One of the things I enjoy most about kicking off a new project is hearing what has prompted an organisation to seek our help. This week, that moment came when a client started talking about the purchasing journey on a website we are soon to test.
They had a wealth of data at their fingertips. They knew how many people started the checkout, how many completed it and exactly where people were dropping out. Their analytics painted a really clear picture of what was happening but there was an important piece of the puzzle missing.
“We know where they’re leaving,” they said. “We just don’t know why.”
We often talk about being data-driven. Analytics has transformed the way we understand our websites and services. We can measure almost anything we want to measure. We know where people come from, the journeys they take and the points where they abandon a task. Those insights are incredibly valuable because they tell us where to look.
The challenge is that they rarely tell us what somebody was thinking in that moment.
Did the language create uncertainty? Did they lose confidence? Did they misinterpret what would happen next? Did an accessibility barrier prevent them from continuing? Did something else entirely happen in their day that meant they simply closed the laptop and never returned?
The data records exactly the same outcome in every scenario. A customer leaves the journey.
This is why I have always loved usability testing. It gives us the opportunity to understand the story behind the data.It gives us the elusive why!
It allows us to move beyond the numbers and spend time with the people behind them. We get to hear the questions they ask themselves, watch the moments where confidence starts to fade and understand the assumptions they bring with them. So often, the explanation turns out to be something nobody in the project team had considered.
Analytics and user research answer different questions. One helps us understand what people did. The other helps us understand why they did it. We need both to make confident and inclusive decisions.
Five moments to move from analytics to user research
1. Customers are abandoning the checkout
Your funnel tells you exactly where people are leaving. What it can’t tell you is whether they’re surprised by delivery costs, don’t trust the payment page, can’t find a promo code, or have hit an accessibility barrier.
2. People aren’t completing an online application
You can see that 40% of users abandon an application before submitting it. What causes them to give up? Is the language confusing? Are they missing information? Do they think they’ve made a mistake? Or has the form simply become too difficult to complete?
3. A key feature has low engagement
You’ve invested time and money developing a new feature, yet very few people are using it. Is it hard to find? Do people misunderstand what it does? Does it solve a problem users don’t actually have?
4. One page has an unusually high exit rate
Your analytics show that people consistently leave from the same page. Is that because they found exactly what they were looking for? Did the content answer their question? Did they become overwhelmed by the amount of information? Did they lose confidence? Or were they expecting the next step to be somewhere else entirely?
5. Search data shows people can’t find what they need (Any sector)
Your search analytics show that people repeatedly search for the same terms, refine their searches multiple times or abandon their search altogether. Are they using different language to your organisation? Are they expecting to find information somewhere else? Is your navigation failing to match their mental model? Or does the content they’re looking for simply not exist?
Read more about usability testing, The Web Usability way.