As digital marketers, we have a role and responsibility to positively shape users’ experiences on websites, apps, and landing pages. Implementing simple usability tests can help our clients navigate through their digital properties from customers’ points of view. Usability tests are a structured way to challenge our assumptions about how people use the internet. They reveal the gaps between how we might expect someone to react to a digital property and their actual experience.

As we craft digital strategies, it’s important to remember that quantitative data cannot answer every question or support every decision. Analytics can answer, “What happened?” but they don’t necessarily tell us, “Why did this happen?”

As a qualitative research method, usability tests help us answer the “Why?” by focusing on subjective details to give us insights into users’ feelings about a digital experience. With usability testing we can answer questions like:

  • Was the user confused or frustrated?

  • Did the user enjoy their experience?

  • How could the experience have been better, easier, or faster?

For example, if Google Analytics is reporting poor conversion results for a Call to Action (CTA) on a client’s homepage, we know what happened (not enough users are converting), but we don’t know why.

By conducting a usability test, we can ask users if the CTA was easy to find and made sense. From those nuanced, qualitative responses we can then pinpoint problems with the CTA, develop hypotheses, and implement solutions to improve conversion rates.


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