Your customers’ time is your money: usability testing as a smart investment
Everybody tells you that you should invest in UX. We know that lowering effort to do things can generate business value. Test and tweak your website right now! But to what purpose? Do you know what you want your visitors to do? Do they actually want to do that? Or is your homepage pushing them to that one button they never ever click? How much money did you spend on this state-of-the-art website? And how much time are people spending on it, getting more frustrated by the minute?
Where customers and makers meet
On your website, you want to tell your story. Believe us, we know that. But did you ever consider the main reason why people visit your site? What do they want to do really badly? And how can you help them? The perfect customer experience only lies within your reach when makers and visitors are on the same page.
First of all, you need to know who your customers are and what they want to do on your digital platforms. Figure out what their ‘Top Tasks’ are. Then we can focus on testing and making the tasks easy to do. They should find their answers and complete the mission they came for — and fast. Whether this is contacting your organisation, downloading whitepapers or buying a product. They should have a short, efficient and pleasant experience in your cosy corner of the worldwide web.
Get to know your customers and make their life easy
Once you’ve established what it is the majority of your customers wants to do, you need to find out what stops them from doing it. The best way to measure this is to observe your customers while they are actually performing the top tasks. To that end you can use a remote usability test, which provides the most natural experience while still giving you control of what you test and streamlining the top tasks. After performing this test, you can quantify how fast and easy — or difficult, or downright impossible — it is for them to complete their top tasks. You also know what the biggest hurdles are on your user’s path. Removing those hurdles will lower the customers’ effort needed to do their top tasks and increase business value in a very focused way.
Customer centered design is something that most companies still need to incorporate in their DNA. Often, marketing comes up with an idea and the website follows. With task performance testing it’s no longer about coming up with the next best idea, but about letting your customer insights steer you towards your next best investment.
But how do you achieve all this? How do you improve your website in the long run, while including these benefits? Know your customers and match their needs with your business goals. That’s when you create value.
At Internet Architects, we have a repertoire of methods to get to know your customers’ needs. We’re sure that some will fit your organisation perfectly. Because your end-result is what matters to us. Contact us via info@internetarchitects and we’ll be in touch soon!
By Rinze Leenheer and Kenneth Tits, UX Researchers at Internet Architects
This article first appeared on internetarchitects.be
