How can you improve your user experience?

With so many brands competing for the same piece of the pie, user experience is the key to gaining long lasting customer relationships which drive revenue and sales as a result while helping to distinguish brands from their competitors offerings. 

Improving your user experience will help to not only retain customers more effectively but actively acquire new ones more frequently.  Here are the top ways to improve your user experience:

Understanding how your users are interacting with your site is key in being able to adapt features, functionality and design elements to iteratively improve your user experience. Analytics can provide a deep insight into metrics like: 

• Site performance
• Journeys
• Drop off points throughout your site 
• Top ranking pages
• Engagement rate 
• Goal conversions

Armed with this knowledge businesses can begin to make adaptations that will drive positive change.

A/B testing is the process of running two different versions of adapted content which is usually split between an audience. For websites and apps, often marketers run A/B tests of web pages with different designs, messaging or layouts to determine the best performing option which can then be implemented. This can also be achieved for other marketing activities such as email marketing where the subject lines and body texts are adapted to see which drives a better response and ads with different designs and messaging. Aside from allowing you to determine the best performing version of your web content in comparison to another, you are also able to achieve results in a shorter time frame than individually testing. Check out Google Optimize for more info.

Having a clearly defined set of goals for each page across your website in order to optimise for that specific result. Your goal for a page may be an email sign up, a sale, a form fill or even to gain a subscriber. Having a pre defined goal will allow you to implement messaging and content around that goal in order to drive conversions and achieve value from each of your web pages. 

Although analytics can provide great insight into web metrics and social engagement, sometimes going back to basics can be a good way to truly understand your customers and most importantly their pain points to begin to make changes to improve those areas. You can gain invaluable insight by: 

• Asking for user feedback 
• Listen to social media users about your experience 
• Use surveys 
• Interview real customers to get real insight
• Ask the right questions 

Users now expect a consistent experience across all platforms and channels and the key to having an amazing user experience is now to utilise the channels most convenient for your users. Whether it’s a website, a mobile app, email, social media, phone, and in person touch points across your business need to remain consistent in order to establish true brand value in the eyes of your customers. As new technology and channels emerge, the more omnichannel experiences brands will be able to create for their customers.

Improving your user experience isn’t just one thing. It’s the combination of every touch point, channel and contact which needs to be considered to truly gain a hold of your user experience and draw more value from your tools.