.

Creative Execution in Marketing & Product

We addressed Working Memory by doing away with the rotating banner and replacing it with a single, key message. We optimized Cognitive Fluency by replacing visual/verbal overwhelm with a beautiful, intuitive design and simple language. Finally, Narrative Bias helped readers intuitively understand a complex solution based on their own “hero’s journey.”

Applying these key interventions worked: web inquiries increased 600%.