How to Use Data to Improve the UX on a Website 

Let's know The designer builds websites with strong attention to UX by feedback and other data

At one point, designers built websites with intuition and a belief in what looked nice. However, technology has evolved a significant way past this point. Today, the modern-day designer builds websites with strong attention to user experience (UX). We can define UX as the ability to increase user satisfaction through improved accessibility, efficiency, and, as the name states, usability. Designers can craft a website that matches the user's needs by encouraging direct feedback and collecting other data based on their behaviors. 

Therefore, besides finding hosting for your website, website owners must navigate the significant number of tools at their disposal. Due to this complexity, many designers have yet to maximize all the opportunities to improve a site's UX. This blog post looks at how website owners can incorporate data into a website to deliver an optimal experience for the end-user. 

Learn About Your Website Visitors 

Websites, like other forms of marketing materials, speak to someone. However, for them to be effective, their owner should know who that someone is, at least with a certain level of detail. For this reason, businesses often spend time developing what is known as a target persona, or a fictional representation of a person, based on a real website user. Some questions worth asking include, 

●  How old are the majority of my visitors? Are they under 25 or over 75?

●  What topics are of interest to my visitors? What do they like to do for fun? Do they like to travel? Cook?

●  What other websites are my visitors frequently viewing? 

Users can find some of this information for existing websites through Google Analytics and surveys. Alternatively, new website builders can use statistics and industry reports to learn about their ideal audience. Then, following the creation of a persona, users will understand the needs and goals of their website visitors and make design decisions accordingly. 

Use Data to Run A/B Tests

Where businesses are involved, websites are often in place to lead customers through a journey that ends in the desired action or a conversion. Some common examples include purchasing an item or collecting contact information into a form that becomes part of a company's email list. Regardless of the reason, encouraging a user to reach this endpoint can be challenging. For this reason, teams, at times, may choose to use data analytics to conduct an A/B test. 

An A/B test occurs when a marketer or other analyst simultaneously runs two versions of a website page to determine which one results in the desired action (leads or sales). After a set amount of time, web designers can compare the data between the two different website pages to determine which one performed better. The results can improve the user's overall experience when visiting a website. 

When conducting this form of a test, the experimenter must change only one aspect of the page. By changing only one variable, designers can ensure that their data tells the right story and that their designers draw the right conclusions. Among the most common website components for testing include the location or color of a call-to-action button, a slogan or other text, and other design elements such as a box around a block of text. 

Identify The Best Parts of The Page 

In addition to an A/B test, designers may also use eye-tracking or click analytics tools like a heat map or a session recording software. These tools can identify what areas of a webpage a user is lingering on. By tracking where users are navigating, website owners can find patterns and reorganize content accordingly. 

Follow The Entire Visitor Journey 

As effective as it can be to use data to optimize a single page of a website, this is only part of the story. An effective UX designer often takes a broader view to analyze the user's entire journey, including their search intent, the pages they visited, and any forms they may have filled out for more information (if applicable) on route to making a final purchase. By tracking the entirety of their journey, website owners can determine the stages of the purchasing process a buyer may be struggling with and therefore exiting the website. One example might be if many website visitors navigate to a checkout page but never make a purchase. 

Following the entire website visitor's journey can help users identify which pages provide a dead-end, a place where the journey seizes to continue. Every page on your website should lead somewhere else unless it is the completion of an action. Therefore, if this drop-off page is much earlier in the journey, there is a chance this page doesn't provide users with a continued path forward. 

The intention is that by optimizing these parts of the process, users can increase the number of purchases or conversions. 

Testing A Design's Usability 

Usability testing focuses on the opinions of real people. Under this data collection method, people interact with your website, then you, the designer, observe their behavior and overall impressions. Collecting usability data is possible by watching a session recording or renting a lab with eye-tracking equipment. 

Since user experience designers gather data firsthand, usability testing is a key component in ensuring that websites built are effective, efficient, and highly engaging for users.

Compare Your Site to Your Competitors

As a final step in the website analysis process, users might gather data from their competitors, looking at what they are doing well and where their offerings are not hitting the mark. Doing a competitor analysis is not a be-all and end-all solution and should instead be a means for inspiration.

Use Surveys To Ask Visitors What Needs Improvement

Another way to determine how you can improve your website is to ask your visitors directly. It is common to find websites that enable users to respond to a survey where they can rate their experience. Common survey questions include what they would like to see to enhance their experience, the features that a visitor believes you should add, and whether the current site meets the user's expectations.

By asking some variations of these questions, website owners can see how they can improve their user experience for future guests. Although it is impossible to respond to every visitor request, what many website owners do is group responses by theme. For example, many users may agree that content is hard to find, and they would like an easier way to locate information. If information is hard to find, your team of designers might respond by adding a search bar or recategorizing your content to make content easier to find.

Maximizing Website Usability

Even the best website designers can not guess what users hope to see on a website despite their best efforts. But, they can use data to learn about their users and make adjustments accordingly.