User experience is an essential component of web development, and it has an enormous impact on your website’s performance. Many business owners neglect user experience and its effects on the visibility and traffic of their site. Knowing your website’s usability will help you answer a plethora of questions. For instance, what is the load time of your website? How smooth is the navigation? Why are users leaving your webpage too early? How can you make your website user-friendly?
In other words, Usability or UX is the experience of your users when they are on your website. Now you may wonder how you can measure usability. Well, this article will list down some effective metrics to help you with the measurement. So, let’s get started:
Why should you measure usability?
Every user on your website is a potential customer. They are browsing through your website because they need solutions for their problems. However, when they find it difficult to navigate through your website, they will decide that it is not worth their time. For example, if the user cannot find the online shop on the landing page, will they leave the website and search on other platforms? On the other hand, if you create a seamless experience, it will result in conversation, and the user will love to visit your website again. Isn’t that what you want?
These metrics will help measure usability
Now, as you know the importance of usability for conversions, let’s understand how you can measure it. Measuring the usability of your website is all about tracking and evaluating metrics. This will help you figure out why users are on your website and why they leave. For that, you need to go through two major types of UX metrics.
1. Objective metrics
These elements are precise numbers that help you track and compare different components, including success rate, time on task, and user errors. In contrast, subjective metrics help to identify how a user feels about your website.
2. Qualitative metrics
Qualitative metrics indicate the experience quality on the website. These measures include satisfaction, recommendations, and ratings. These metrics are in numerical form and help you understand the users’ interaction while they are on your site.
You can use the HEART framework by Google that includes both objective and qualitative metrics. This framework will help you choose important metrics according to your needs. For instance, you can measure task success, retention, adoption, engagement, and happiness. Unfortunately, Usability testing does not indicate why your users are acting this way. Instead, it tells you the actions of the users.
Conclusion
After you complete your website, you have to focus on maintenance. Maintaining your website is an ongoing effort that you cannot look past. Through maintenance, you have to increase the engagement level of the site. As a result, it will reflect on your business growth. Also, it indicates how dynamic you keep your website. Keep in mind that a potential customer will prefer an up-to-date website rather than a traditional one.
Related Reading:
7 simple tips for a better website user interface!
Understanding users’ first impressions of your website
5 things you learn from a website impression test
Banking on bad UX: Finance website designs are failing gens Y & Z