What to Look for When Choosing a Website Optimisation Consultant

Website optimisation consultants aren’t all created equal. Individual consultants vary in terms of the solutions they offer, the processes they follow, what they charge, and even the results they’ll be able to achieve for you and your business.

Before choosing a website optimisation consultant, take the time to ask and answer the following questions:

Do they really understand how to do UX well?

Lots of teams and consultants say they ‘do UX’, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re integrating it into their processes effectively — nor does it mean they’ll be able to get you the results you need.

A few important questions to ask here are:

• What qualifications have they completed?
• What experience and results can they show you?
• Does their development team understand UX as well as their UX team? This is important to ensure everything is technically feasible from a development perspective, and that it behaves as intended once executed.
• Do they understand the psychology of UX? E.g. from a research perspective, do they incorporate psychology research best practices in mitigating bias, or are they aware of visual psychology principles when designing solutions?
• Do they validate their design ideas? If so, how do they validate their ideas and designs (or do they just go with what ‘looks good’)?
• Do they have in place rigorous research practices? E.g. ensuring data saturation, achieving data triangulation, avoiding or minimising researcher bias, having a neutral observer in all research sessions, etc.

These and other questions will help you identify providers who both understand how to do UX well and how to carry it out effectively.

What is their process when it comes to website optimisation?

How will the consultant approach your project? The best site optimisation consultants start with a comprehensive analysis of a website, rather than diving immediately into problem-solving mode.

At Sitback, we firmly believe that you can’t solve a problem unless you have the required data. As we say, in order to innovate, we must first understand.

“In order to innovate, we must understand.”

Any good website optimisation consultant, from a best practice perspective, will always perform background research to understand your existing issues before presenting the appropriate solutions and recommendations to you. Whether you’re planning a full site redesign or more simple landing page optimisation work, beginning with research is critical.

Do they follow design thinking frameworks?

At Sitback, we use design thinking in our website optimisation work, because we believe it’s the strongest foundation for achieving strong UX. It also allows us to confirm that we’ve identified the right problems to solve from the start — and that the challenges we’re solving for are tied directly to our clients’ desired outcomes.

But what is design thinking?

“The design thinking ideology asserts that a hands-on, user-centric approach to problem-solving can lead to innovation, and innovation can lead to differentiation and a competitive advantage. This hands-on, user-centric approach is defined by the design thinking process and comprises 6 distinct phases.” Nielsen Norman Group

Specifically, the six phases of design thinking include:

• Emphasise
• Define
• Ideate
• Prototype
• Test
• Implement

While there are many ways to approach website optimisation, we don’t recommend working with a consultant that doesn’t base their approach around this methodology.

Do they understand your website’s objectives?

Making UX improvements isn’t just about improving the look and feel of a web page. Changes have to relate to your company’s priorities or to your users’ requirements — otherwise, all you’ve really done is put a nice design over the same problems that still exist.

A good website optimisation consultant should be able to balance all of these priorities. While aesthetic considerations are important, the consultant should care just as much — if not more so — about whether the changes being made meet the needs of your business and its website visitors.

Have their methods been proven effective?

To ensure a consultant will be able to provide you with the results you need from your optimisation project, look at their past work for previous clients.

Take the time to read through their case studies and testimonials to get a feel for the type of results they’ve achieved in the past.

It’s also wise to note what types of websites, businesses and industries they’ve worked with to make sure they have a proven track record for similar businesses to yours.

An eCommerce website is very different to a banking website — a construction company’s website will function very differently from an insurance firm. Individual websites can require different knowledge of best practices, user behaviour and the appropriate business strategies to drive optimisation efforts.

If you’ve struggled to find the right website optimisation consultant in the past, get in touch with Sitback’s team for more information or take a look at the company’s case studies for more on the results its work has achieved for past clients.