Measuring User Experience Through Inclusive Testing
User experience (UX) is the aspect of a customer’s interaction with a product or service that leaves a lasting impression on them. UX is a critical component in the design of products or services. In the case of a website, research shows that mobile phone users are five times more likely to abandon a site if it is not optimized for their device.
Impactful UX is crucial for a business’s success and gaining loyal customers. Part of developing a website, app, or other digital tool is testing its effectiveness before launch. There are specific steps to take when conducting inclusive testing to avoid missing out on the critical demographics of your audience.
Here are some ways to measure UX through inclusive testing methods.
Do Your Research
UX research (or user research) studies users’ attitudes, behaviors, needs, and pain points. It is a core part of the UX design process. From such a study, you can determine potential challenges when interacting with websites and seek to alleviate them through your web design. Using the information for design enables you to create web features that delight users.
To conduct UX research, start by knowing your audience and the diversity within that audience base. Building a profile of your audience based on their demographics, i.e., age, gender, occupation, etc., helps you know who to target for the research.
Be thorough when identifying your audience inclusively and consider how they communicate and interact digitally. Essential digital habits to establish include devices they use to visit the internet, frequency of interaction, and why they interact (popular sites they visit). Partnering with a user experience design agency can further enhance your research efforts, providing expert insights and strategies to ensure your design truly meets users’ needs.”
Include the Demographics You Seek
Once you’ve identified the various demographics in your audience base, incorporate them into the testing sample. Actively recruit for each demographic type to ensure representation for all. As much as possible, have similar proportions of depiction to the overall target market. For example, if your target group is mostly youth, skew your sample with young people in the testing process.
Have a similar representation of the unique characteristics of target audiences. If statistics show that 10 percent of your target audience lives with a physical disability, a similar proportion of the recruited testing participants should be the same.
The demographic choice determines the accuracy of your research result. You can identify salient characteristics of a website that would impact UX.
Have Several Ways of Measuring
You must develop several ways of measuring UX to have an exhaustive study. Just as your audience base has a range of personalities and identities, so should the approach of measuring UX. Before embarking on the UX testing, list down all the possible interactions a user would have with the website.
Measure for all the different experiences a user could be having for each interaction. Collect mixed data types, including qualitative and quantitative data. The two methodologies complement each other and provide various perspectives on UX.
Quantitative data enables you to quantify the experience, e.g., bounce rates, number of downloads, abandoned tasks, etc. Qualitative data provides non-quantifiable insights, e.g., user impressions, reasons for leaving a site, the attractiveness of imagery, etc. These research insights are vital in building a customer-centric website.
Adapt and Do It Again
UX testing does not end with the first research. Once you have measured UX, make changes to your product and test it again. Re-testing is critical to affirm that you applied the insights correctly to develop the site. This exercise is especially essential for core interactions for the business like those that impact conversions.
If you feel ill-equipped to handle specific UX needs, consider hiring someone or using a freelancer. You can contract a part-time software developer remote as a physical presence is not necessary to do the job. Such experts can design and write appropriate code to achieve the desired user interface.
Measuring UX should be an ongoing process of adaptation and evaluation. In addition to getting the UX right, your audience may change based on different societal shifts and because you constantly want to be improving your product.
Test and Achieve the Best User Experience
Measuring UX ensures you are building a user-friendly and impactful website. You avoid the pitfalls of investing resources in interactions that do not matter to audiences. The testing can reveal specific changes that do not cost much but are the difference between a bland and high impression site.
Testing should be a continuous process to impact the UX. Build the approach into your web-design process to create websites that appeal to the target audiences.
