A previously fresh design can begin to feel stale after a few years. That’s because design trends are continuously changing. For that reason, many businesses engage in a redesign. However, another new design isn’t worth the cost if it makes your website even harder to use.
UX research is highly recommended before a website redesign because the stakes are significantly higher to shoot in the dark. Pre- and post-redesign must involve UX or user experience study.
User Experience; What Is It And Why Is It Essential?
UX research allows business owners to experience their brand the way users do. That’s why a user experience study starts and ends with the target audience. The result is likely different from what website owners think their prospects and customers do.
So, how do you conduct UX research? Continue reading this to know how it works. Basically, it involves better understanding who your target website users are by interacting with them. Doing so also lets you know the scenarios in which they decide to check out your website and the tasks they want to accomplish.
How Is Website Design Influenced By User Data?
Sometimes, you get so caught up in your website redesigning that you may overlook some important details. However, keeping users on the website requires two crucial factors: functionality and ease of use. Your business will suffer if you don’t understand how your website works for current users when planning a redesign.
Benefits Of UX Research
The following are the benefits of conducting user experience research before designing or redesigning a website:
- Make Better Decisions – The results of decisions made after user experience research are consistent with user tasks and overall business goals. What happens is that the focus will shift to options that present a higher conversion rate, rather than just choosing options that look better.
- Delight Users – The average user experience is a failure. That’s because the task success rate of most websites is less than 50%. If you want to make users happier, you have to understand what they actually want, then provide them with a much more tailored experience. The number of confused emails and customer support calls you’ll receive will also be reduced significantly.
- More Conversions – Business metrics of websites that undergo a user-research process increase by around 80%. Your site can convert more, resulting in higher sales and increased revenue.
- Cost Reduction – Business organizations can make more conversions while keeping costs low through user experience research. You may already know that making changes based on the results provided by the new real-time website will take more time and cost more. UX research allows business owners to test low-fidelity prototypes of wireframes, thereby making changes faster and cheaper. You don’t want to change things when development has already started as costs have gone up exponentially in that stage.
Measuring The Success Of The Improved UX
It’s essential to plan UX research, as with any decisions that may affect business marketing. Part of the planning is figuring out how to track your progress after implementing the actionable insights you’ve gathered.
Here’s what you can do:
- Check Baseline Metrics – Gathering your baseline metrics is one way of tracking your progress. For example, gather three or more months of data on the number of form completions if your goal is to get more conversions on a form. Compare the new conversion numbers you’ll get with the baseline as you run split tests.Behavior metrics help determine if the site’s quality is improving. It makes sense because a better online experience is the ultimate goal of studying UX. Keep an eye on metrics like pages per session, average time on page, and bounce rate when implementing design updates.
- A/B Testing – We’ve mentioned split tests. What is it really like? A/B testing is actually comparing one change or update in the website. It provides more accurate results. For example, you can split test two different button texts to see which is more effective. It can also be applied to specific site elements’ placement.
- Conduct Post-launch User Experience Research – Continue to gather up to date data that you can compare to previous designs by conducting UX research even after the website has launched. Post-launch user experience research will let you see how users interact with the new user interface (UI) through additional mouse-tracking data and heatmapping. Studying UX is a process that must not stop.
Final Thoughts
Setting the direction of website design on a path that provides a better and more usable user experience is UX research’s goal. Business owners can determine what areas users interact with on the site. They’ll also learn about the underlying reasons for user decision to visit the site. All these things are possible by studying user experience. Watching people experience your website’s UI allows you to meet current needs and identify new business opportunities.
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