User experience (UX) covers all aspects of a product or a service from a customer’s perspective. It guides the customer’s interaction with a website or mobile app from a visual and functional perspective. UX highlights the affective, experiential, valuable, and meaningful aspects of product or service interaction.
When it comes to implementing various sales and marketing strategies, it’s crucial to measure user experience. In product design, user experience (UX), as the name suggests, refers to the overall experience of the users when using a product. The job of a UX designer is to create a product that promotes the best user experience.
User experience reflects every interaction with visitors on your website, apps, and other online platforms. Creating good UX design focuses on the user irrespective of their location, age, and ‘tech-savviness.’ Aside from creating a great UX design, keep in mind that an essential aspect of any marketing strategy is to measure user experience.
In this post, you’ll learn the different reasons why measuring experience is important.
1. Determine A User’s Level Of Satisfaction
One of the primary reasons you need to measure user experience is to determine your target audience’s level of satisfaction. UX goes hand-in-hand with the usability of the user interface (UI), which greatly influences customer satisfaction.
It’s crucial to measure the following user experience metrics for your website:
- Completion Rates: Using clicks and impressions, you’ll know if an online user takes the correct direction in the completion of orders, interactions, subscriptions, and the like.
- User Errors: This metric tracks the mistakes users make while trying to complete a task. If there are too many user errors, the problem should be addressed immediately.
- Usability Problems: These problems include unclear error messages and slow-loading pages that may either be local or global. These issues may affect a small portion of the entire interface.
- Task Times: This efficiency metric measures the time spent by a user on a task. If it’s taking longer than expected, then it’s a clear indication of interface redesign.
- Task Level Satisfaction: This UX metric measures a user’s satisfaction level, giving direct feedback on usability.
Check this blog post for more information about essential usability metrics to measure user experience.
2. Improve Usability
If your website visitors have a poor experience, they’ll look for solutions or go elsewhere.
Usability plays a vital role in promoting a good user experience when visitors visit your website. This term shouldn’t be confused with UX. Remembers that usability is the second component when designing a great user experience. When determining a website’s usability factor, it’s essential to measure a website’s appeal, usefulness, and brand experience.
A website design’s usability factor depends on how the site’s features relate to the people’s needs and context. Check these important considerations to improve usability:
- Efficiency: Your website should support users to perform actions accurately using a simpler process.
- Commitment: It’s when the user finds the website or the product pleasant to use, thus increasing user satisfaction and maintaining or increasing the number of visitors on your website.
- Resistance To Errors: Your website should enable different user actions, minimizing the possibility and impacts of errors.
- Ease Of Learning: The first-time visitor can attain their objectives easier and faster.
3. Track Conversion To Gauge Sales And Marketing Campaign
User experience can influence your marketing campaign, which has something to do with the conversion rate. Increased conversion rate is a relative metric, reflecting a good user experience.
What is the conversion rate? This metric pertains to the percentage of people who take the desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, adding contact details in the contact form, booking an appointment, or purchasing a product.
Below are important things to know about tracking conversion to gauge your marketing campaigns:
Why You Should Track UX And Conversions: Tracking conversion rate is important in determining the absolute number of user actions your business value the most. It also tracks the marketing effectiveness of your UX efforts and user-interface design over time.
How To Measure: In gauging the effects of user experience on sales and marketing, you can ask your web designer to improve your UX design without making any changes in your marketing strategy. If the changes result in higher conversion and sales, thank your web designer. Measuring conversion should take a month before obtaining the number of conversion events and the baseline user count.
UX Investment: Track your conversion rates, aligning them with web design changes. This way, you can justify the cost of your investment in user experience. While there are many non-UX parameters impacting conversion, the actual web UX design has a more significant impact. For instance, a more simplified form can increase your conversion rate because people might find it faster to answer and submit forms and queries (higher completion rate).
Split Testing: A key in measuring the impact of UX design in sales and marketing is A/B testing or split testing. As per the recent example, in determining which of the forms (shorter or longer) is more effective in your sales and marketing, you can conduct a split test. For instance, you can create a longer form for a month and then a shorter form for the same period and compare conversions and sales.
Read also; How to get Started with Growth Hacking
4. Track, Analyze, And Improve Sales
Consumers find online shopping more convenient than physically shopping in grocery stores and supermarkets, especially during this pandemic. So, it’s not surprising for many brick-and-mortar entrepreneurs to add or shift to online stores.
Measuring user experience is a vital step to track and analyze sales because they have a direct relationship. If you place yourself in an online shopper’s shoes, you’d want a fast-loading, intuitive, and easy-to-use online store. A sluggish, confusing, and boring online shop is a major turnoff for consumers. On the other hand, a seamless and fast-loading website attracts more sales, making people’s lives a lot easier.
5. Improve Overall Customer Experience
User experience improves the overall customer experience, affecting your company’s return on investment (ROI). Good UX investments enhance customer satisfaction. Then, your satisfied customers will become loyal customers because they trust your products and services.
With better UX, you are assured that your software solution investment generates a great measurable value, which results in loyal customers returning frequently to avail of your products and services. Make loyal customers your brand ambassadors by making their experience meaningful when dealing with your website, mobile app, products, or services.
What are the different UX techniques and processes you should implement to improve the overall customer experience? They are as follows:
Creating Personas
Personas refer to fictional characters one can create based on field data research. A persona represents various user types interested to use your product, service, website, app, or brand. By creating personas, you’ll better understand the users’ needs, goals, experiences, and behaviors, allowing you to gain better insights.
Creating personas can also help you identify and relate with the users you’re designing a website, app, or product for. Moreover, with a scenario-driven design, you’ll understand customer experience by building personas, user stories, and customer journey maps.
Wireframing
What does a wireframe mean? A wireframe refers to a basic or low-fidelity layout of a website or product which involves paper sketches and prototypes. Advanced wireframes have more visual details and interactions, such as interactive digital mock-ups.
This sets a foundation for UX design with wireframing, focusing on how elements seamlessly flow or interact with one another for the best possible user experience.
Usability Testing
This UX testing technique aims to determine the ease of use of a website or product design. You can conduct usability testing for a group of representative customers or a crowd testing platform. This way, you can gain powerful insights through various interactions with your design.
The main objective of usability testing is to determine a design’s usability problems as early as possible. It allows you to resolve any design issues before mass-producing or implementing the design. Usability testing usually involves using prototypes instead of finished products, allowing you to create measurable business goals and identify barriers using analytics, user testing, and AB testing.
6. Improves Job Performance And Employee Retention
Technology helps companies understand employees better to improve the employee experience (EX). With advanced design techniques, businesses can improve both UX and EX. Measuring user experience can also help improve job performance and employee retention. Additionally, it reduces inventory and saves on labor costs.
Because user experience also applies to creating IT systems and business software programs, measuring the same is crucial to improve work productivity. When your employees find it effortless to use your business and telecommunication systems, they’ll get more things done.
Conclusion
You’ve learned the important reasons you need to measure user experience. Firstly, it will help you gauge users’ satisfaction levels. Also, it improves the usability and the effectiveness of your marketing campaign.
Measuring user experience can improve your sales. When people shop on your website or online store without issues, there’s a higher chance of closing more sales. The conversion rates measure what happens once people visit your website—as greatly influenced by your web design. Also, it’s an essential parameter when assessing the effectiveness of your UX strategy.