To encourage sales, your product—and the platform you’re selling on—needs to be appealing to prospective customers. Hard-to-use platforms or unattractive site designs that make a consumer pause should be avoided at all costs. But what seems intuitive to you and your team may not be so to the average user.
When you’re building your company website or app, user experience research helps mitigate this problem. Below, 10 Young Entrepreneur Council members explain how to conduct effective UX research and how it will help your business in the long run.
Young Entrepreneur Council members share research tips when considering the UX of your website or app.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Let Your Audience Test A Prototype
Start with your minimum viable product (MVP), develop a working prototype and let your target audience test it. This is the only way to see if they find it easy to use, if it solves their problems, if it offers features they’re looking for and more. Give them tasks to complete and ask them to use the app as they would in their daily lives to see how it actually works, not just how it looks. – Jonathan Prichard, MattressInsider.com
2. Map Out Different Customer Journeys
Before doing anything, you need to map out the different types of customers you’ll be addressing. Your B2B and B2C customers will value completely different aspects, and you need to incorporate both of those into your design. The same goes for your average customers and your high-end ones. Once you have an idea of who these groups are, mapping out a customer journey becomes much easier. – Karl Kangur, Above House
3. Use Heat Maps
Heat maps are a great way to understand how people interact with your website or app and where they are clicking. This insight can help you change your website layout and design to boost interactions. Tools like Crazy Egg can show what features users like and whether a specific color layout converts better. You should also track page views and time on a page to understand user behavior better. – Brian David Crane, Spread Great Ideas
4. Conduct Surveys And Interviews
A key piece of advice is to use surveys and interviews to collect data from your target audience. You need to do this before you start building your app so that you weave your target market’s needs into the app or site before you start anything. This will reduce the need to rework parts of your app later on, and it will also ensure that you’re creating something that your target market wants. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
5. Ask Open-Ended Questions
The advice I would like to give for conducting effective user experience research is to use open-ended questions. This will give your target audience more freedom to share their experiences and provide valuable insights so you can improve your website or app’s UX. User experience is a qualitative indicator, so, leave the canvas blank for your users to fill. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
6. Test Your Site Across Multiple Devices
If you want to test the user experience of your website or mobile app, I suggest using multiple devices and platforms to ensure everything looks good and feels smooth. You don’t want to alienate a chunk of your audience by making an app that, for example, works like a dream for Android devices but is fundamentally broken on iPhones. – John Turner, SeedProd LLC
7. Empathize With Your Users
Empathy is the “no nonsense” approach. It enables you to walk in your users’ shoes. It allows you to understand the motivations of other people. By empathizing with their users, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of their needs and desires, which in turn will help them create better digital products and services. – Candice Georgiadis, Digital Day
8. Define Your Research Goals
It is important to first define the goals of the study in order to conduct effective research. Not doing this right leads to research becoming costly, time-consuming and inconclusive. The goals will largely dictate the stage and, therefore, the kind of study to conduct (e.g. discovery versus divergence versus idea iteration, etc.). This will help you come up with the right discussion guide and activities for the study. – Vinay Indresh, Spacejoy
9. Launch In Phases
User experience is perhaps the most critical aspect of your website or app. Without your audience, you wouldn’t have sales and traffic. I recommend launching your site or app in phases so you can make gradual changes that match the needs of your readers. After each stage, send questionnaires to your email subscribers and include on-page surveys so you can gather actionable feedback. – John Brackett, Smash Balloon LLC
10. Run A/B Tests
Improve your UX research with A/B testing. It helps you gain richer insights into your users’ preferences. In doing so, simply offer customers two slightly different prototypes during testing and ask them for the pros and cons of each option. – Josh Kohlbach, Wholesale Suite