Companies are always on the search for making their products and services stand out from their competitors. But something as simple as an unusable website or a malfunctioning app can quickly turn off a potential customer. A quick UX analysis can point out these inconsistencies or frustrations and improve them. This can help improve a company’s conversion rates and increase user engagement and retention.
The key to a successful UX analysis is empathy. Researchers and designers must learn how to empathize with a user’s wants, desires, and expectations of a product. In our latest article. UXAX walks you through the steps of a successful UX analysis process.
While conducting thorough user research early on is critical for building a solid foundation for your design process, you should always remain connected with your users’ needs. To maintain empathy with customers, you should engage with them as much as possible. Whether you regularly conduct user testing or continually manage customer support, you need to stay in constant contact with your audience members. This relationship will prove useful when you need to improve a product’s usability beyond its initial launch.
Companies usually conduct a UX analysis when they receive negative feedback on a product or service. Maybe customers are annoyed with a website’s accessibility or an app’s tendency to crash. Sometimes, this feedback is indicative of problems with your website or app’s user flow. However, companies should conduct UX analyses on a regular basis. This will allow teams to monitor user behavior while keeping an eye out for opportunities in improvement.
UX researchers must first consider which user segments they want to analyze, such as new users and returning users.
To start, list out each segment’s unique:
Make sure this step is backed by other user research, such as data analytics results or information from a previous usability study.
Next, you need to decide what success metric you want to use for data analysis. MixPanel and Google Analytics are great resources for leveraging your user analytics data. To measure your rates of success, evaluate your conversion rates for each step of the buying process. Keep an eye out for any obvious bounces or drop-offs from one screen to the next.
Remember to make note of all your discoveries to find the biggest opportunities for improvement within your user flow.
You should prioritize common use cases over edge cases. For instance, you can use this technique to determine which of your user segments are the most valuable for your company’s overall performance. This could pertain to your overall revenue or user retention. You can also try to define which user segment offers the greatest impact at the lowest effort.
You should also examine which steps within your individual workflow would have the highest impact on your product’s overall health. Changes within the early steps of a purchasing follow often result in the highest impacts.
Once you have created a new user flow, you will need to exhibit it to team members and clients. In order to walk through your new user flow using a fresh lens, you will need to either clear the cache in your browser or re-install your phone app. Remember to record every step so you can visually articulate it to viewers. Once you have assembled your shots, you can lay them out in a cohesive storyboard.
Depending on how different each segment’s goals and use cases are, this layout may be different for each segment. The most important thing to consider is laying out the flow from the perspective of a new user and again for a returning user.
What do customers expect when they visit your business online? Does each step of your online user experience perform the task it’s supposed to? Is it obvious to the user what is being asked of them to achieve their intended goal?
Sometimes, what a designer or engineer thinks is obvious might actually be confusing for the average user. In order to ensure maximum usability, your website’s buttons, menus, and icons should leverage common visual cues to clarify their functions. You should also match elements on-screen to areas displaying significant spikes to verify your UI clarity.
A heuristic evaluation analyzes a website based on best practices for improving a product’s overall usability. This enables UX designers to determine whether all core usability heuristics were used when designing the final product. The top 20 usability heuristics designers use to evaluate their websites include:
Start by counting the number of interactive steps it takes for a user to achieve a goal, such as learning about a particular service or filling out a contact form. Swipes, taps, and, hovers should be counted as a step. Consider how the number of steps a user must go through to finish a task affects them. See if you can cut down on any of these steps.
Consider the locations of different features within your app and how easy it is to switch between them. Record how different data objects, such as items in a cart or system preferences, are handled across different areas within your website or app. Are users spending a lot of time in one section of an app while missing important notifications from another? Are they losing cart items when they hit the “back” button, resulting in them abandoning their cart in frustration? Creating a customer journey map may help you align data analytics findings across multiple touchpoints within a product.
In order to determine the success of your software updates, you will need to compare changes in your user data while also running subsequent UX analyses.
If a team determines that streamlining their signup process by reducing the steps requires to complete the process will result in a higher conversion rate, the UX designer would then redesign the set-up process so it required fewer steps. After making this change, the team can test the hypothesis by analyzing any change in conversation rates observed with the new flow.
To measure success, many companies will calculate whether more elements were removed than added from a product. In general, a simpler interface is easier to use than a cluttered, overloaded one. However, removing critical elements can end up frustrating a user. Therefore, you need to make sure you can maintain a steady balance of simplicity and practicality when designing your product.
As you continue to update your product design, you must remember to reconsider any user interaction events and changes being tracked through your data analytics tool. This may include clicks and conversions.
In order to quantifiably improve a product, companies must re-tackle its user flow with a comprehensive UX analysis. Businesses should employ this practice on a regular basis in order to prevent complex or serious design problems from developing. Is your company in need of a UX analysis? Contact the team at UXAX today to get started.
