Contrary to popular belief, User experience, or “usability” studies are both an art and a science. At the cutting edge of Customer Experience Management, Usability studies provide a vital insight to analyse, design and/or develop the human-to-technology interfaces where your customers touch your business or products…
These can include:
- Websites – visual and navigational
- Interactive Applications – surveys, online registration etc
- Inbound (or outbound) telephone systems
- Product design for devices (e.g. PDA, mobile phones etc)
- etc.
As businesses and consumers increasingly adopt new technologies and technology driven channels for interaction and transaction, user experience (human-to-technology) is rapidly becoming a critical factor in delivering an effective customer experience.
Consider this, when customers (or prospects) visit your website, do they find what they are looking for? How do they feel about your company after their visit to your site?
Aside from server logs, clickthrough tracking and a host of other analytics tools available, you need to look into the hearts and minds of your visitors to understand their experience and levels of customer satisfaction.
Getting 5 or 6 people to ‘test’ your website will, almost certainly, uncover website mistakes that could take a years worth of development to fix. But how do you know you’ve found the most important problems?
Regardless of what you’ve heard about usability testing, the overarching principle is not just to build useable products and websites, but to build them in a way that ensures they deliver the promise of your brand and in an engaging way that coverts them from single shot statistics into long term relationships.
Let’s assess a number of methodologies that will get you beyond the clickthroughs and web log analytics.
- The panel approach. Using this type of methodology links behaviour with attitude. Start with a number of pre-registered panellists who can be segmented into multiple demographic and techno graphic ways. Assign them a task and watch what they do. There are simple and sophisticated ways to achieve this, from observational ‘in-use’ studies to pre-installed, client-side monitoring applications. If it’s online, ask them pop-up questions along the way and reward their efforts with a coupon as a thank you.Whether your panel includes 50, 100 or 1000 people, you’ll be able to compare the experience of different visitors depending upon the demographics and techno graphic groups represented and get the answers to some valuable and specific information to determine their likelihood of returning, buying from or recommending your site to others. You can also use this type of web analysis to compare the experience of your competitor sites too!
- Pop up survey. Let your real, live visitors identify trouble spots for you. Ask them a quick question as they exit your site to find out why they’re leaving. You won’t find this type of information in Server logs!
- Micro sites. A powerful and interactive tool, microsites are a collection of pages that allow you to target specific product features or offers to a unique buyer segment. Different mircosites can be used to compare and contrast different ideas for marketing.
- Web landing pages. Perfect for gathering information, conveying a message and provide a personalised way to better understand the needs of your prospect.
- Test drive your products. If you’re planning a major upgrade to your product or website, test it before launch. Go a stage further and involve your customers in the design and development to get closer to that perfect user experience.
Interactive tools like these are inherently measurable ways to assess or predict the way users will behave. In a sales environment that is both increasingly competitive and cluttered, they can provide you with the tools to design and build human-to-technology interfaces that gives a customer experience that will keep them engaged and meet their highest expectations.
