Your user experience (UX) refers to the feeling that customers get when they're interacting with your website. These feelings can be good or bad, and each plays a role in what you should capitalize on and change on your website.
Here are seven user experience testing tips that you should utilize.
1. Send Out a Survey
The first item to try on the user experience research tip list is to simply send out a customer survey. There are multiple ways to approach this with your customers to make sure that it is not intrusive. An intrusive survey can ruin the user experience of a website.
The best time to send out a survey is right after a customer has completed a conversion. Whether this is through buying a product or filling out a service request form. This will take the customers you already have and let you know what they like and dislike about using the site.
You can also try sending out a survey while someone is browsing an item. Just as a simple pop-up that asks them what they like or dislike about the page that they are viewing.
If you have an email list, you can send out an email blast to your subscribers and ask what they enjoy about the website. When you find a common denominator from all the emails, whether it be positive or negative then you have a good starting point.
2. Ask Your Customer Service Team
Your customer service team is another method to try to improve the user experience. They're often already in contact with your customers and can get in touch with what may be a problem.
For instance, if you find that your customers are constantly calling because the product page fails to load, that in itself is user experience feedback. Ask your customer service team if there are any specific items that constantly come up related to the website. Whether this is a bug, load times, or simply something they don't like.
3. Track Your Repeat Visitors
Have a website that has customers constantly returning? Track to see what all attracts them to your website over competitors. You can do this by reaching out with a survey specifically for repeat customers or looking at the routes they take on your website.
A good user experience strategy doesn't just focus on expanding customers, but also ensuring that the customers come back for more. A customer may have no choice but to order from a poorly run site, but that doesn't mean the website wouldn't help when it comes to drawing them back.
4. Check Your Conversion Rates
Conversion rates are going to correlate with the number of users that come to your website to contact you or purchase something and actually follow through. Let us say that you run a plumbing service and someone enters your website because they searched for a plumber near them.
If the first thing you find is that the person looked at the home page and then the contact us page and then left, then you might need to start asking yourself why. The whole point of a website is to highlight your services and get people to contact you for service, so them not following through may make the website seem pointless.
Send out a popup survey to these customers to see why they're deciding not to follow through with contacting you. It may be the only way to save them as potential clients.
5. Look at the Time on Site and Bounce Rate
Bounce rates refer to the time that someone spends on your site if that is any time at all. It specifically refers to if someone enters the site on one page and then decides to leave from there. You can look at what page they entered and see if they exited from there as well.
Identifying pages with high bounce rates can help identify areas where you need to improve on user experience. There might be major grammar mistakes, a broken plugin that only affects that page or just something off-putting like the font or color choice.
6. Test Your Site Speed
One of the contributing factors to high bounce rates can be site speed. We live in a time where most people living in urban areas, which tend to use the internet more, have access to high-speed internet. Going onto a website that feels like watching a turtle race can quickly lead to people clicking off the website and looking elsewhere.
Try plugging your site into Google's PageSpeed Insights. This tool from Google breaks down the site speed and what may be slowing it down. They also present options for you to try and remedy the slow speed.
7. Utilize a Heatmap
The best way to find out how most users are using your website is to utilize a heatmap or program that literally shows you what they did. Essentially, the software captures the video of someone (anonymously) and you can then watch to see what that particular user did.
This is useful for collecting data and deciding on key parts where people are leaving your websites or converting effectively. From there, you can decide if maybe you need to hide a cost or simply reword it to sound more appealing.
Check out Decibel for their session replay tools and how to utilize these user videos.
Use These User Experience Testing Tips to Increase Your Customers
By utilizing these user experience testing tips, you can help increase conversion rates and see an increase in customer count. The goal is to test your website yourself and also see what the customers are looking at when they enter your website. As there is no better user testing than asking the user themselves.
If you want to learn more about the future of tech and how to stay on top of it, be sure to check out the rest of the blog. If you know a company with a slow website, consider sending this article to them.