UI/UX Development, Assessment and Heat Mapping

Online, your website is your welcome mat. If customers have a poor experience with your company website, they won’t shop from you, they’ll look for a competitor who offers a better online experience. If you want to help customers have a better experience online, you’ll need to improve your UX, or user experience, and your UI, or user interface. Learn how UI/UX assessments deliver quantitative data about your website’s performance with your target audience to help you improve your web presence.

What is UI/UX?

Since UX encompasses all variables of a user’s experience, including the user interface, UI can be considered an aspect of UX. Other components of UX include the organization of information, visual design, and overall site usability.

UI development refers specifically to the front-end development of the website: the design, if you will.

UX development takes a customer-centric view of web development. By making a website attractive, informative, and easy to use, UX design creates positive experiences for your customers. This in turn benefits your business. When customers can find what they need quickly, they may feel relief. When they find value in the content on your website, customers may feel engaged or happy. All of these positive feelings create a natural connection between your customer and your brand, positioning you as the trusted expert or valued vendor because you’ve given them what they needed.

It’s easier to see the benefits of UX development when you consider the ramifications of poor user experience. All web users have had an experience of searching for information on a website and being unable to find it. The emotions connected to this experience are negative — anger, annoyance, frustration, irritation. Perhaps you continued to search and finally found what you needed; perhaps you navigated away from the site and found another resource. Overall, you judged the company for their awful website, and you probably made a decision not to give them your business going forward.

88 percent of online shoppers who have a poor experience are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience (usabilitymatters.com 2017). Three-quarters of your website viewers take it further, actually judging your business’s credibility by your website design. If your website delivers a poor UI/UX, it will cost you, customers.

How to Test UI/UX

Most companies are too close to their own websites to know whether or not they have a good UI/UX. Employees may use the website daily, so they have an innate knowledge of where things are. They also know how the company works and aren’t seeking for information the same way customers are. To tell whether your UI/UX is working for you or against you, you’ll need to invest in UI/UX testing.

A UX testing firm can gauge your target audience’s experience using your website through tests like:

• Heat mapping – Heat mapping services such as Crazyegg deliver actionable insights into where users click on your webpage, while aggregating data into trends so you can extrapolate based on what most users do. With heat mapping data, you’ll find out whether web users are clicking on the links as intended, or if they’re clicking on other areas of the page. By tweaking the design using heat map data, you can position your CTA button in the perfect place to increase conversions.
• Scroll mapping – Similar to heat mapping, scroll mapping shows how far down your page users scroll. You may notice that users aren’t scrolling down as far as you hoped; they may be missing your CTA button. With the map data, you can make sure your customers are getting your key takeaways by moving what’s most important above the fold, eliminating the need to scroll.
• A/B testing – A/B testing lets you experiment on what type of content works best with your target audience by delivering different options to users. From compelling headlines to convincing web copy, there are many benefits to using A/B testing to hone your message.
• Session replay recordings – Recordings of users’ interactions are powerful tools to help convince doubters that UI/UX development “works” and is worth investing in. When people can see for themselves where web users get stuck interacting with the website, their objections to investing in UI/UX fall away.
• Form tracking – Tracking how customers interact with forms on your website can help you figure out where conversions drop off. Data-driven insights on form behavior can help you dovetail your web forms to your audience, which increases your conversion rates and revenue.

By tweaking your website to provide customers with the right information at the right time, you can increase your conversions, your sales, and your customer’s satisfaction. This leads to increased loyalty, word of mouth referrals, and more. For companies that do not have the resources or the budget to invest in the UX tools needed to succeed we are here to help! The frank Agency is a web development agency that excels in all facets of user experience. We can provide deep insights as to how your customer is interacting with your website. Contact The frank Agency today to take a closer look.