Why You Should Invest in User Experience Testing

Have you ever had a shopping experience in which it was so difficult to find what you were looking for that you vowed never to use that site or visit that store again? You may have even told your friends not to shop there or posted something negative on social media. Or maybe you even took time to fill out the survey on the receipt so that the company knew what had happened. Now, as a business owner yourself, you know this one thing – you do NOT want to be that company.

In order to make sure visitors to your website are having a positive experience, you need to be able to step away from the business end and look at your site from your customers’ perspective. Chances are you won’t be able to do that from the inside, so you will need someone to analyze your site as an outside viewer. You always want to make sure this outside viewer can look at every aspect of the user’s experience. They need to examine it from both the customer’s perspective (Can I easily get where I need?) and a web builder’s view (How can we better get customers what they need?)

If this sounds like something you need (and honestly, who doesn’t?), you would benefit from the process called User Experience Testing and Evaluation or UX Testing. You can expect the consulting team to take a step back from coding and development to break down the website, software, or application by how users will interact with it. A great website is not so great when potential clients can’t find your phone number.

Some basic User Experience Testing involves:

• Identify the audience(s)
• What are your goals as the proprietor of the software or website for the audience?
  • Do you want your customers to track their shipments? Is it easy for the customers to know this?
  • Do you want your HR team to easily review employment applications? Can your management team find this information efficiently?
  • Is it easy to manage and edit your website?
• What is the purpose of this webpage?
• Is the website easy to navigate?
• Are you clearly communicating to visitors/users?
• Where do visitors leave the website? Why?
• Where do users get confused in an application? Why?
• What can be done to improve the quality of experience?

It is an investment of time, energy, money, stress, willpower, and sweat to make a great piece of software, whether it’s a website or an independent application. Plan Left wants to make sure your development gets used. The worst-case scenario for any piece of development is that no one ever uses it.

The benefit of a properly implemented piece of web development will be the obvious ease of use by your audience, but also by the numbers. Quality web design will have increased traffic, increased use, and increased experience. In the end, you want people talking about your business. Our job at Plan Left is to make sure they can only have good things to say about their experience.