He Said, She Said – From Analysis To Insights
23/11/2017
In this fast moving, increasingly digital world we live in we’re all running to keep up with the latest and greatest. Staying (and appearing to be) relevant is a battle of the fittest and fastest.
I am sure you will have come across these personalities either in your organisation or in organisations you work with; there is the reader of all things digital who professes knowledge by the amount of blogs he or she consumes, there is the platform evangelist who despite what your company uses currently has an opinion otherwise, the conference attendee who changes direction with each new speaker that catches his or her attention or the colleague whose friend has done this amazing thing with their website for free.
I believe that the digital project has matured to the point where we realise that a website, once built, is not a finished product but needs continued enhancements to ensure it is consistently meeting the changing needs of our customers.
The question is, which expert analytical platform or research method should be the source of truth from which to base an ongoing programme of website enhancements on?
Ideas for improvements are generally welcomed from within the business but when we’re talking about improving our customer's experience there is nothing like true feedback from the users themselves to keep us honest in our prioritisation of new development.
Getting business buy-in to get real people in the door for user research can be challenging. A cost efficient and effective way of proving the value of user research is by using online tools. There are both free and paid tools on the market now that allow us to interact directly with customers and potential customers. Some of the things they allow us to do are;
Inform pre-build questions:
Indicate what your information architecture should look like with a card sorting tool.
Validate early designs with a clickable prototype.
Gather insights on current implementations:
What content are customers interacting (or not interacting) with using Heatmaps.
Analyse key customer journeys to identify pain points with Visitor Recordings.
Identify content gaps using Polls on key pages. Ask specific questions based on behaviour. E.g. What were you looking for today? Did you find it?
Conversion Metrics based analysis:
Another approach is to use personalisation and A/B testing to see how using different scenarios can directly influence your goal conversions.
Personalise promotional banners based on visit numbers or geo-location rules
Personalise campaigns with known data on existing customers
A/B test page variants testing different layouts
A/B test page components e.g. CTAs, offers, colours to see what best converts
These tools allow us to see how real people behave, giving us the feedback we need to move forward without the internal bias that may come from the personalities mentioned above.
Which tool is right for you?
There are a few deciding factors that will influence your decision.
What skills do you have in-house (or within your agency)?
How much time do you have to do the analysis and come up with the recommendations?
What is your budget?
There are usually free trial periods in most tools so it’s a great idea to give them a go. Have a specific piece of work you want to achieve and set out to do it in the free period. This will give you a good indication of whether it will work for you ongoing.
Top Tips:
Identify
Identify the key pages and key journeys on your site.
What are the primary CTAs.
Analysis
Don’t under-estimate how long the analysis takes. Prioritise a schedule of ongoing analysis.
Validate your assumptions with a colleague – they may see the themes before you do – there’s a lot of data!
Factor this into your project.
Use insights to generate meaningful development items or give direction to broad development requests.
ALWAYS keep your customer top of mind.
Tools we use:
Hot Jar has a good range of Analysis and Feedback tools including; Heatmaps, Recordings, Polls and Surveys.
Optimal Workshop can guide Information architecture with card sorting as well as a content tree tool. First click testing allows you to run tests on wireframes and prototypes to assist with usability.
Sitecore Experience Manager allows us to run A/B tests and personalisation programmes across website pages and individual components within any page on a Sitecore website.
Optimizely enables A/B and multivariate testing across multiple platforms.
Written by Jael King