Have you ever truly considered the UX Strategy of your website? Is your website adding value to your business beyond the basics of being a digital business card? If you relate to having a “digital business card” for a website, you’d be smart to consider how your website can enhance the User Experience for your current and potential future customers.
A UX Strategy encompasses every aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and it’s products.
Does your website answer every question your target audience might have? If the answer is “No”…then why not? What is preventing you from making your website better?
Lets make an important distinction before getting into it…User Experience is not User Interface, they work together but a UI is just one-aspect of the user’s experience, hence why they are not the same thing.
Need more help understanding the difference between UX and UI?
- UI is how it looks vs. UX being how it works
- UI is a deliverable vs. UX Strategy is the process behind the deliverables…the “why it was done this way”
Why care about UX? Research shows that applying a UX Strategy has many benefits:
- 55% of time is saved for developers when UX research and design is completed beforehand.
- 88% of users will not return to site after bad experience
- 23% of customers are likely to tell 10 or more people about a good experience with a site (when goals of business align with goals of the users)
- increases in many important KPI’s
What’s the typical UX process? –
Define the Problem –
Research –
Design –
Test –
Build –
UX Activities to Complete Before Launching your new Website Redesign
- Complete a HEURISTIC ANALYSIS — A very useful tool for UX beginners and pros alike to use for this step is called “UX Check“…its a free chrome extension that could help speed up your documentation of issues and ideas when testing out a webpage.
- USER INTERVIEWS – If you actually talk to people who use the website, you’ll often find many easy quick wins for the redesign. Start with easy, open ended questions, don’t stop or attempt to educate the user on what you think is what the site needs…you already know what you think…The saying “Don’t know what you don’t know” applies here. HAve you ever seen Undercover Boss? Thats what you become here, you need to keep this converation casual so you can get the truth out of people…Undercover Boss style…this step is pretty crucial because it can save tremendous amounts of time! Have questions prepared, but be able keep it casual and be sure to record the session (don’t even bother taking notes…Undercover Bosses are not taking notes.)
- PERSONA DEVELOPMENT – If you don’t have these already, based on the interviews conducted, determine what your user personas really are. You don’t need to go crazy here, but it helps to provide some structured thinking as to who your business serves and what attributes and commonalities are most strong amongst those users. Knowing our audience is always a good thing.
- USABILITY TESTING – Set aside a few users from each segment and perform a Task Analysis testing, one method you can try the “Think Out Loud” method.
- USER JOURNEY – A visual aid to show the user path for the selected User. Helps to visualize the entire experience.
- CARD SORTING – brainstorming tactic to help group similar ideas and help define things.
- SITE MAP – URL / Page structure document…maintain a visual representation of your website page structure so that you have a great understanding of the content heircarchy and how all future content additions will fit into the bigger picture of your content journey.
UX Activities to Complete After Launching you new Website Redesign
- Enable User Feedback with user feedback forms
- Use Page Analysis Tools like HOTJAR – User videos, click heat maps, and more for user research.
- A/B TESTING – Keep it simple! Choose one element of your site to test at a time.
Closing:
The User Experience strategies described in this article are not reserved for corporate technology companies with fancy designers. Anyone and everyone can be an impactful contributor to forming a UX strategy when redesigning a website…it takes some organization to define what steps to take, but don’t be intimidated!
The most important part of creating a UX strategy is staying with it and making iterative changes as you go…it’s meant to be an ongoing, somewhat never ending process.