We all know the digital world is continuously changing. With these new relevancies and demands comes a struggle for companies to keep up. Companies have to be prepared to pivot and adapt to a new, digital-forward life. This places great importance on user experience (UX), which can make or break your business.
What Is User Experience?
While there are many user experience concepts, it can be boiled down to how a person (user) feels when interacting with a product or experience. UX can be good or bad. Good UX is essential because it makes a user's experience simple and straightforward, making them more likely to become a lead or potential customer.
To understand the user at a deeper level, there's a certain amount of empathy that goes into UX. There's also a certain amount of design thinking or creativity, and expertise in your execution. There are ways to pull out information from users, whether it's surveys or in data from various platforms so that you understand them, and so that the solution you create is going to be good. You can't make the right solution without understanding your user and having useful, quality data about them.
Should I Use Tools to Collect Data on How to Improve User Experience?
Yes. There are a variety of tools to test how people are interacting with your product or your website. These tests should focus on specific data you need, such as where people are clicking on your website. You need to know where users are scrolling, where they're clicking, or where they're visually scanning. See the tools we use here.
Want to learn more about UX testing?
Are There Changes That You Can Implement Yourself?
There is a certain art and science to interpreting the data you find from UX testing. On your site, you can see that people aren't scrolling on a specific page. But what does that mean, and why aren't they scrolling? Why aren't they figuring out how to use a particular feature?
With someone who is trained to help you interpret that data, you can certainly take that and help make critical changes to whatever you're trying to improve the user experience for. We would recommend using an industry expert first for implementing changes to your UX. You can certainly learn about some of these UX methods and tools, and be a part of implementing a new strategy for your UX.
Can you do it yourself?
How Often Should You Be Conducting Tests for User Experience?
It all depends on your business's size, the traffic or volume of people using or purchasing your product, your customer lifetime value, average purchase price, and more. The general answer is, never stop testing.
Every time you stop testing for a long enough period, you have a compounding effect of decreased revenues, decreased success, and decreased satisfaction. With user experience, you can always optimize, and you can always get better. There's no reason not to conduct testing regularly.
You should think about how much time and resources you want to be putting in, of course. But once you figure out the magic equation of UX testing and optimizing, your investment is only going to gain a positive ROI.