Five analytical components for a better user experience
User experience (UX) is the core element that differentiates products (both actual and virtual) from one another. In order to increase conversion, you may need to completely overhaul the UX of your product, but where to start? How do you find the pain points and how do you figure out what your users actually want?
It’s easy to make excuses and to think you know exactly what’s wrong with your product without any research or investigation. You have to be humble, be smart, and draw your conclusions objectively through analytics.
There are popular analytics services like Google Analytics, Hotjar, Chartbeat, and Kissmetrics to name a few. If you are not sure which analytics service to use, this analytics tools article from Sitemap might help you select the right one.
I’m not going to be discussing everything from the perspective of one tool, instead I’ll talk about each way to extract data from your product and you can figure out which tool will work best for you. The points we are going to cover are insightful, actionable, but basic. If you already have Google Analytics installed, you’ll be able to check the data of each component we’ll be discussing, hurrah!
Here are the five analytical components that will help you improve UX:
01. Bounce rate
02. User behavior
03. Search usage
04. Customer surveys
05. A/B testing
Bounce Rate
In layman terms, bounce rate is when visitors land on your website and leave it in a couple of seconds.
In technical terms, it’s when a visitor lands on your website, they leave under five seconds and/or visits less than 3 pages.
Having bounce rate over 70% is something you don’t want. It’s like 70 out of 100 visitors don’t find the information or product that they were expecting. You need to check your site immediately for the following issues in order to reduce the bounce rate:
Wrong target audience:
Targeting the wrong audience is sometimes the root cause of a high bounce rate. The way users discover your site is called a ‘campaign’ in the analytics world. Have you ever clicked on a link and it looked something like this:
http://example.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=agencies
When you set up your analytics correctly, you can tell exactly where and how a user found your website. This can tell you exactly what’s wrong with how you are marketing your website. For example, you’re a publishing company producing and marketing entrepreneurship books. You have a paid Google Adwords campaign targeting young kids (12–15). An attractive banner ad would make them click the ad but you should expect a high bounce rate because young kids would have no interest in entrepreneurship products. Your ad might be on point, but you need to reconsider the audience who is seeing it.
Navigation issues:
Website navigation is like the table-of-contents of any well-organized book. The navigation should be very well organized and grouped. An ideal navigation has a very obvious name that users can predict what the information/content underneath will be.
Navigation is still one of the most frequently used components for content discovery on a website. Having a very complex, lengthy, and unorganized navigation will create confusion with your end users. Here’s a real world example where navigation is key:
You are in a totally new airport which has 2 terminals, 6 concourses, and 3 floors. (Have you ever flown out of ATL?!) You need to reach to the terminal 5-B under 5 minutes. How would you reach your gate without proper map/sign-boards? A bad website navigation is like being in a giant airport without signs. Your users are going to get frustrated and take another mode of transport. Here’s an article from HubSpot on how to organize your website navigation. It is a bit old still very relevant.
The easiest way to find out if this is an issue is check if users are actually clicking on each item of your navigation bar. If they aren’t, seriously consider dropping some items, or think about restructuring all your navigation with a card sort.
Problematic design elements:
You create a design language for your website which should remain uniform for every pages.
You create extreme UX friction when you create a page that has a totally different colour scheme, design style, and typography. Any user visiting the homepage or other uniform pages before this page will definitely leave quickly and contribute to your bounce rate.
This would be harder to identify through analytics, but if you have one awkward page with terrible fonts and colours that has a super high bounce rate, now you know why.
Lack of calls to action:
You need to guide your users to take certain actions on your website. You might be familiar with the “You might also like” Amazon feature that motivates user click on suggested items and make them engage with more products.
If you have a page with very tailored, sorted content, try adding your other product or service recommendations. If you still find space on the screen, fill it with some meaningful content like a testimonials or ratings. The goal here is to keep the user engaged.
User Behaviour
Whatever someone does while on your website is called user behaviour. It includes the journey within your website’s pages, interaction with page elements, page scroll, form submissions, link/button clicks, and others.
Analytics will help you understand the user behavior of your website better. How far are they scrolling down the page? Which forms are being used consistently? Are there any pages people simply don’t go to? Optimizing your website after analyzing the behavior will definitely help you improve the engagement/conversion on your website.
User journey and returning users:
A visitor landing on a page and visiting a different parts of your website is called the user journey. User journeys help you discover which pages are making people abandon your website, and which pages keep them engaged.
In most cases, you will have a common user journey to the core product/services page of your website. That user journey is important for you. It will allow you to explore the drop-offs, bounce ratio, and exit pages on this user journey, and thus be able to improve the engagement.
On Google Analytics, you will find the ‘User Journey’ under ‘User Behavior Report’. If you see a high bounce rate on your product/services page you need to re-think the page design and content. But if you see a very few visitors reaching those pages, you have some issue with prior pages.
Acquiring new visitors and converting them into customers is cool, but converting returning/repeating users is much easier than you think.
Returning users are deeper inside your sales funnel as they are familiar with your website, content, and product/services. New visitors are just getting started with your website.
Lower returning visitor session suggest an issue with your website’s UX. Fixing the high traffic (most visited) page with high bounce rate would probably show significant changes to your website’s traffic.
New vs Returning:
It’s always good to convert a new visitor into a customer. But converting a returning visitor into a customer is far easy than converting a new visitor.
Check your returning user analysis.
Time analysis:
Time is another important factor in user engagement. How much time they spend on your website and pages matters.
Sometimes a user spending more time on a page is a positive sign and sometimes it is a negative sign. How would you differentiate? And what action should you perform?
The positive one: If you observe users spending more time on a page which has a lengthy but well researched content. It is a positive sign. You should consider it as an engagement. This generally happens with blog posts.
The negative one: If you observe users spending more time on a page which has very little content, it’s a negative sign. The chances are your users are confused, don’t have clue about where to go next, and didn’t find the information they were looking. If you see this happening with your product/services page, you need to take action.
What actions should you perform?
Make sure all your links and buttons are working fine.
Also, make sure the page with the high drop off rate has uniform UI design with correct a call to action elements in place.
Ensure your above the fold section has meaningful, action motivating, and engaging content. For the product page, throw your product images, specs, and price above the fold.
Use heat maps on your analytics service (Google analytics, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg offer heat map analysis) to make sure visitors are viewing the full page and making relevant actions.
If the users are making a full page journey quickly, there might be something like important information, content, images, or a guided action element missing on your page.
If users are not making a full page journey, there is something wrong with your above the fold content. Check their interaction, time spent on page, and content you have above the fold. Change it and put under A/B test to measure the results.
User behavior, a recap:
- Common user journey
- Next and previous page visit flow
- Are they scrolling to the end?
- How they interact with page
- Time analysis: how quickly they find items, how long do they take to perform an action, loading time, how they behave with interactions you have on a page
Search Usage
Search is a must have feature on your website if you have a content heavy or product heavy website.
Search is mandatory when you are catering to the small device screen segment and you have a large number of pages on your website.
Search makes content or product discovery easy as your users just need to type what they want, and they get what they need. I cannot imagine some of the very popular websites/apps like Amazon, YouTube, Google, and Spotify without a search!
When the search is positive:
If you see an increased traffic on your search action/page, an increased average engagement time, and reduced bounce rate, you are on the right track!
Your visitors are properly interacting with the website, and there is no issues with navigation and information architecture. They have used the search for the correct reason, hopefully to buy product.
When the search is negative:
A search feature is really useful to find specific information, but it’s not meant to be on the home page or landing page.
If you see an increase traffic on your search action/page, decreased average engagement time, and high bounce rate, there is a problem we need to address.
Check your user behavior report and explore the user journey before the search page and after the search page. Consider the number of user drop offs on the search results page.
If you notice users are using search for common pages that are included in the navigation, then you might need to rethink your navigation items.
If you see a large number search made from the homepage with little to no interaction on the page, you need to rethink the home page content. Personalization of content may help you increase interaction and engagement just like how you see personalized suggestions after signing in to the Amazon, YouTube, and other such websites.
Customer Surveys
A customer survey is a really handy way to get very specific answers from your real targeted end users. It helps you optimize the experience based on their real feedback.
If you observe a high bounce rate in one area more that another, then asking your real end users a specific question might help.
You might have created a website interface based on a common design standard. But possibly that design standard is not working for your product or the audience. In this case, observing just the heat map analysis may not help you, but reaching out to your end users would definitely help.
For instance, the colour red represents danger in the western world but it isn’t the case for China! All the major companies conduct customer surveys when they update their design, layout, and launch a new product. It helps them improve their content and design to serve their users better.
When to conduct customer surveys?
When you see an increase of bounce rates in a specific audience or when you are launching a website/app for specific a geographic region, then it makes the most sense to conduct the customer survey.
Be sure to ask a very specific questions that help you improve the user experience. It would be best to have multiple choice questions for quantifiable data, but also allow people to speak their mind freely at some points to capture qualitative data too. If you are conducting the survey for reducing bounce ratio, you must study the analytics of your website in order to prepare the right questions.
A/B Testing:
Analytics help you identify the leaking parts of your website. You need to create a design strategy to address those flows. Make a list of items that need to be redesigned.
A/B testing is the recommended strategy when you finish re-designing a page and you are ready to deploy the changes. Deploying all the changes on the production server at once is a very bad idea.
Instead, I would recommend you first change the above the fold section and alter the call to action design a bit. You can also start with a core product/services page which has the high traffic but facing high bounce rate.
Your new, modified design will become the ‘Version B’ of your page while the ‘Version A’ will be your original page. Ask your programming team to setup the AB test for your website/app. It is very easy for WordPress website owners, the nelio plugin makes this task easy. A/B testing is the action of sending some users to the new design, some users to the old, and measuring the analytics of both.
The most straightforward way to measure the A/B test result is to measure the Page A engagement vs Page B engagement. The one with higher average engagement and lower bounce rate is the winner.
Here is a nice and detailed article on how to run an A/B test on Google analytics. The ideal A/B test strategy would be:
● Identify the flow in your website/app
● Create a new design version
● Name the new design Version B.
● Measure the engagement and bounce rates.
● Decide which page is the winner.
● Repeat the strategy until you get the expected engagement figures
Conclusion
Analytics help you understand your users better. You can trace the problematic parts of your website via user interaction, bounce rates, engagement, user behavior and other analytics reports. Fixing the problematic pages/sections on your website will help you improve the user engagement and conversion rates of your website.
About me: I’m Alice Emma Walker, a User Experience Designer in Canada/Hong Kong/Australia. When I’m not UXing, I’m playing rugby or traveling. Check out my other articles or connect with me on LinkedIn.
