7 UX Tests You Must Do While Redesigning Your Website

To get the most out of your newly designed website it will be wise on your part to focus on user experience (UX) during the entire process of redesigning. Here follows 7 ‘must do’ UX tests:

1. Analyze your competitors’ websites

Identify the best practices for your industry by figuring out what is common among the websites of your competitors in terms of content and functionalities. Create your own rules of thumb for website design based on your findings. Optimize your homepage for a unique keyword to improve your search engine metrics.

2. Review your own website through analytics

Get an insight about user experience by looking into your website analytics. Identify the reasons for high bounce rate, short time on page and factors leading to navigation issues. Try to eliminate the reasons for low conversion and work on frequently visited pages to enhance user experience.

3. Analyze users’ goals and prioritize them

Putting yourself in the users’ shoes think of all the tasks they would perform in your website. Imagine about the goals they want to accomplish by those tasks. Once you are done, prioritize those based on their significance to conversion. Now, begin with your homepage and figure out the time by counting the clicks user has to perform to reach their goals. If user performs too many clicks to reach such critical goals then try to minimize them by working on it. If clicks are few but time taken is more, then work on the visibility of those CTA.

4. Do card sorting for efficient navigation redesign

Navigation is the most important redesign element of your website for seamless user experience. To achieve this perform a few card sorting tests (open sort or closed sort) by putting different websites pages on notecards and getting some sorted by participants. By these you would recognize common patterns inferring to navigation expectations. Now let your design reflect their expectations!

5. Test your layout designs for improvement

Its turn for your website layout! Use rapid prototyping and website wireframe to design layout of your web page elements. Go for user testing, refer test #6. Try the same tests on wireframe website and designed website to determine whether it is design fault or layout fault. Recognizing the problem can get you a speedy solution saving you time and money.

6. Test your website with real users

Get your wireframe or designed website tested with real users. Watch them perform the tests to make notes and ask questions at the end of test sessions. Know the demographics of your test participants to correlate them with your buyers. Make them perform those tasks you have prioritized in test #3. Let participants lead to find out their thoughts about a problem and how they want them to be solved. Once you have all the user feedbacks you have better ideas to implement in your website to suit users’ needs.

7. Perform beta test for special features

If your redesigned website have some new tools specific to your business needs, you want to get them tested before launch, then beta test is highly recommended. Provide your visitors easy way of submitting errors and feedbacks. Work on them till you don’t have any errors submitted. Now your website is all set to go public!

With your newly built website, reap the benefits of happy customers ­– higher conversion rate, improved user experience and less ongoing website changes.