It’s often said that the more sites you design and develop, and the more analytics you study, the better you become at predicting how to get conversions from a website, whether it’s enquiries, sign-ups, downloads or sales.
And while that’s undoubtedly true, there are still many things you just can’t predict. Sometimes knowledge, experience, or just good old fashioned intuition, are unable to anticipate the ways in which real people will interact with a web page once it’s live.
That’s the reason why a team at Google once tested 41 different shades of blue links to see which one performed best.
This article at Fast Co Design covers four of the most common types of UX experience, as summarised below.
A/B Testing
A/B testing is when you expose users to two versions of a design to see which one performs better. It’s a favorite tool of Google, who first used the method back in 2000 to determine how many search results to put on a page.
Heatmap testing is used to track where a user’s eyes are focusing, where they are clicking (clickmaps), or how far they’re scrolling down the page (scrollmaps).
Netflix, in particular, likes to conduct user testing on new subscribers to get a sense of how easy it is to navigate its interface without a prior, intimate knowledge of it.
As Froont notes, the trick to an effective survey is to make sure your questions are precise enough, and you reach enough people that you can overcome your own assumptions as a designer.
See Froont for more.
If you are interested in user experience testing for your website contact our team for a chat.
