Offering an enriching, pleasant and satisfactory experience to the user is the main objective that should be fulfilled on any web page, online shop or application nowadays. Our duty as marketing professionals in the Digital Channel is to assure its optimum quality, which is why we employ a series of techniques to analyze, assess, and optimize the experience that our websites offer the user or consumer.
However, before tackling these techniques, we want to explain to you why it is so important to offer a positive, enriching and consistent user experience. We also want to highlight the importance of working hard on it in order to increase the conversions and/or the revenue of your website.
WHY IS THE USER EXPERIENCE IMPORTANT?
A positive user experience increases the global quality of a web page or application. It is the basis of Digital Strategy and, without it, nothing turns out how you planned. It is a proven fact. Let’s say for example that you love reading and you are given the best book of your life as a gift. You carefully unwrap the package to appreciate its binding with an appealing cover. You read the synopsis on the back cover attentively; it looks like a promising read. You can’t wait to start it. But as soon as you start reading you realise that some of the pages are stuck together and that the edition is a disaster. You leave this promising book aside because it doesn’t meet your expectations and, on top of that, it frustrates you. Someone once said that people will forget what you say and do, but they will never forget how you made them feel. And so it is the same with the user experience of a web page. If the website gives you a positive feeling, the content is coherent and in general you find what you are looking for, you will surely stay and become a buyer.
SETTING UP THE OPTIMUM USER EXPERIENCE; KNOW THE TECHNIQUES AND TOOLS TO ACHIEVE IT
It is proven that if we work on and optimize the user experience we will obtain very positive results, which will soon be reflected in our strategic objectives.
The benefits of analyzing your web page with an audit are variable. You will be able to know the characteristics and preferences of your target audience, but, additionally, you will succeed in improving the conversion rates of your site. This will increase benefits and the number of contacts or records received. You will also know what aspects of your portal you should work on and modify in order to improve its performance and, ultimately, you will get to engage with your audience thanks to the improvements made; something that often gets overlooked but is very important.
Next, we offer you some techniques and tools that will be very useful for you in order to achieve an optimum user experience.
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WEB ANALYTICS
Nowadays, we have very powerful tools that allow us to know the number of visits and the traffic patterns on your site, the funnels and the whole journey towards converting or where there has been outflow. Carrying out an Audit of Web Analytics will allow you to know the tools of your page, identify the main milestones to gauge, implement tracker panels and obtain conclusions in order to make improvements (whether in content, functions, design, etc.).
Google Analytics is a very powerful and free tool that allows you to analyze and record any type of quantative data about your users. It deals with very relevant information that you will be able to use to refine and give focus to your strategic actions of communication. Analyzing the purchasing process of an e-commerce site and knowing where your users come from and go to will allow you to increase the percentage of conversions of your site. These are some of the actions that web analytics allow you to carry out. There are also other much more advanced tools that enable us to integrate the analytics with marketing automation solutions, with AB testing, Big Data etc, such as the paid version of Google Analytics Premium, or others such as Omniture, etc.
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USABILITY TEST
Is your web page functioning correctly? To make improvements to a site, the first step to follow is to find out whether or not the page is working how you expect it to. For this we use different usability tests, based on real actions and behaviour patterns of the user.
A designer can assume that something is useful or practical according to their judgement, but what is important is to try it in order to see if what has been designed actually complies or not with the goal that we planned. Define your hypothesis; prior to checking what do you think is working and what is not, and identify objectives, for example ‘where do the problems come from in the purchasing process’. It is important to set out between 5 and 10 specific tasks that you think the users should complete on your website in order to be able to analyze their behaviour. To test a design with a usability check or test guarantees the profitability of time and money invested in a web project.
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HEATMAPS
Heatmaps use thermography as a way of presenting data and user behaviour within a web page. They mark the most visited zones in hot colours and in green the spaces with less activity, in order to monitor the way in which a person looks at an image using the eye-tracking technique.
In order to successfully improve your marketing strategy it is essential to improve your website continuously and the heatmaps are a tool that can also be integrated into your performance analysis, providing data that will help you to recognize the zones or elements of your web page that generate most interest to the user.
Heatmaps will offer you very useful information to complement your quantative reports and allow you to make short-term decisions, such as detecting whether or not there are problems in the conversion phases, analyzing the performance of the different ‘Call to actions’ of a web page, among others. A few available resources for creating this type of analysis and which you can install onto your website are Crazyegg, Sumome or Page Analytics also from Google.
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SESSION RECORDING
Hotjar, Open Hallway and Silverback are some of the many tools used to observe and analyze the behaviour of buyers on a site. They allow you to create a recorded test of a session with the aim of obtaining a pill of information about the movements and interaction that your users have with your online shop, landing page or website.
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FIVE SECOND TEST
This is a simple tool to quickly find out if your page communicates well. The Five Second Test should provide an answer to 3 basic questions, and pages will only get past them when the selected customers can respond quickly and efficiently to ‘who are you?’, ‘what products and services are you offering?’ and ‘Why should I be interested in what you are offering me?’. It is proven that the the webpages that are capable of responding to these questions during the first five seconds attain better conversion results particularly in services.
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SURVEYS (ON AND OFFLINE)
On and offline surveys offer us relevant information that we can incorporate into our study or consultancy of user experience. They are a useful tool for obtaining qualified information that we can use to assess a new design or the performance of a new function on our web page. Carrying out a questionnaire with several basic questions will provide us with the content that we are looking for in order to know whether or not the implemented changes actually work and help to convert.
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IN DEPTH INTERVIEWS
Listening in depth to your target audience is essential and is an important part of the Study of Usability that you should carry out before creating your webpage. It is a tool that enables the following: defining the most useful architecture of information for the navigation of your site, knowing the behavior patterns of your customers and knowing if the design and the programming work correctly. Once you have defined all this, your page will be ready to proceed to its design and programming.
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HEURISTIC EVALUATIONS OF EXPERTS
This type of evaluation makes reference to 10 basic points that stem from the interaction of a user in the interface of your web page. With these you will obtain qualitative results that will give you relevant content in order to know the level of satisfaction with the usability of your webpage, whatever the level of design or the structure of content. The heuristic evaluations carried out by experts in each matter will also provide answers to take into account regarding different relevant standards for your website.
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A/B TESTS
We could not end this post without talking about A/B Tests which are a very interesting tool for testing any type of improvement that you introduce onto your website. The comparison between various options will help you know which the best one is and which will make you convert more. To start off with a goal that you want to analyze, whether it is to attract new subscribers, increase the time of visits or reduce the rebound rate, you will have to create two or more versions and experiment to see what what happens in each case. For this you can use different tools like Google Analytics and others that we have shown you above to compare between versions in order to define which one is best suited to your goals.
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LIFTING GROUP METHODS TO OPTIMISE THE USER EXPERIENCE OF YOUR SITE
In Lifting Group we have methods that we have been using successfully for years in all of our projects. It allows us to evaluate and optimize websites, while we obtain relevant insights about the customers, users and buyers in general. To know their behaviour and their needs and interests is something very relevant and, as we saw in this recent post, it helps us to refine the content of the Inbound Marketing Strategy.
Detecting the needs of our target audience is very important but so is detecting possible usability problems, using the tools that we have mentioned and proposing concrete actions to solve them. The next step is testing. How will we know whether or not something works if we don’t try it out? And, finally, analyzing the implementation of the actions carried out in order to restate new improvements based on the results attained. In this way we can work on the user experience in the Online Channel.
One step ahead of the digital user experience with Omni Channel User Experience
Now we will talk to you about Omni Channels and the importance of offering a coherent and global user experience, not only in the Online Channel but also in every channel through which your customers interact with your brand.
In Lifting Group we have different specialised teams in distinct channels that will help you to devise a long and short term global strategy to increase your turnover. We adapt ourselves to your needs and/or goals. Whether it’s improving or creating channels of attention for the customer, promoting actions to optimize the image of your brand or product, adding notoriety and interacting with the client. We offer you every kind of creative solution to build an optimum and satisfactory relationship with the customer. Our goal after all is to take care of them and make them feel so good that they become your loyal subscriber.
