User experience is a subjective thing. Not everyone using the internet has the same expectations or knowledge. We know it is important for your web visitors to have a good user experience, but how do we know what their idea of good UX is? How can we tell across the internet if they are having a good experience or getting frustrated or disappointed with our website? There are surveys you can ask people to do, but there are much easier and more immediate ways of assessing your business website’s UX too.
The most obvious measure is the conversation rate. If you don’t see enough visitors converting, something is wrong. But that alone doesn’t give you much detail. To really see if your customers are having an easy time navigating your site, you need to monitor their behaviour on the site. What pages engage them? Which are ignored? Are they hopping all over the place unable to find what they want? Do they click on your calls to action? Are they spending a lot of time browsing without putting anything in a basket? Do they fill up a basket and then not purchase it? Heatmap programmes can give you the insight you need into how visitors move through your site. Study your analytics and see what you notice about how people behave on your site. That can tell you a bit about how they perceive their experience there.
Your website should include ways to contact you. If your visitors are contacting you with questions that are answered on the site or querying how the site functions, that’s evidence that the UX is lacking. People are not finding what they need on your site.
You can also do some common sense checking yourself. Keep an eye on your load time. If your site is full of graphics, make sure they are compressed so your site isn’t slowed down. You need to know that many people will be accessing your site on their mobile devices. Mobile-first design is an important way to boost UX now. Remember, UX isn’t static. People’s expectations change, sometimes quickly. Your website needs to keep up to keep them happy.
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