How to Measure User Experience

User Experience, or UX, refers to how an individual interacts with a company’s services, products, or in this case, website. User experience is an important factor when it comes to web design and development, as we need to make sure a user’s journey from start to finish is effortless and flows.

Most web developers will incorporate UX when designing your website, but once your website is live and kicking, how do you know if your website has a good user experience?

Well… continue reading and we’ll tell you a few ways you can check!

1. See how visitors use your website

Thanks to the evolution of technology, checking to see how visitors use your website has become quite easy thanks for conversion optimisation (CRO) tools.

One in particular that we love to use, and recommend to our clients, is HotJar. The tool records each visitor and shows you how they use your website. This tool is fab as it will show where people spend the most time, what page they click off and more.

Another reason the recordings are great is it will show you how a customer fills out forms. It will tell you if they miss out certain fields or if they are just not finishing the form itself – a good indication if there are too many fields and it needs to be relooked at.

CrazyEgg is another great CRO tool as it has functions where you can see where your visitors are coming from and also how far down they scroll before exiting.

By using CRO tools you will be able to see which parts of the website are used the most, and which parts of the website aren’t used at all or if a visitor finds any part of your website hard to use. You can see how you can improve those bits of the website, resulting in better UX.

Check out this blog for a list of other CRO tools: http://www.toprankblog.com/2016/07/conversion-rate-optimization-tools/

2. Keep an eye on your analytics

Much like the CRO tools in the first point, Google Analytics and other webmaster tools are great at checking how visitors use your website.

The information is presented in the form of analytics data. It can show you things like which page has the highest exit rate, what the bounce rate of the whole site is, and also how long on average visitors are staying on your website. With the data you can then see how you improve aspects of your website.

An example of this would be, if a page has a high exit rate and it isn’t a page which where you want conversions tracked, why are they exiting? Maybe the content isn’t right or there are no links or CTAs to other pages.

3. Check your customer feedback

It is good to keep an eye on what customers say when they give feedback, whether through emails, social media or call up. A website should allow visitors to find information easily, but if a visitor cannot find it they will click out and some will feedback.

See what they are saying and if there are any parts of the website they find confusing or if there is any part of the website they are trying to find but cannot locate.

To make sure you don’t run into this type of feedback though it is good to make sure everything is easy to find. For example, if you are a web design company a visitor will likely want to see previous work and how to enquire about your services, so make sure these aspects are easy to find.

4. Test your site!

Internet speeds are increasing and with this, users expect fast loading webpages. Research determines that a user will only wait 3 seconds for a website to load before exiting, so make sure your site loads fast!

There are many tools you can use to check this such as Google’s Test My Site or Pingdon. Both will check your website and also give suggestions on how you can improve the speed. What’s great about Google’s tool as well is it will show you how your website is on mobile devices and if the speed needs improving on them as well.

5. Check usability yourself

Something that we have mentioned before is to get friends and family to test your site! Get them to play around your website, go through, make an order or fill out a form. See what they say and make improvements from their comments.

Just remember, UX is a very important aspect of your website so make sure you keep a check on it and continue to look at ways on how you can improve it!

Why not check out our previou blogs of User experience:

• Keeping up-to-date for UX

• Quick Fire E-commerce Tips: UX

• Web Design Tips for User Experience