Learn about various user experience (UX) concepts and how you can identify core areas to improve your clients’ UX. Contact Look-See to find out more.
What Is UX Design?
There isn’t any one definition for UX design that has been commonly accepted. The concept “user experience (UX) design” has a lot of dimensions, including several diverse disciplines such as information architecture, interaction design, usability, visual design, and human-computer interaction.
According to an Oxford Journal study, “Interacting With Computers”: The goal of UX design in an industry is to help improve customer loyalty and satisfaction through the utility, pleasure, and ease of use provided in interacting with a product. It’s all about enhancing the user experience people have when interacting with a product, service, or system and ensuring their satisfaction.
Why Is UX Crucial To Marketing?
A great website experience designed for targeted customers plays a significant role in ensuring customer satisfaction and boosting business conversions. A good UX is a great way to stay ahead of your competition. This is what makes UX so important within marketing. UX metrics are quantitative data points typically used to compare, measure, and track a website’s or app’s user experience over time.
It is also vital in ensuring UX design outcomes are created and evaluated with evidence rather than guesses or opinions. Using UX in marketing can improve sales by adhering to the growing expectations of modern consumers. User experiences should be tailored to each individual user while catering to their motivations, needs, and desires to capture their full attention.
How Metrics Are Used in UX
Metrics provide signals that reveal whether a UX strategy is working. This method is used to track changes over time, for benchmarking against iterations of your or your competitors’ applications or websites, and for setting targets. While most organizations track metrics of engagement time or conversion rate, they are not often used for design decisions. This is because their metrics level is too high. Conversion rate changes could include a promotion, design change, or something a competitor did. Strategists should take advantage of using metrics for UX.
About UX Audits
Also known as a usability audit, a UX audit is an evaluation process of the user interface of a website or app. It’s the best way to identify usability issues in your digital products. It can also help detect problem areas that cause users to abandon their shopping journey and your website.
How UX Audits Work
UX audits works by pinpointing areas of a digital product that are less than perfect, revealing the parts of a website or app that are giving users problems and causing them to leave without converting. Like financial audits, UX audits use practical methods to expand existing situations and offer recommendations for improvements based on heuristics. Ultimately, a UX audit reveals ways to boost conversions by providing users with easier ways to achieve their goals when using your site.
For example, performing a UX audit on an online e-commerce store might reveal that delivery information about a product is not available. It may also show limited payment options, making it hard for users to pay. Moreover, if it takes too long for the checkout page to load, users will probably close the page after a few seconds.
These are just some of the issues that lead to a higher rate of shopping cart abandonment. While running a UX audit cannot resolve these issues, it can answer some important questions about how your website or app is performing:
- Are users experiencing difficulties with functionality or navigation?
- What does the data say about users’ needs and behaviors?
- What can potentially be changed to improve your website or app performance?
The user experience audit helps define your product’s core problems that you may not know exist. Once you understand what may be driving your customers away, you can fix the issues to improve usability and address users’ objections, which should increase conversions.
User Experience Research
UX research is a critical step in UX design. Yet, it is extremely misunderstood and sometimes not taken seriously enough, as user research and testing should inform each UX design decision. In reality, research may sound like a scary word to some who see it as taking a lot of time, money, and expertise, which many business owners don’t have. However, the truth is, you can’t afford not to apply UX research to your business marketing efforts. Without it, you may have frustrated users and not even know it.
You need to know what your customers are experiencing when they visit your website. Are they able to find what they are looking for fast and efficiently? Are your pages loading at satisfactory speeds? Is the checkout process simple? Are you using clear and proper form labeling to help users understand their place?
The only way to know the success/error of your website is by performing effective UX research. This will give you a complete picture of how satisfied or frustrated users are with your website so you can know what improvements need to be made.
What Are Some UX Research Methods?
UX researchers use many UX research methods, but they all have the same goal, to find the motivations and needs of users. Basically, UX research involves task analysis, observation techniques, and feedback methodologies. However, there are two main types of UX research: quantitative statistics that can be computed and calculated focusing on numbers and mathematical equations, and qualitative that provide insights of descriptions that are observed but not computed.
Quantitative Research
This type of research is mostly exploratory research used to quantify problems by generating numerical data or other data types that can be altered into usable statistics. Some common methods include Google analytics, surveys, website interceptors, longitudinal studies, systematic observations, and online polls.
Qualitative Research
Qualitative UX research directly assesses behavior based on observation. It’s about understanding an individual’s practices and beliefs on their terms. It can involve several methods, including ethnographic studies, contextual observation, moderated usability tests, field studies, and interviews.
Learn How To Improve Your Website
Look-See can review your site in just minutes and tell you where your success and errors lie. We check your site against the science behind UX and best practices to see how your website UX stacks up and ranks. We identify core improvement areas and make recommendations to add more value to your website and improve the overall user experience. Get Started Now For Free