Usability and Heatmapping?
Heatmapping is a technique used to understand how your audience is using your website. The user expereince is crucial to the success of your website and understanding how good that process is can dramatically influence the success of your website to your business.
If your user experience is poor it will result in a low conversion rate and cost your business lost sales and customers.
Not only will you not win that sale, but you will also harm your brand. Online branding is all about usability. Give the user a good expereince, let them find what they want quickly and easily and leave satisfied and your brand shines. Let them struggle and leave frustrated and the perception of your brand and business suffers comensurately.
Improving the usability of your site
There are some great techniques and technology availble now to identify how your users are actively using your site. Heatmapping underpins the best of these techniques and in essence shows visually where individuals or cllections of users are looking and/or clicking around your site. The heatmap is a visual overlay of the user’s expereince on an image of your site.
Types of heatmap techniques
There are typically two types of heatmapping techniques that we advocate through our user experience testing; qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative involves collecting users together, providing tasks to undertake and capturing where they are looking at the screen by using eye tracking technology. This records exactly where people are looking on the screen when trying to achieve a specific task. Quantitative tracking tends to be web based and records the timeframe and percentage of clicks in given areas of the screen. the software records exactly where the clicks are and the amount of time taken to make that click. It gives a good overview of where people click but is not as inciteful as the eye tracking proces.
What does heatmapping show you?
heatmaping is able to show you instantly and visually what works on your site and what doesn’t. It shows where users expect a button or information to to be and where a site may be ambiguous. Used properly it highlights where your site is failing your users and where you need to improve.
It shows the poitives and th negatives. That fancy bit of graphics that you thought the users would love? well this will show you ho is right, you or the users. and if you choose to ignore that then you aren’t interested in maximising the site’s benefit to your business.
Heatmapping and conversion rates
By taking this information and acting on it, you can improve the user journey, shorten time to click where you want them to and guide them effectively to what they are looking for. This all adds up to an improved user expereince leading to a higher conversion rate.
If you can’t improve your conversion rate by using this technique then maybe you haven’t got what the poeple coming to your site want. In which case, change your product, message or users.
The point is that without empirical reliable user data you are shooting in the dark with your marketing.
If you would like to know more about improving the ROI from your website and engage with your users more effectively then call us on 01273 972 992 for a friendly chat.