Understand your audiences with UX research
Your favourite websites – the ones you go back to multiple times a week – are the ones that provide a useful, interesting or entertaining service and do so in a satisfying way. They are easy to navigate. There are no weird design choices getting in the way of what you want to do. You don’t have to click and tap endlessly to get where you’re going. You’re not being constantly logged out or nagged by ads.
In other words, they’re providing a good user experience.
The term ‘UX’ (User Experience) describes how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system or service. And it’s remarkably easy to get wrong. Part of the challenge is being able to identify the successes and failures of your own website, when you’re so close to it.
That’s why people come to us for help. We’ve partnered with many incredible cultural institutions at One Further on UX projects. You can take a look at some of our work here. A typical first point of contact is when a client says “We’d like to change our website, and want to do it right. Can you help us figure out what is working and not working?”
Website issues can be difficult to spot without an appropriate research methodology. Exactly how we go about this varies from project to project, but there are core principles that we use to guide the research.
Analysing the site
We cannot diagnose issues without taking a proper look first, and a first step is always to analyse how the site is performing now and in the past. It is very important to identify how people interact with the site, what pages they visit and which buttons they click.
This gives us an initial analysis of visitor behaviour and the site’s technical competence. We can tell whether some pages are not getting the traffic they should be getting, or if people are getting stuck at a critical moment such as during the checkout journey. Many serious issues can be spotted at this stage before we’ve even started talking to real people, such as page loading issues that would cause frustration or impatience.
Asking people for their opinions
We’re the experts, but analysing the numbers only gets us so far and is no substitute for real world tests.
It’s vital to hear from real people, whether that’s regular or first-time visitors. People can tell us what they think the site does well and what needs improvement, and this is often when we make unexpected discoveries.
We have several ways of finding and interacting with a client’s visitors. Some of these are third-party website surveys, while others involve us talking to a range of visitors to observe their response to the website’s design.
Checking things work as they should
There comes a time when we need to see things through the eyes of a website visitor, and understand why, where and when they click. Sitting with people as they use the site allows us to take the expert hats off and better understand how the site functions in the real world.
This is actually my favourite type of test as not only does it highlight the big issues, it also reveals smaller things that puzzle visitors and which would otherwise be overlooked. It’s great feedback for our clients, and allows them to think at a bigger scale.
Sometimes, our clients are so used to knowing where to click on their own website that they overlook obvious problems encountered by visitors. For instance, I was recently leading a testing session for a client and asked the participants to cancel a ticket purchase. Several testers turned to the site’s search function to look for that information and, to their surprise (and mine), found no results. It hadn’t even occurred to me – or the client – to use the search box, yet it was the first destination for the testers, before even trying to use the website’s menus.
This was a great insight for the client, as we suggested that they review their search function and add links to the FAQs, which actually did contain the relevant information but were not included in the search’s scope. It’s a good example of why you need to engage with real people, so as to move past your own assumptions and built-in expectations.
A recent study highlighted how important it is to let the visitor know when something is happening. During some user testing sessions, I was asking people to search for specific resources, using a search box and filter.
What testers did not realise was that nothing on the page visibly changed when they clicked on “search”, as the results were displayed below the fold.. The page did not reload, there was no update, nothing on the screen gave any indication that results appeared. So testers kept trying, hitting the search button repeatedly, until they realised what was happening.
The client already knew how the search worked, so had never realised how confusing it was to an external visitor.
Making sure visitors are happy
The core principles of UX are whether someone can do what they need to do on the website, whether they can do it quickly and easily, and whether it is a pleasant experience.
If a site requires you to jump through hoops to purchase a ticket to a show, is that good enough? Even if it works, is that the experience you want to give your visitors? It’s the digital equivalent of the first impression someone gets when they walk through the doors of a physical venue. This is why we ask for people’s opinions, and why we have them test things in front of us. If there is a frustration, we need to identify it, so that it can be fixed and customers will be happy to come back.
The UX reports we produce are a mix of data, interviews and observations. When the report goes back to the client, it provides them with renewed clarity. Sometimes that feeds into a brand new website brief, or a tweak to a site’s navigation or messaging. Our job with UX is to help clients and customers better understand one another. UX is all about people.
If you want to talk about a UX project, do get in touch.
“Collaborating with their knowledgeable team was a joy, as they expertly guided us through each phase based on the data they found. These critical insights formed a key report that became the roadmap for an online transformation.”