In order to make improvements to your website, you need to know how your users feel about the overall site experience. Short of asking them directly (which is certainly a proven strategy) there is a range of tools and metrics you can use to gauge engagement levels.
Having gathered enough relevant data, you can go about making improvements to your site — improvements that will hopefully translate to increased sales and customer satisfaction.
Measuring your website’s UX is something that is most commonly done at the initial design and development stages when building a new site. However, it can also be a useful strategy should you be thinking about making improvements to an existing site but are not really sure where to start.
It’s telling that 88 percent of users will not return to a website following a bad user experience. With those kinds of numbers, poor UX is really something you can’t afford to be practising. Of course, the team at Newpath Web are well aware of this. As one of the top companies providing UX design in Melbourne, we understand the importance of measuring UX and know which tools are best for the job.
What is UX?
Of course, UX is difficult to measure if you don’t quite understand what it is.
When it comes to web design and web development services, UX is defined as the experience a user has when interacting with a digital product. This can involve everything from how many steps it takes to complete an online purchase to how long it takes for a confirmation email to be sent with your order details.
It goes without saying, then, that a website that provides poor UX is not going to be a successful one.
Strategies to measure UX
The question is, how do you measure UX? To a certain extent, UX can be perceived intuitively. As tech-savvy people, we can tell a good website experience from a bad one. We don’t need facts and figures if the site is simply taking too long to load.
On the other hand, as developers and business owners, having these statistics at our disposal can be invaluable in pinpointing down exactly what it is that customers expect. From here, a strategy can be developed to transform a sluggish, clunky site into a seamless user experience.
Tools, resources, and strategies that the Newpath Web team often use to measure UX include:
Heatmaps: Heatmaps are a great way of tracking what visitors are doing once they reach your site. Using a website like crazyegg, you can view exactly how customers navigate your website, what links they tend to gravitate towards, and where in the customer journey they stall.
Form analytics: Regardless of what type of business you run, your website probably has a form of some kind. Maybe you gather customer information to create mailing lists. Perhaps you’re an e-Commerce store and filling out a form is the last step in the purchasing process. Whatever the case, studying data about how long customers take to fill out these forms, where they pause, and what answers they skip over can provide valuable data about what may be preventing engagement.
Back button usage: The back button is a handy tool. However, if a customer is relying on it too heavily, it could be a sign that your site navigation is clumsy or broken. Analytics tools, like Google Analytics, make it simple to track clicks, from which informed conclusions can be made.
User testing: Of course, one of the easiest ways to judge user experience is by simply asking your customers. When working with a team that provides web development services, they will most likely include user testing as part of the initial planning stages. These brainstorming sessions can provide valuable quantitative and qualitative information regarding overall user experience. Who knows, your customers might even have suggestions for you!
Newpath Web — creating seamless user experiences
As a leading company providing website design in Melbourne, Newpath Web has built websites of all shapes and sizes for an incredible variety of clients. What ties all our projects together is a dedication to and passion for engaging web design. If our experience has taught us anything, it’s that UX design is a constantly evolving process, one that is best attacked with experience, intuition, and data.
As such, we use a range of tools and strategies to measure user experience. We believe in making informed decisions and see web design as being a combination of art and science. Contact the team at Newpath Web today to learn more about our web development services and our portfolio of engaging, customised websites.
