Optimize Conversion Rates with Usability Testing

How many times has this happened to you, you see an advertisement on social media about a new jewelry brand, you visit the website and get frustrated in few seconds and close the page.

What went wrong there? Well, sometimes you are bombarded with too many ads on the landing page. Sometimes the sign-up page asks you to fill 20 questions and you think it's not worth the time. And sometimes the website will not allow you to continue without signing up.

Whatever the reason is, the website just lost a potential customer affecting its conversion rate. If you are a marketeer, wouldn't you want your customer to be glued to your page until the user reaches the completion stage?

A successful marketing strategy will hand a user to your website, the usability of that site takes over and converts that user into a customer. A good user experience is directly related to a high conversion rate.

Understand the user's perspective

When you are designing a website, you may feel it has the best user experience. Of course, you feel that way because you have designed it, you are aware of all the features. But the actual feedback comes when your intended user uses it. By putting out your design in front of real users you will get feedback about their experience.

Usability testing of your website will give you an idea about things like:
a. Does the landing page has too much text that confuses the user.
b. Is your call to action clear or it looks like an ambiguous link which user may hesitate to click on.
c. Is your signup page asking for too much information.
d. On which page is the user abandoning your website.
e. How many users reach the completion stage.
f. Is the user comfortable with the color combination of the website.

If your website is not usable, be sure that users will leave midway. Market research shows that people judge a website in less than a seconds time. Your website should look promising, it should make the user feel that we will get the job done. Getting traffic to your website is not the actual huddle, converting that traffic to customers is.
Let's look at few examples.

Example 1: This website does not follow any of UX best practice. Too many links on the landing page, too much white space, tacky color combination and fonts, unrelated images. It has it all. A user will mostly think of it as an unreliable website and close it immediately.

Example 2: Correct error message will let the user know what exactly is wrong with his input. In the first case, by seeing the error message "Specified date is incorrect", the user may not realize what his mistake is and close the page. By specifying the exact error as shown in the second case below, the user would know what exactly he needs to do.

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The guide to usability testing

Conducting a successful usability testing requires few important factors. You need to understand what is your focus group. Do you need users from different age group, geographical location, mix gender, different profession, different IQ level, different device configuration, different networks etc. The user base needs to be varied to get a general feedback. Various tools can be used to record user behavior and track analytics example of one such tool is UXaudit.io

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Analysing results and improving your UX hence your conversion rates

Now the question is how is the data gathered from usability testing going to help you. To do that we need to go through few problem statements and come up with action items.

Let's take an example to analyze this. A car resale company, who also has an online presence wants to increase their online sign-ups. Their website shows updates about available used cars, price quotes, and users can book a test drive online if they like a car. But not many people sign-up using their website. Data collected through usability testing and analyzing it can help in getting insights like:

a. The percentage of users accessing the website using mobile - Google analytics can tell you what percentage of users are trying to access your website through mobile and if the website is not optimized for mobile devices, visitors will surely abandon the website

b. The % of women visitors - Google analytics can also help you to know what percentage of visitors are male and female. If a major percentage of visitors are female then being inclusive of both genders is important. For this company, if the homepage shows a man driving a car, they should consider changing that image to show both men and women driving

c. Identifying UI flaws and usability issues - Feedback collected from usability testing can tell you what are the features that user feel are missing on your website. Like if this website did not have zoomable images that is a major usability issue. Users like to zoom in and see car details like the design, prior scratches on the car or color. But if the images could not be zoomed, this could disappoint the user resulting in increased bounce rate.

d. Unrelated Ads - Showing random banner ads on your web page does not give a pleasurable experience to your user. The click-through rate for the advertisements shown on the website will give you an idea if you are marketing related ads. If you are a car resale company, an ad for a website whose product is car perfumes might do fairly well. Push your creative team to come up with a relevant advertising campaign.
The example below shows a website for children toys which shows men hair loss ad. Totally unrelated right!

e. Vague Content - The text on the landing page should convey what the website is about clearly. Content testing can show if your website is communicating what you have to offer. Too much text or ambiguous lines on the website confuses the user. Create a powerful content strategy so that you come across as a promising website.

Just by fixing these minor UX designs this company can reduce their bounce rate. If users don't have a reason to leave the site, they will surely reach the completion stage. Small improvements on your website like changing the button size or changing a particular image can have a big impact on your sales.

With this I hope you would have got an overview of usability testing and all the peculiarities involved. I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Thanks for your time and feel free to add your comments below and let me know your thoughts about this article.

Nidhi Rai, UXaudit.io

I am a QA by profession with 5 years of experience on various automation technologies. I am highly passionate about experience design as an emerging field and an enthusiast to spread the importance of usability and usability testing. When I am not working I am mostly reading, writing, or traveling. I am from India but currently staying in the United States.

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