We’ve noticed that a lot of the guides out there treat usability testing like a one-step thing. They tell you how to make changes to your website and test them.
But based on our experience working with hundreds of thousands of companies over the past 14 years, we believe conducting a website usability study right requires 3 steps:
- Getting a background on how people currently use your site
- Identifying usability problems and hypothesizing about the cause(s)
- Making changes, testing, and iterating on solutions.
Without the first two steps, those changes are no more than a shot in the dark. You end up with a bunch of data that doesn’t point to any clear-cut problems or solutions. In short, you end up without any actionable takeaways from the testing.
Below, we share the full three-step process for web usability testing that we recommend to our customers. Then we talk about some of the software and tools that can help you accomplish that process and pull actionable insights out of the testing process.
Step 1: Run Baseline Heatmaps and Recordings
Before you do any usability testing or make changes to your website, it’s absolutely vital that you take a step back to understand the current state of things.
It’s easy to see low conversions in Google Analytics and immediately assume your call-to-action (CTA) copy isn’t compelling enough. But there are a lot of different reasons for low conversion rates — and changing up the copy won’t solve many of them. For example, your CTA may be placed farther down the page than most people scroll. Or you may have a pop-up that blocks users from the CTA on certain devices or screen sizes.
That’s why gathering as much information as possible about how real users are currently behaving on your website is the first step. It gives you a baseline idea of how people are moving through your website and some insight into why they’re behaving as they are.
Heatmap reports show you where users are clicking and the frequency of clicks across a page.
To do that, you can run heatmap reports and session recordings on the primary pages you want to test.
- If you aren’t sure about the path users take through your website, it’s best to go big here — gathering as much data as you can on your most important pages.
- If you’ve spent time mapping out your conversion funnel and know where the breakdown is happening, you can focus your heatmaps and recordings on the problem pages specifically.
Step 2: Identify Points of Friction and Hypothesize Causes
Once you have a baseline understanding of user click behavior on your website, you can start to identify usability issues: areas where users are running up against friction that blocks them from taking the next step you want them to take.
(For a more detailed explanation of how to interpret your heatmap reports, read our guide to interpreting and using the five reports Crazy Egg offers.)
At this step, you can bring in data from Google Analytics and any other website analytics tools you use. This data can help you narrow your focus on the web pages showing problematic conversion or engagement numbers.
Diagnosing Friction on Your Website
From there, you can diagnose “friction” depending on the type of page you’re looking at.
On your homepage, for example, it’s normal to see visitors taking different paths. You might see some users click on your CTA and convert right away; others will travel deeper into your site to learn more about the company and your products. Some might jump to your blog in search of case studies on how your product works for other companies.
In this case, friction likely looks like users exiting your website from the homepage.
Crazy Egg’s List Report can show you where people are going when they leave a landing page without converting.
But on a landing page, your only goal is to get users to convert. You want them to fill out a specific form or click on a specific CTA. If they aren’t doing that, there’s friction — even if they don’t exit your website.
Figuring Out the Cause of User Friction
Once you identify that point of friction, you can hypothesize about why users are butting up against it.
- In the landing page example, you may be offering too many links or navigation menus, giving users too many options other than “convert now.”
- Alternatively, the sources leading to your landing page could be setting inaccurate expectations about what users will find there — or that they aren’t actually reaching your target audience.
- On your homepage, users may be exiting the website because you haven’t given them a clear or compelling-enough next step.
If you can’t find a clear cause for why friction is happening on your website, you can run additional, more qualitative tests to get more feedback directly from end users. For example, surveys or session recordings with live feedback can help you dig deeper to identify why users behave the way they do on your site.
Step 3: Make Changes and Test with New Heatmaps, Recordings, and A/B Tests
Now that you have an informed, data-backed hypothesis about why users aren’t converting or engaging with your website, you can start working to change their behavior. The key here is to lay out clear changes you think will help — and then test them one at a time.
Continuing with our landing page example, if you found that users seem to have too many options for where to go from the page, you could test removing the site navigation menu entirely. The testing is important because you don’t actually know that navigation options are the problem until you remove them and see an improvement in your conversion rate.
For example, you might find that removing the menu doesn’t help boost conversions.
In that case, you’d go back to step 2. Your next hypothesis might be that the copy on your landing page isn’t compelling enough to get website visitors to convert. From there, you can test changing the copy to see if that helps to increase your conversion rate.
Successful website usability testing is all about testing and iterating to find the most effective version of each page and your conversion funnel as a whole.