What is the User Experience and Why It Is So Important?
What is the User Experience?
“User experience is everything that happens to your users when they have interaction with your business, organization via your website or an online communication system. It includes everything they hear, see, feel and their reaction to the events that happen on the website.”
Why is the User Experience so important?
A web page is designed with some goals and the success of the web page is measured by the goal conversion. Are the visitors’ doings what they are supposed to do? If no then a page is not providing the good user experience. The success of any page solely depends upon the user experience.
Successful companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay and a lot others recognized that their user experience has a direct impact on their bottom line. These companies didn’t succeed by chance instead they have been doing a great work. They continuously test every aspect of their business with real users to ensure high levels of customer satisfaction.
With the millions of web page on the internet a web page just a time of less than one second to grab the attention of users. That’s because on the internet the customer is king. Any point and time your user simply can leave your website and move to your competitor’s web site or somewhere other. We have all experienced this when we’ve visited a website that was slow or buggy or simply made it difficult for us to achieve our objectives.
Common sense tells us that if they cannot find information or have trouble buying your products they will quickly leave your website and shop elsewhere, and they don’t get back. It may happen that they share their experience with others as well and also can have a bad review for your product and services.
The “2011 User Experience Buyer’s Guide” by Econsultancy identified that a good User Experience
- Increases Sales and online conversions
- Improves brand perception
- Improves Google search rankings
- Reduces customer dis-satisfaction and churn
- Reduces the costs of development and support
What is User Experience Testing?
User Experience Testing has several names; UX Testing, usability testing, user testing; they all refer to the process of understanding “what users do and why they do it.”
Traditional user testing involves individual test participants who are recruited to sit at a computer and be observed carrying out tasks that they are given. The process of watching and listening to real people carry out these tasks provides a great insight into what works and what doesn’t, and critically – WHY.
Traditional user testing is really effective, but some time it is time consuming and really expensive, as a result only few companies invest in it. We believe that anyone
How does User Experience Testing Can help You?
User experiencing testing helps you understand what users do on your website and how you can provide a better way to achieve your target. It’s about observing what people actually do and hearing what they think as they interact with your website, application or marketing. It’s the best way to discover what works (so you can do it more) and what doesn’t and WHY. Then fix it.
If you are a user of Google Analytic, Omniture or some other then, goal conversion funnel is the best way to analyze the visitors, their actions and the path they adopted to complete the goal. This funnels and statistics provides a great amount of information about what happens on your website. User experience testing tells you WHY.
- Why your users stay and why they leave?
- Why they buy and why they don’t?
- Why they pay and why they abandon their shopping carts?
- Why they buy from your competitors and not from you?
In fact, you can test pretty much anything and find out what your users do and why they do it.
What the experts say
“You can increase sales on your site as much as 225% by providing sufficient product information to your customers at the right time.”
User Interface Engineering, 2001
“User experience testing will identify if your product information is sufficient or not, and what to do about it.”
Nielsen, 1993
“Approximately 63% of large software projects are over budget and the top four reasons rated as having the highest responsibility were related to usability engineering.”
Jakob Nielsen
“Usability rules the web. Simply stated, if the customer can’t find a product, then he or she will not buy it.”
What’s the return on my investment?
Increasing the conversion rate of current website users through user experience testing can be a great help for achieving higher sales. If you are able to understand the physiology of your users and what they do on your website you will be in a better position to tailor the things according to their actions.
A survey suggested spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 83% (Nielsen, 2008).
