The importance of a good website’s user experience: 9 ways to measure and improve it

9 ways to measure your website’s UX. As time passes, finding ways to measure UX on a website becomes more and more important. This will help you identify those aspects you need to improve on your site for the satisfaction of your users.

On the other hand, measuring web UX is very useful to ensure your website is working as it should. This is because it will guide you to stay close to your potential customers.

However, if it turns out that you need to improve certain parts of your website, this process becomes vital. Only by carrying it out will you keep it in top condition.

As a result, you’ll be able to easily grab the attention of your users. That’s why you must detect your weaknesses and work on them to get the best results.

Web usability comes into play when measuring the user experience. This is because collecting this type of information is relevant to offer the user what they want to see. You can do this either qualitatively or quantitatively to find out the best ways to measure UX on a website.

Before you start measuring your website’s user experience, you need to know how your users interact with it.

Each tool that you will see below, offer different data, where you can observe the complete processes. Besides, you will also be able to get information on how much time do your users spend in every step.

This way, you’ll find out if the processes are very long, or where users tend to leave.

When these kinds of problems show up, it’s because something in your website is failing. Once you figure this out, you must do whatever you can to improve it.

Find out 9 ways to measure UX on a website

• Carry out a website analysis to figure out your bounce rate

By finding out through which pages do your users access your website, you’ll be able to figure out how to approach them.

The same happens with the bounce rate of every page.

This is because they allow you to know what to improve in those pages that get you the most traffic.

• The CTR details of the page

Knowing what happens on your website leads to knowing how your users react to your “call to action”.

This way you’ll be able to study the clicks and user behavior of your website.

Thanks to this you’ll also be able to find out any kind of issues or shortcomings within it.

Thus, finding out what you need to improve or change to offer the best user experience.

At this point, what’s important is to correctly label each button. This will allow you to monitor every detail and get information of value.

• The definition and analysis of your conversion funnels 

Before anything, you must first define the sales process you’re going to carry out. Thus, you must also know what your objectives are to monitor them through a web analytics tool.

Thanks to this tool you can see if you’re losing many users and why.

You can then start a study to see which visitors completed all steps and who didn’t.

By understanding all this, you will be able to have enough clues to determine what’s not allowing you to improve the conversion of your website and UX design.

• Analysis of site errors

One of the best ways to measure UX on a website is finding it what’s wrong with it. For this, you can start by studying how it behaves on different devices and operating systems. You must pay extra attention to the pages that bring you the most traffic.

On the other hand, it’s no use having a good UX design if your website keeps failing over and over again. Because of this, you must do whatever you can to improve your website and make it as efficient as possible. For this, there’s a wide variety of methods and tools you can use.

Errors like 404, can make users leave your website faster than anything you can imagine. When this happens, it may be due to poor links, broken links, or other issues that may affect navigation.

• The ability to bring attention to your website (Engagement and user retention)

You’re probably focusing on attracting new users and have forgotten other equally important points. To achieve this objective, your actions must be channeled towards non-optimized targets in tune with the objectives of your business and to improve its user experience.

But first, you must ask yourself the following question: Are your users structured in the right way?

To answer this question you will need to take into account the following metrics:

• The recurrence of users.
• The abandonment rates.
• How much time they spend on your website.
• The depth of the visit is based on the user typology.
• The bounce rates.

These are some ways to measure UX on a website. However, other metrics are available that may be just as effective.

• Measurement of search vs navigation usage 

To know the quality of your website architecture, this metric plays a very important role.

On many occasions, users find searching for information of interest to them hard.

Searching on your website shouldn’t be seen as a last resort option by the user when looking for what they want.

Rather, you should focus on this metric through an objective process to observe the number of users who reach that goal through navigation. Besides, the number of users who reached that goal through search must be taken into account.

• Monitoring through heat maps and recordings

Through heat maps and recordings you’ll be able to monitor user behavior, but from a visual approach. This way, you will need to focus on your interactions to see data such as:

• The level of clicks.
• Record sessions using user behavior.
• Scrolling

If you want to study your website’s user interaction, you can use the following tools:

• Lucky Orange.
• Hotjar
• Crazy Egg.
• ClickTale.

• Loading times and code optimization 

There are many factors related to the user’s journey through your website, and they can affect your website.

For example, if our website takes too long to load, it will lead to a poor UX.

As a result, there may be an increased rate of dropouts, this is why you shouldn’t ignore it.

GT Metrix and Screaming frog are some tools you can use to measure page load efficiency.

• Surveys (NPS)

You can use a very simple questionnaire, to get direct feedback from your customers.

This way you will be able to know what their perception of your website is. Surveys even let you know if your customers would recommend your site to another person.

The information you can get from surveys is very valuable because it comes straight from your users.

For you, it is important to know what the UX experience is going to be when entering your site, and to achieve this you can use some applications such as Customer Gauge.

Is testing also an effective way to measure UX on a website?

The answer is yes.

When it comes to optimizing your website, it’s common to want to see user acceptance when changing certain elements that may not be so relevant. If this is your case, testing can become your true ally. There are different types of testing that you can use, however, these are considered the main ones:

A/B test

Here, you can create two versions of the same page to study them.

For example, you can keep the original one as it is.

Then, in the second you can all those changes you want to test. Besides this, you should also define a trust level and work towards it.

Once you achieve this, you can compare the results to verify which version works best and which one doesn’t. For this, you must keep in mind your objectives.

Multivariate test 

Here, you can add more alternatives to the original version, since different options can be displayed based on the established percentages.

Of course, the original version of the page must also be included.

To carry out these experiments, tools such as Adobe Target and Google Optimize can be used.

The best tools to measure UX on a website 

For you to find out what’s wrong on your website, there are different tools that you can use:

GTMetrix

Through this tool, you can measure the speed of a website.

This tool will carry out an analysis, and once it’s done, it will let you know which files you should modify to improve your website.

Institution HQ

Through this tool, you will know the exact point where the user leaves the process.

You can also figure out how long it takes to complete this process.

This way you will know if this time is long and how the process of your interaction takes place.

Navflow

To find out how users navigate through your website, you can use this tool.

This way you can know which elements need to be improved and which features are having more success.

Juicy Studios

One of the most difficult objectives to fulfill is writing texts that achieve a good positioning and a good UX experience. In this case, you should only write content about what your clients want to see.

All of this while making sure it relates to your website’s topic or field.

By doing this, your users will be able to easily understand the relationship of our site with its text.

For this reason, by using this tool you will be able to determine if your text is correctly optimized for good reading comprehension by the user.

What data can you get with 9 ways to measure UX on a website?

Once you start using the past 9 ways to measure a website user experience, you will be able to get some wonderful data to help you keep your site optimized. Thus, getting potential customers in the right way. These are the most relevant data that you will be able to obtain:

How long the user stays on the website

If your users don’t stay for long on your website, something is wrong. In this case, a bad user experience is the main reason why they leave almost at once.

As a result, they don’t even get the chance to find out what you offer.

Purchase, registration, or other unfinished processes 

How do you know that these processes are failing?

When users register on your website to buy something and then leave the site in the middle of the process.

When this happens it’s because the process has failed, simple as that.

The reasons why this happens are many, but the main one would be requesting data the user isn’t willing to give. Others may be an overload of questions or way too long processes.

Bounce rate

The lower your user experience is, the higher your bounce rate.  This, in turn, means that you aren’t offering the best UX design. A high bounce rate is the nightmare of any website since it means people are leaving it without even looking deeply into it.

Pages visited per session

When users visit a website and don’t visit every page, it may be because your website’s navigation isn’t as easy as you thought. If this is happening, you should make an upgrade to make your content menu user-friendly.

Common mistakes when using these 9 ways to measure UX on a website

Before using the past steps to analyze your website, be careful not to fall into the following errors:

Collecting a lot of data and studying it at the same time 

Due to the variety of ways you can use this process, you fall prey to measure every detail.

For you to be able to do correct and goal-oriented analysis, you must only focus on the most relevant information.

After this, you can then move forward on the small details.

Not having 100% reliable data 

To get the cleanest and useful data, you must set up your chosen tools correctly. When you start to develop a strategy, you must already have a set of clear goals.

Not taking context into account

If you only take into account numbers but not the context, your website analysis process will be incomplete. For you to know if your site has had significant changes or if you need to improve certain aspects, you must take a look at its timeline. This way you’ll have all the information you need to measure your website’s user experience.

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