Quick wins you can action to enhance the user experience. This will enable you to prioritise which features, elements, copy changes and page designs need to be implemented based on customer-centric design to increase site conversions and ultimately ROI.
For eCommerce sites, a serious issue effecting the majority of sites large and small is poor (or poorer than what can be achieved) conversions for customers who have started the checkout process. User research this key shopping journey will identify where site users experience barriers to progression and any areas of frustration or security concerns.
Does it make sense to continually invest money in Google Adwords and similar social media channel, when your conversion rate percentage doesn’t improve. Surely it makes sense to drive the same paid traffic budget to a user-tested website with a better design and better conversion level. This delivers more conversions for the same budget. With improved conversions you can either throttle back on marketing spend to receive the same level of conversions or UP your spend and get a higher number of conversions.
After user research, you are now far more informed why users struggle to find a key area/tool within your website or mobile device. This is invaluable, providing the necessary proof that key changes need to be made.
An area that is considered optimal may in fact have room for improvement
For e-Commerce sites, user research will provide insight into the various shopping behaviours [we call these ‘personas’]. Shoppers may be hunters, followers, know what they want, impulsive or open to persuasion buyers. This helps you identify how critical information and calls to actions should be positioned within a page hierarchy as users progress through a shopping journey.
Real users provide the insights into what is and isn’t working on your site
The expensive, slick piece of on-site marketing is actually overlooked as users exhibit ‘banner blindness’, instead they go looking for actual site content and not forms of advertising or promotions
For businesses without sufficient budget – improvise! Use friends and family who fit within one of your customer personas. Ask these people with the same site objectives with your commercial objectives. Observe them as they navigate the site and you will begin to realise the issues they experience and the incredible potential of user research. With reference to the title of this post, in addition to observing user experience research, a second factor comes in to play – think out loud methodology.
The user is encouraged to talk about their experiences when carrying out task and scenario based exercises. When they pause their mouse movement whilst contemplating where to look or what to click on, research facilitator encourages the participant to talk out loud what they are thinking – remember the more cognitive effort a user requires to complete their tasks can enhance their frustrations or reduce their patience in carrying out the task.
Speaking with other usability professionals, some prefer not to rely on what the user says. Although this is not wrong, it can depend on a variety of factors. A facilitator who puts words in the users mouth, or when a users actual site interactions conflict with what they are saying, the moderators best approach is to always encourage the user to ‘think out loud’.
1. Be aware of your own judgments and projections
2. Be genuine and transparent
3. Adapt to each user. Do not ask users to adapt to you
4. Be conscious of the way users are interacting with you
5. Get users to speak about their own experiences
6. Notice when users are censoring their own comments
7. Get users to speak in terms of problems, not solutions
8. Ask Why? and dig deeper
9. Make objective and precise observations
10. Allow users to be spontaneous and follow their flow
Coupled with the user research and think-out loud principles, taking the research another step further by introducing eye tracking may provide further insights. Whilst eye-tracking technology is improving there are limitations and at the time of publishing. Contact lens, false eye-lashes, prescription glasses can inhibit the quality of eye-tracking and even moving your head to acknowledge the moderator or into a more comfortable position can record a variance on the results. Some might say that eye-tracking is unnatural and can impact normal behaviour and that the effort required to analyse the eye movement can easily be replaced more naturally with the simple ‘talk out loud’ approach