Go beyond analytics to understand why, not only what

Photo credit: Alliance Interiors

Let’s say you have a website that works quite well for you, but nothing is perfect and you are aware that there is plenty of room for improvement in terms of user experience and your conversion rate.

Online analytics services, such as Google Analytics, provide a lot of useful data to make sense of what is going on with the website – which pages perform worse than others, common user paths, conversion rates, average visit lengths. While the data is definitely important, you cannot rely solely on it in order to decide what you need to do to improve the website. You have a lot of data on what is happening, but not why it is happening.

Is it good that users spend a fairly long time on the homepage? You do not know whether it is because they read everything thoroughly there or because they struggle to make a decision what to do next. Users might abandon your website at checkout for a completely different reason than you might think, thus you might spend resources on simplifying the checkout process when the problem is not with it but with misleadingly worded delivery options. Marketers, analysts, UX teams can make good assumptions to interpret the data, however, these are just assumptions that might be wrong.

No expert can get into the heads of your users to see what exactly they are thinking. And making wrong assumptions is often expensive.

What you need is getting some insights into how actual users use your website to achieve their goals, how they perceive it, how exactly they behave, what surprises them etc. It is especially important if the process of creating the website was only partly or not at all user-centred.

The behavioural data should not be treated as a replacement for analytics, it should just supplement it, help to test various hypotheses of why usage statistics are the way they are.

User testing is easier than you think

Nothing helps better in understanding users’ behaviour than actually observing them using your website, however, a common reaction when I recommend a client to do some user testing is unease or scepticism, mostly due to an assumption that it is something time consuming and expensive. It might well be, but you do not necessarily need to rent a lab with some eye-tracking equipment, find a professional facilitator and recruit a lot of potential users (or, more realistically, contract an agency that does it for you).

When you are doing user testing not for measuring usability (thus, do not need accurate statistics for things like success rates or average task times) and not for doing benchmarking, but in order to get some understanding on how users use and perceive your website, you do not need many participants.

In fact, as few as 5 would provide many good insights, ideally you should run several rounds of testing (every time some changes are made). Even observing fewer users than this would enable you to look at your website from a different angle and avoid a common problem in design teams – not being able to see obvious issues with a website because they have spent too much time looking at it, cannot to step aside and look at it as a typical user.

Source: Nielsen Norman Group

You could just invite some people (who are part of your target audience) to your office, ask them to carry out some specific tasks on your website while thinking aloud and observe them – do they carry out the tasks a bit differently than you have expected? Do they get frustrated? You are likely to make many interesting observations, which, combined with the insights from analytics, can inspire some successful design or content changes.

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