What is User Experience (UX)?
The term User Experience, or UX, was coined by Don Norman, a cognitive scientist working for Apple in the 1990’s who describes it thus:
“User experience, encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products.”
This is certainly a broad definition, but it clearly highlights the importance of understanding that UX encompasses every touch point a user has with a product or service, and helps to highlight the difference between User Interface and User Experience design (commonly mixed up/mistaken), with UI design being an element of the overall user experience.
User Experience best practice
One of the most commonly used diagrams to describe what contributes to User Experience design best practice was created by Peter Moreville (shown below) and helps a designer to understand the following key user points:
- How they would discover your company’s product
- The sequence of actions they take as they interact with the interface
- The thoughts and feelings that arise as they try to accomplish their task
The impressions they take away from the interaction as a whole
Why is User Experience important in CRO?
At Webtrends Optimize we consistently see tests based on user experience research methodologies outperforming tests designed based on the ‘throwing enough mud at the wall to see what sticks’ approach.
Your website user experience should ensure that every user journey or task on your website is simple and intuitive, with this flowing completely across the site, meeting your user’s expectations. With this thought in mind you should be actively identifying areas of friction and finding ways to resolve these. This approach to UX benefits conversion rate optimisation (CRO) in a number of ways.
Using the user experience methodology allows for a more structured prioritisation of testing. For example, changing the copy or colour of a button may see a lift in conversions, but are there bigger more important issues that are preventing conversion on your site. By working your UX research into a testing priority matrix weighting the tests based on impact and complexity it’s easy to identify those which are likely to have the biggest impact.
How Webtrends Optimize can help with User Experience
Webtrends Optimize has a broad team of UX and CRO experts with years of experience across multiple industries who will help you to get enhance your website experience.
By using this joined up approach to CRO you should be then able to more extensively study user behaviour on your site, generating test hypotheses based on these learnings rather than going down the route of best practice or the highest paid persons opinion.
These insights are best gained through web analytics platforms, heatmaps, user surveys, to name but a few, all of which Webtrends Optimize can support.
