Most businesses are now becoming aware of the fact that ongoing user testing is a vital aspect of their website development. Rather than allowing internal – and usually uninformed – corporate views to dictate developments, user testing allows the digital platform to be reviewed and assessed by test subjects from the actual target audience.
There are a number of benefits to this approach.
Firstly, user testing offers immediate and actionable quick wins. With targeted insights, you can take immediate steps to re-engineer the website, enhance the overall user experience and increase task-completion rates, which in turn will increase your online conversions and ROI.
Assessing the Barriers to Conversion
It can be used too to assess why conversion rates at the point of check-out or application – known as abandonment – are so low. The testing will identify if there is a certain stage in the process which is leading to high abandonment – something that is a key blocker for successful for e-commerce websites.
Using Your Budget More Effectively
Another benefit is that UX testing means the marketing search budget won’t be wasted. Rather than spending money blind on AdWords and other tools, investment in the research behind user actions means that you can target the budget and increase ROI by optimising user experience. It will also flag up any substantial issues with the site’s information architecture, which will prove why certain structural changes must be made. A web designer in Cheltenham such as 16i can assist with this.
Of course, one of the primary benefits of buying in expertise from a specialist agency is that it flags up issues that the internal team may not even be aware of. An internal-facing perspective and viewpoint is one of the most typically challenging aspects of optimising digital assets – and all too often in-house politics end up driving developments rather than true insights into what is and what isn’t currently working.
Interestingly, many marketing teams find that UX testing shows that their creative online marketing efforts and promotions actually aren’t that important – with users ignoring banners and instead heading straight to the substantive site content. This insight into shopping behaviours again helps to inform budget spend and how time is spent focusing on different marketing opportunities to best effect.
Is your company ready to invest in user testing?