Why You Should Add Usability Testing Into Your Interactive Strategy

While Google analytics can provide you with quantitative data regarding your website’s performance — the who, what, where and when, you may still be left wondering about the qualitative data, the why and how. Why would a user spend more time on one page of your site versus another? Although you may know where every piece of content is on your website, your end user may feel clueless when navigating your site, therefore leaving sooner than you’d like them to. Usability testing helps you understand why that may be happening.

Usability testing is one way you can gain valuable insights regarding your users’ site interactions that can help translate back to higher conversion rates. In short, usability testing is a technique to help solve problems in the design of your website.

Why should you consider implementing usability testing as part of your interactive strategy? Here are a few reasons.

• Deliberately involves end users and helps understand business objectives
• Learn what doesn’t work when it’s most cost effective to fix it
• Addressing challenges earlier gives us a better chance at hitting deadlines
• Uncovers opportunities to differentiate products to gain competitive advantages
• Provides a solid and robust research-led approach to design
• Enhances market research and competitive analysis

There are various tools with different features out there to help with usability testing. Tools such as these can help provide you with critical feedback including video and screen recordings of how users are interacting with your site.

What can you test using this technique? One area to test is your brand impression. By asking a few questions of your test users upfront, you can gauge several important factors before you even have them go to your site. With usability testing, you can identify what your target demographic thinks, feels, and knows about your industry, and then narrow it down to what they know about your company specifically. Then you can also test how clearly you’re communicating your brand. Once the test user is on your site, they can describe their emotions regarding your logo, your homepage, ease of navigation, and even the overall design and color scheme of your site. Another area to test is how consistent your brand is coming across on multiple platforms, such as your social media sites and other marketing materials.

In summary, usability testing allows you to get a glimpse at the why of your end users’ interactions with your site. Knowing the reasoning behind your users’ interactions on your site can help you make practical changes to improve overall conversion rates.

Need help with usability testing? Let’s chat!