Why your company can’t ignore the importance of providing a positive user experience (UX)
Does your site offer the best user experience?
Poor website usability is not only bad for its users; it’s bad for your business too.
What exactly is the usability of a website? It’s definitely one of those industry jargon terms that many entrepreneurs and business owners may not be familiar with. But should!
Website usability means: how easy is it to use your website?
If you’re not sure what that is, you probably need help creating a strategy for your website.
Usage of your website is how well it achieves the reason you created it. Is it to generate leads? Get someone to make a purchase? Direct people to something else? Every page on your website needs a purpose and if that purpose is not clear, usability suffers.
When web marketers look at usability, they are looking to see whether or not a user can complete a defined task with little or no confusion or frustration.
So how do you know if your customers find your website easy to use?
Measurement of user experience and usability
There are many services that have come and gone when it comes to measuring user activity and the usability of a site.
heat map services such as Hotjar or Crazyegg have been partially successful, although unfortunately they have suffered abuse at the hands of those who do not know what to do with the information. These types of services give the website owner a bird’s-eye view of where their website visitors are focusing their attention.
test groups It can be a huge advantage, but at the same time these are closed and controlled groups, so they often inadvertently present misinformation as not being an accurate representation of the site’s actual target market.
The best way to check the usability of your website is its google analytics. Google offers its web-based analytics software for free for many reasons. One is so that you can improve your website.
Within Google Analytics, site owners can check things like how long someone is on a page, where they entered the page from, what they did on the page, and when they left.
If someone lands on your page and leaves almost immediately, you have what’s called a bounce. If the majority of your users are bouncing (called a high bounce rate), then you have a usability issue and are offering a poor user experience where they’ve left too quickly to take any action.
Another way to check is to set a conversion measurement. This is when you enter information into Google Analytics that triggers a signal when someone completes a task as defined there. You can even assign monetary values to the conversion if you want to measure the revenue generated through the conversion.
This type of analysis is best left to professionals, so please contact my team if you need help.
But Google doesn’t stop there with its free offers! Try checking things like your site speed or mobile usability using your free tools:
Measuring usability is as complicated or as easy as your website. Larger projects with many types of users and conversion rates will have more complicated ways of measuring usability, but the overall message here is: is your website meeting the business goals set for it?
Do your users have a bad experience on the website?
If you’re looking at the overall statistics and the numbers aren’t good, then it’s time to look at why your users are having a bad website experience.
Here are 7 questions to ask yourself about your website to avoid frustrating your users:
1. Have you clearly defined what your business does and appeals to the right audience?
2. Did you make it as easy as possible for users to find the information they were looking for? In general, there should be no more than 3 steps between landing on the site and finding what the user wants.
3. Can a customer easily contact you if they are stuck or have a question?
4. Do you have any broken links on your site that will lead users to a dead end?
5. How fast does the site load (see test above)?
6. Is your website mobile responsive?
7. How transparent is your About page?
Nothing can be more frustrating than a dead end, so make sure you don’t have one. Users must have established trust in a website if they are going to commit their time, money, or both.
This is where user testing groups can come in handy. The universal website basics that are often forgotten are there so that someone who has never been to your website before can have a good experience on it.
Please check the few points listed above and if there are any areas you haven’t covered or if you need help, please contact us and we can break it all down for you.
Is user experience really the same as usability?
The experience and expectations will vary greatly between websites depending on their purpose.
For large-scale businesses, user experience transcends platforms and today’s award winners are merging online with offline in an attempt to drive both on-site POS ‘conversions’ and conversions. Web.
For anyone working in small and medium-sized businesses, usability is the user experience of your website, so focus on that. Make sure that when someone comes to your website looking for something, they find what they needed as quickly and easily as possible.
And don’t forget that your user experience doesn’t end there!
A conversion is not the end of the road for a good website user experience
Provide great support
Your user experience doesn’t stop when the conversion does.
Think about your conversion process from the perspective of someone doing the converting.
Once you’re done, will you return to the website? If you do, will you be able to get the support you need right away?
Not having a support channel or any indication of one is a huge drawback for any user. They likely won’t buy from you if they don’t think they can contact you afterwards regarding any issues.
Refine your website based on feedback
Be sure to respond to negative feedback with more than dismissive apologies or a canned “thanks for the feedback, we’ll work on it” email. Users who have a bad experience during a conversion but a great experience with support can be recovered as customers who are likely to buy again.
Accept negative feedback as an opportunity to improve, even if you disagree with it.
Take what you learn from the feedback as a gift. If a user takes the time to complain about something, treat it seriously and resolve the situation (within reason).
Maybe you completed your homework but have feedback on how easy (or not) it was?
In addition to analyzing your Google Analytics, you can follow up with customer surveys (if they opt to have one sent to their email, of course) to help refine their user experience.
If you need help writing a survey, try this list of some basic website experience survey questions.