How to use questions in CRO and how to build a Questioning framework with Riccardo Vandra

AI-Generated Summary

In this video, Riccardo Vandra discusses the importance of asking powerful questions for conversion rate optimization (CRO). He emphasizes that the quality of our questions determines the quality of our insights and ultimately our success. Riccardo proposes a three-step questioning framework for building effective questions. The first step is to identify the core problem or challenge. The second step involves categorizing questions into “how,” “why,” and “what” types. The third step is to consider the actions and responses required based on the answers received. Riccardo cautions against vagueness and encourages breaking down broad questions into more specific sub-questions. He provides practical examples related to research prioritization and establishing CRO strategy. Riccardo concludes by highlighting the power of conscious questioning and invites viewers to connect with him for further discussion.

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Riccardo Vandra 0:00
How do we actually create more powerful questions? Because if we are actually able to create more powerful question, we can get more insights and more testimonials and more of everything. So how can we do that? And I came up with like a three step questioning framework that we can use in order to build the in order to think about questions in a more effective way.

Riccardo Vandra 0:37
Hey there and welcome to this experimentation session about how to ask questions in CRO and how to build a questioning framework. I’m Ricardo and I work as a CRO consultant where I help my clients to sort out analytics problem, or to get more insights out of their customer, and ultimately, how to build a better AI performing optimization ecosystem. So the start of this presentation was a sparkle with a single quote that I read. And it is this one, the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your questions. And I think this is such a powerful quote, because if you think about it, it means that if you are asking the right questions, you can turn your life around, think about, for example, asking, why can’t I do something? Versus how can I do something. And the difference between the two is night and day, in the first one, you are complaining about why you can do something, and not empowering you to actually solve the issue and thinking about how you can solve the issue. Meanwhile, in the second thing, you are actually you’re actually narrowing your focus and coming up with ways on how you can fix something, how you can improve something, and, and things like that. So once I read this, I started asking questions, and I started applying questions through all the different areas of my life through through health, through my my job, and specifically, when it comes to my job, I thought about what if I could apply this code to conversion optimization, because ultimately, at the end of the day, conversion optimization is about asking questions. So we are constantly asking questions, even if he is in an unconscious way, we are thinking about a word customer. So what motivates them? Is there any friction point that they might that they might have in this journey? Is the messaging correct for them? does it appeal to them? And like, those are just a couple of examples. But I can go over and over about thinking about questions that we could ask about our customer and about the overall optimization program that we are building. So by thinking about this specific question I came up with, with this reformulated water is specifically created for for optimization and experimentation, which is the quality of your optimization is determined by the quality of your question. So even in this field, like life in general, we can use questions and we can think about questions as a tool to the to improve the quality of your program, improve the quality of our insights, improve the quality of our testing ideas. So this could be applied in many ways. And as I said, questions are really a guiding tool here. And they enable us to break down the problem. And think about how we can solve that by directing our thinking and by narrowing down our focus. So the question here becomes,

Rommil Santiago 4:10
this is Rommil Santiago from experiment nation. Every week we share interviews with and conference sessions by our favorite conversion rate optimizers from around the world. So if you liked this video, smash that like button and consider subscribing it helps us a bunch. Now back to the episode,

Riccardo Vandra 4:23
how do we actually create more powerful questions because if we are actually able to create more powerful questions, we can get more insights and more testimonials and more of everything. So how can we do that? And I came up with like a three step questioning framework that we can use in order to build the in order to think about questions in a more effective way. A lot of areas that could be applied. And the first step here is identify what is the core problem so what problem them are currently facing right now. Is this for example, a problem related to strategy? Is this a problem related to research? Or is this a problem related to testing for example, or event? Is this related to culture, experimentation, culture of things like that? So the first step is identify, what are we currently facing? And what are we look like? What is our problem right now, this could be when I don’t know what kind of research to start with, or something like that. But it’s really key that we identify a problem here. The second the second thing here is to think about the question and think about the question that we could use. Here, I mapped out, like three different kinds of questions, which are like the most used kinds of questions that we could use, for example, the first one is how question. So the with those, with those questions like,

Riccardo Vandra 6:05
How can I how can I build this? How might we improve this experience, we can understand how we can do something so understand how we can actually create a measuring framework or how we can actually choose a research type or even brainstorm different ideas. Because we came up with different ideas, once we start with a question like, how might we improve or x a, our cart or product page, for example? The second are why questions. So why questions are a special especially useful? When digging deeper and finding new insights? Think about, once you finish up your test? Usually, you are you’re starting to ask why do we Why did we get these results and with data, you start thinking about what could be the reasons about it and actually discovering the why behind the the behavior of the user is one of the most important things for insights generation and learning inside of the program. And ultimately, the last one is related to what questions and those could be more, more toward, identify objectives, KPIs, research material, or any different bullet points. So least that we want to do about the specific areas. And this is the second part. So the last one is related to action. And you have to think about how you are going to act and how you’re going to act based on the answer that you get. You should have, you should have a rough idea before you’re starting out about a about the response that you might get and watch, what are you going to do with the response that you are getting?

Riccardo Vandra 8:09
So this part is fundamental? Because a lot of a lot of people start by asking a start by asking the question, but don’t complete the framework with the action. And I think you should always keep action in the back of your mind when, when building questions. When thinking about question, the last point here that I want to make his are not you use this framework, and the key points that I refer about is being too vague. If you’re being too vague with your questions, or with your problem, like, how do we optimize the website? This is like a super broad question that you that you are asking, and studying with that could be like, really, really difficult to use, especially at the beginning. So the solution here is to break down the vague question into simpler question that you can add something like, how do we optimize your web setup, we can think about what are the areas of your website that we want to optimize? What is the research that we have available? What is the current traffic that we have for each of the sections of the website? And by asking similar question or sub questions? You can you can came up with a different bang a bunch of different ideas that you can use to respond to like the broader question.

Riccardo Vandra 9:47
And this could be are you can, you can use that. And yeah, right now, I want to just give you a couple of practical examples, which are a little bit more useful for you and so you can actually have this Standard, how to think about this and how to think about the framework in general. So a first example here is during the research process. So for example, let’s see that our problem is that we have a limited time and limited budget, and we need to understand how to prioritize our research efforts. How do we understand what can be researched first, and what gets the highest amount of insights and actionable insights? So once we, we are in front of this problem, we could ask questions like, how much traffic that does the website and how much research can be automated? What’s the turnaround time for qualitative analysis? And other kinds of questions where and other kinds of questions like, what was the available data? Do we need to do any kind of tracking any kind of additional tracking? And the more questions that you ask, the more you can create a clearer picture about what is your current situation and what you can do about it? So the action part is respond to all the questions. And once you have a clear picture, you can you can account that and think about the first resource type that you’re going to use the the second one, the third one, and so on. The second idea here is when establishing the main zero strategy. So think about it, you start, you start as your engagement user, you’re just starting out working with new clients. And you need to think about what is the basis? Why What are the the core components?

Riccardo Vandra 11:48
So here, you should ask questions like, What business problems? are we solving? What KPIs are we focusing on? Which areas of the website should we start researching first? And all the different questions that we are asking here are geared toward establishing the basis of our CRO strategy? So the more questions you come up with, and the more responses that you get, the more precise you can be with with the actual outcome that you’re generating from this. So I want to leave with, with a takeaway, which is, we as your people use questions all the time, we are using those in an unconscious way. So I think that if we took the time to use them more consciously, and if we think about mapping those out and writing those out, and thinking about how we can ask more powerful question, we can even we can improve our efforts, and we can improve our ability to to use insights and to get more valuable insights. So I hope you understood that. Quiz questions are really powerful. And please take your time to master them use the framework, and this is the end of my presentation. I hope this was gonna, this is gonna be useful for you. And if you want, you can contact me through email, or reach out to if you want even my website, or shoot me a message on LinkedIn. I always respond to every LinkedIn message and I cannot wait to connect with all of you in the community to go out soon and I hope you’re enjoying all the other session. Have a nice day. Bye bye

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