Insight article
Understanding the Customer Experience with User Research
Toral Contractor, Director of User Research
May 2008
Customer Experience
The customer experience encompasses what a person experiences on and off of your website. As experts in user experience design, we focus all our attention on the website to make sure the user’s experience on the site is the best it can be. Remember that the user’s experience with your company doesn’t start the moment they land on your home page and end once they leave your site. It begins with advertising, word of mouth recommendations, or an email campaign announcing an upcoming sale. Nonetheless, a website attracts and aggregates many different types of users and serves as an excellent platform for measuring and researching not only how they experience your site, but your brand overall.
Measuring and Researching the Customer Experience
The customer experience should be measured with both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative methods can answer “what” your users are actually doing on your site. Since Google Analytics premiered as a high quality, free web analytics tool, more companies are able to get insight into what users are doing on their site. A web analytics tool is a great way to see if your users are converting into customers, how much time a user spends on a page or in an entire session on your site. It allows you to see where your users enter your site from and even track how your marketing campaigns are performing.
Web analytics can provide such a wealth of information and data that your web analyst can report on almost any data point. You can even test out different designs with your users with a/b or multivariate testing. However, the web analytics tool will not provide the qualitative data that helps you to know why a user decided not to finish their transaction or why your users are only clicking on certain links and not other ones. Therefore, web analytics tools should be used in conjunction with other methods such as focus groups, in-person interviews, surveys, and usability testing - all of which give qualitative data.
Web analytics can actually be a springboard to finding out what areas to test for a more focused usability testing session. If a website has a large drop-off rate on the fourth step of the transaction process, that is an area that must be tested in usability sessions. Usability testing gives you the opportunity to talk with a real user of your site to discover their needs and expectations while observing any technical roadblocks or obstacles they may face on the website during the process. It will give you some of the qualitative data that is needed to know more about the behaviors of users on the site. Usability testing and web analytics used together can give a better picture of users' behaviors on your site, but not the whole picture of your users' entire experience with your company.
Conducting usability tests and analyzing endless web metrics will not give everything you need to know about your users. Before you embark on that web redesign project, start with market research to understand the demographics of your users and the competitive landscape. Deploy a survey to get both quantitative and qualitative data from the masses. Conduct some focus groups and in-person interviews with representative users of your site. Having a one on one conversation with users can be a huge eye opener. Tap into your customer service group since they interact with users or customers on a daily basis. Keep track of those calls they are receiving because that could provide you with valuable information that can improve your site and reduce any unnecessary costs with the off-line channels of your business.
If you have the opportunity, go to the location where your users actually use your product or web site and observe them by conducting contextual interviews. Seeing users in their actual environment will give you so much insight into their world that cannot be obtained otherwise. For example if you are redesigning your intranet, talk with your employees at their desks and observe the paper or documents that they have printed out for easy access. See what notes or “cheat” sheets they have around to help them be a little more efficient. These observations may help you discover what are the most important links on a page or how to format a table to allow your users to scan the page for important information more quickly.
Conclusion
To gain a thorough understanding of the customer’s experience with your company requires the use of more than one or two methods. For a more holistic approach, we must combine many quantitative and qualitative methods. Yes, time, budget, and resource constraints prevent us from researching our users to the fullest extent. However, it is impossible to know the motivations for certain user behaviors on a website without actually asking the users for their thoughts.
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