Must Do User Experience Tests When Redesigning Websites

Website designing is a long and tedious process. To ensure that this long process goes smoothly and provides you the maximum benefits, you must test it. As early as possible and often. Testing reveals flaws in your current website and identified flaws will take lesser time and resources to get fixed.

Competitive analysis

Businesses globally move on a path of competition, where by carefully evaluating their competitors pricing, the kind of products they offer and their marketing plans, businesses plan out a strategy of their growth. The strategy should be no different when opting for a website re-design.

Start with the five of your nearest competitors (if applicable) and look at their website. To further clarify things, you can create a checklist where you can clearly see the results of your analysis later on. When looking on your competitor’s websites, here are the things that you must account for:

Best practices of the industry
· Website characteristics
· Product placement
· Payment mechanism (if applicable)
· Search engine metrics

Analytics analysis

Now that you have identified the weaknesses and strengths of your competitor’s website, it’s time to take a look on your own. One effective way of doing so is to look into the user experience of your website. You can take a deep dive into the analytics part of your website and run an assessment on to how your customers are liking any particular page or section of your website, which portion of your website is read most by your visitors, what is creating the bounce rate and so on.

Card sorting

Now that the issues with your website are identified, it’s time to rectify them by building a better design.
Having an intuitive navigation helps your visitors to get from point 1 to point 2 without confusion. While re-designing your navigation, I suggest you put up some tests that can sort things out pretty nicely for you. There are two kinds of card sorting tests:

• Open Sort – When you don’t provide categories for the card sorting and you let the participant decide how to categorize your website pages.

• Closed Sort – When you provide categories that the participant must sort the cards into (example: services, products, about us, contact us).

I recommend starting out with a few open sorts until you start to recognize patterns that appear in the categories. Then switch to a close sort to see if participants still sort your website pages in the same way.

User testing

Once you finalize the new design after card slotting, it’s time to test the new design, via user testing. There are many kinds of user testing mechanisms available, but the most used and trusted one is A/B testing. A/B testing allow you to roll out two different version of the same design, say with difference of colors and some functionalities and each of them will receive equal traffic. The version of design that gets you the maximum hits or leads is the one liked by your customers, most.

Beta Testing

Finally, when you’re ready to roll out your new website, decide if you have special features that need a little extra user testing. If you do, beta testing is a wonderful way to get customer feedback while providing fun features that customers want! It’s a win-win because you will not only receive valuable feedback, but you will also be able to effectively market your new tool before it’s shown to the public.

So, this was the wrap of the most tried and tested testing techniques to assess and evaluate your website design user experience. In order to get a clear picture of how your website can do better, try getting in touch with a professional website design agency in Dubai.