Your product designs may be visually appealing, but are they actually serving your users? And most importantly, are your users converting?
While traditional user testing techniques might help you answer these questions, it often involves going through lengthy interviews with a small pool of users—or even worse—individuals who aren’t even your users at all.
Luckily in 2021, there are new and advanced tools at your disposal that can speed up the user testing process while also providing you with more accurate data.
In this article, we’ll share 3 simple tips and tools to help you test the effectiveness of your designs and optimize your designs accordingly. Keep reading to learn how to start building better products faster and with more confidence.
Let’s get straight into it.
✏️ A big thanks to our friends at Sprig for sponsoring this blog post! Header illustration by ls.graphics.
1. Talk to your active users
You shouldn’t test your designs on your team or stakeholders. You also shouldn’t test your designs on just anyone off the internet. They aren’t the ones using your product.
The most accurate way to conduct testing is to understand how your actual users—the one’s currently using your website, app, or product—respond to your designs.
Talking to your active users ensures that your design decisions make sense because they’re based on real user needs and pain points—which means you’ll start to see more fruitful results from the design optimizations you make.
📌PRO TIP:
Recruit interview participants who are actively using a relevant part of your product using this handy Microsurvey Template from Sprig. Simply customize the template to start identifying, screening, and scheduling qualified users to talk to.
2. Measure customer effort
Customer effort refers to how easy (or difficult) it is for your customers to use your product. A low-effort experience leads to improved customer loyalty, while a high-effort experience is more likely to cause user churn. That’s why reducing customer effort is key to the success of your product.
Customers prefer products that simplify their lives and they’ll be more likely to continue to use your product (and recommend it to peers) if you can help them accomplish their goals much faster and efficiently.
Here are a few questions to consider when it comes to measuring customer effort:
- Are your users taking the action you want them to take?
- How fast is it taking them to complete that action?
- How many users accomplished what they came to do?
Measuring customer effort for both new and experienced users will help you easily identify opportunities to optimize your customer journey and improve your conversion rate.
📌PRO TIP:
Measure customer effort with the help of this Microsurvey Template from Sprig. Use it to help you understand how well your product meets the needs of your customers, and quickly uncover what you can do to improve your user experience.
3. Understand user goals
Want to get a step ahead of your competitors? Invest time in understanding your users. Why are visitors landing on your product page? What goal(s) are they hoping to accomplish?
The deeper understanding you have of your users, the more you can tailor your product to them, giving them a custom experience they likely aren’t getting elsewhere.
Survey your website visitors and ask them what their goals are. This will help you confidently refine your content and messaging so that you successfully drive visitors down the funnel, and ultimately acquire new customers.
For best results, user research experts recommend surveying visitors to your marketing site after 2-3 page views and 10 seconds on a page.
📌PRO TIP:
Try Sprig’s Microsurvey Template to identify visitor goals and understand the reason why they came to your product. Then, optimize your site’s content and copy accordingly.
Start designing products that convert
A great user experience goes far beyond aesthetics. If you want to start designing products that serve your customers, build loyalty, and increase conversions, you need to start with effective user research.
To help you improve your existing research efforts, we recommend trying one of Sprig’s 75+ microsurvey templates designed by a team of user research experts. Sprig’s microsurvey templates are not only sleek and non-intrusive, but they can also be easily customized to match your brand’s look and feel.
Sign up for free to explore Sprig’s full suite of tools for product teams and start building better products today. ■
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