Is your website performing as per your expectations and that of your visitors? Today’s websites are becoming highly interactive, complex, and packed with features. In pursuit of making the website that has it all, designers sometimes give lower consideration to the usability factor of the site. If a visitor can engage and interact effectively with your website then it can build loyalty and trust with your brand, but a poor performing website will do just the opposite. Optimizing website usability is such a vast field that Nabler has built an Optimization Center of Excellence. Every year we help our clients enhance their website performance through in-depth usability analysis. Here are 10 ways usability analysis can help:
Identify the website problems
Gone are the days when having a good-looking website was considered “cool”. Today, visitors are there on your website for a purpose. They do not wish to be distracted. They want to find the information they are looking for in the easiest possible way. Your company would be termed as innovative if you can do just that. With usability analysis, you can learn where visitors are facing a problem and hence identify those loopholes where they might be bouncing away or facing difficulties in finding what they want.
Chart the right path for your visitors
You want your visitors to follow the steps of your conversion funnel and give you that sale, but have you analyzed those steps? Through various types of analytics techniques, the path followed by your visitors on your website can be identified and then you can tally it with the path you want them to follow. This will enable you to find places where the visitors are deflecting so that you can take necessary measures to modify that behavior. Any vagueness in the path to conversion should be removed.
Remove confusing navigation
Navigations provided at the top, at the bottom, on the homepage, on the inside pages, on the landing pages, and even sub-navigation in the middle of the page content might help you to place the content logically, but it might not be effective all the time. We must test how the website navigation is used by the visitors and remove any confusion that might be occurring due to overwhelming navigations.
Simplify the checkout process
All e-commerce websites want to increase basket sizes and reduce cart abandonment rate. According to various studies, 63% is the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate in 2015. Although there are many best practices defined for developing an e-commerce website, this number remains high for most of the online businesses. By studying the user behavior, usability analytics can help simplify the checkout process thereby increasing user satisfaction as well as sales.
Optimize website content
Content is exploding all around in the digital world. It is important for businesses to study the appropriate amount and style of content required for various types of visitors. Bombarding the visitor with too much information can be as deadly as giving out too little. The way you present the content is equally important. With usability analysis, site owners can learn how visitors are interacting with their content and modify it appropriately to increase engagement.
Test the graphic design elements
Just like content, graphic design holds equal value. There have been a number of test cases where analysts have found what type of design options work. But each website is unique and so is the design. A/B testing and multivariate testing can help analysts study every element of design and content mix in order to find the options that have maximum usability rating among visitors.
Reduce page load timing
47% of consumers expect a web page to load in less than 2 seconds. Even Google has said that it takes page load time into consideration while ranking the pages during the search. There are many tools in the market that can help calculate the page load times under various circumstances. Page load timing can have a significant impact on the user experience and hence it is a key part of usability analysis.
Personalize your website based on past user behavior
Nothing enhances a visitor’s experience than seeing a website that caters to his/her needs. Based on the past behavior and how the website was used by the visitor, the current session can be personalized to enhance usability further. Offering what the customer needs is the key deliverable for any company and usability analytics can help achieve that.
Analyze digital marketing campaigns and landing pages
Usability analytics is not a one-time activity that you do for your website; it’s a continuous task that also takes into consideration your digital marketing initiatives and the corresponding landing pages. If you wish to get better results from your future campaigns and increase conversions, then usability analytics is not an option but an imperative.
Usability analysis for the mobile site
Mobile internet has already taken over the desktop internet and so users expect that what works well on the desktop should also work equally well or even better on the mobile. However, the reality is quite different. Even today, many companies treat desktop website and mobile site as two separate heads. Usability analytics of all the types of screens that your customer uses has to be conducted and designs should be modified to cater to those differences.
To conclude
Jakob Nielsen, one of the veterans in the web usability domain, has written a book titled “Usability Engineering”. According to him there are five characteristics of usability:
Ease of learning
Can a first-time visitor to your website use it well enough to accomplish basic tasks?
Efficiency of use
How quickly can repeat visitors accomplish tasks once they have learned to use the system?
Memorability
Can repeat visitors remember enough to use the website more efficiently during the next visit?
Error frequency and severity
How often do users make errors while on the website and how serious are these errors?
Subjective satisfaction
How much does the user enjoy using the website?Conduct usability analytics and see where your website stands in terms of the above parameters. Due to the increasing complexity of the digital world and the prevalence of the multi-channel visitors, usability analytics has turned into a specialized field. Nabler offers advanced services for usability analytics and we would be happy to answer any questions that you have. Please feel free to contact us.