Well hello everybody, I’m Brian Lewis with TinyFrog, and today I want to talk about UX, also known as user experience.
You know, UX has become increasingly important in the digital landscape as businesses are now figuring out how crucial of a role it plays in visitor behavior, and ultimately business outcomes.
Unfortunately though with this, there have been some myths and misconceptions about user experience so I want to talk about some of the common myths and truths that go with user experience.
The first one is, the first myth is that good UX means always following best practices. Now best practices are definitely great to learn from previous experiences, but what we’ve seen in doing A/B split tests is that it’s not always what works on one’s website doesn’t always work on another website, and that’s because you have different types of businesses, your different types of products or services, you have different customers and visitor intent.
So you want to make sure that you do the research in terms of what’s important to your visitor when it comes to your user experience, and you can also, again, still rely on those best practices but just don’t follow them blindly.
Next myth is that good UX is only good visual design. Now visual design is definitely an important part of the user experience, but there’s also many other aspects that determine how that interaction is going to go for your visitor in terms of the relevancy of the visit.
You know, is it relevant to what’s important to them? Is the messaging going to resonate with the visitors. Is your messaging primarily about “we we we” “we’re the best in the industry” “we do this” or is your industry more tied to the benefits for your visitor. We’ve seen when it’s more tied to the benefits for the visitor, it’s going to provide a much better user experience.
Another common myth is that good UX cannot be measured. It actually can be measured quite well, both on a quantitative perspective and a qualitative perspective.
First, quantitatively you can use your Google Analytics and you can look at task completion. You can look at conversion rates. You can even look at “time on page” or average session duration. That’ll all give you a good sense from a quantitative perspective of the quality of the UX.
Now on the qualitative side of it, what we’ve seen what works real well is simply doing user surveys, and whether these are live user surveys on the site or whether you do it after the fact, you can get some good information in terms of how good of an experience are you providing for that visitor as they go through their journey.
Another common myth I want to talk about is that good UX is expensive. And good UX does entail extra research, extra work, and typically extra expense. But the key thing here is not the expense of it. The key is the return on your investment. Because what we’ve seen over the years is that sites that don’t do their homework and really understanding visitor intent and just go strictly with best practices will roll out a site that’s not going to work that well. Technically it may work fine, but from a marketing perspective, may not work that well, may not accomplish the corporate objectives, may not accomplish the visitor objectives.
So that extra time and expense of doing the UX research definitely produces a site that is going to age much better, it’s going to meet both the objectives of your visitors and your business.
So remember that good UX is more than just a good visual design. It’s really encompassing the total interaction of how that visitor is feeling about interacting with your website. Thank you.
