Understanding User Experience

User experience is a huge factor in how successful your digital marketing will be.  It refers to how easily visitors can use your website.  It is obvious and instinctive to navigate?  Do visitors enjoy being on your site?  UX is about more than how pretty your website is.  It isn’t just picking good fonts and colours and having things clearly labelled.  So what is user experience exactly?

UX can be boiled down to five critical elements of your website design.

1. Learnability – How easy it is for someone to navigate and use the functions on their first visit to your site.
2. Efficiency – How does it take visitors to do tasks on your site?
3. Memorability – How well visitors remember how to use your site if they have not visited in some time.
4. Errors – Do visitors make many errors on your site? What happens?  How severe are the errors and how easily can the visitor fix them?
5. Satisfaction – This refers to the visitor’s satisfaction with using your site, not their satisfaction with the information they find there. Do they enjoy visiting?  Do they find what they want easily?

Measuring UX

User experience is in the eye of the visitor to your website.  It isn’t your experience with the site that matters, but that of the visitors you are hoping to convert to sales.  To know if your site has good UX, you need some way to measure it.

The most obvious way is to ask your visitors.  You can choose from several different surveys to offer your web visitors where they can assess their satisfaction with their experience on your site.  You can find very detailed questionnaires or quick and simple options.  But not all users will take the time to complete a survey, no matter how quick it is.  You can also put together a focus group and seek their feedback on your site.

Thankfully, you also have objective measures of how they use your site that offer great insight.

Objective Measures of UX

You can see how long they spent on various pages.  If someone visited several pages but didn’t stay on any for more than a moment, that suggests they were looking for something but did not find it.  You can also monitor how much a page is shared on social media.  You can also see how many errors visitors made and how long it took them to complete tasks on your site such as fill out a call to action.  If people are sending a lot of messages to customer support that indicates they need help to find things on your site, that tells you your UX is sorely lacking.

Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a way to see which of two options users prefer.  You give them both and see which is more popular.  It’s simple.  You can also have multiple landing pages and tweak various features of each to see which page is more successful at driving traffic to your site to give you an idea of how people navigate and what draws their attention.

The ultimate measure of your user experience is your conversion rate.  If that isn’t good, it is likely your UX isn’t that great either. The good news is that you can do something about it.  You can contact us!  Matrix is a leader in UX, and we can make sure your site is easy and fun to use.

Talk to our UX experts