Being part of a remote or distributed team, we may have noticed the productivity boosts we gain by working asynchronously. Even before COVID-19 coronavirus disrupted the planet, remote work at Global Digital MOJO had already become a standard component in our work culture. And mastering remote work is all about finding the right tools to stay productive and connected. And Hotjar being the most recent inception in this list of tools allowing us to provide much better user experience and usability testing results to our customers.
Hotjar is a powerful usability testing tool that reveals the online behavior and voice of our users. By combining both analysis and feedback tools on a website, Hotjar provides an insight from real users in their own words, giving us a better understanding of the customer journey: depending on when (and how) we ask for feedback, we could gain insight about how users feel about our site from the moment they arrive to the moment they leave. Feedback tools help us to understand from where our users are coming from (i.e. their likes and dislikes, their wants and needs, and why they feel a certain way about the site), and feedback can point to trends in user behavior so we can make decisions on how to improve the user experience and increase conversions.
What’s the difference between website analytics tools and website feedback tools?
Website analytics tools like Google Analytics test a site’s performance and gives us quantitative data around metrics like: Traffic, Pageviews, Exit and bounce rate, and Session duration. Whereas in feedback tools, like Hotjar, give qualitative data based on real customer feedback, which gives a better understanding of the customer journey from their point of view, and lets us move beyond what users are doing on our site, to why they’re doing it.
As user experience designer, it becomes really important to gather user feedback, and no amount of feedback is enough. Feedback points to trends in user behavior so we can make decisions on how to improve the user experience and increase conversions. Usability testing helps us to eliminate assumptions and get real data on the user experience of our app, website, or product.
Generally, the product owner and the stakeholders (developers, designers, and managers) can’t unlearn what they know about the product and already have a predefined and different perspective of their target market, they can’t make an objective evaluation of what they’re offering. So we need to put the product in front of real people from our target market, using a usability testing tool like Hotjar. It allows us to see first-hand what their experience looks like, and what they think about the product.
Employing tests with real users helps us:
Validate prototype. Bring in users early on in the development process, and test their reactions before locking down a final product. Do they understand what you’re trying to do? Do they see the purpose of the product? Testing on a prototype first can validate the concept and help us make plans for future functionality before we spend a lot of money to build out a complete website.
Confirm product meets expectations. Once the product is completed, we test usability again to make sure everything works the way it was intended. How’s the ease of use? Is something still missing in the interface?
Identify issues with complex flows. If there are functions on the site that need users to follow multiple steps, we run usability testing to make sure these processes are as straightforward and intuitive as possible.
Complement and illuminate other data points. Usability testing can often provide the why behind data points accumulated from other methods: a heat map might show that people aren’t paying attention to an important part of the landing page, but observing users in action can reveal why they’re ignoring it.
Develop empathy. It’s not unusual for the people working on a project to develop tunnel vision around their product and forget they have access to knowledge that their typical website visitor may not have. Usability testing is a good way to develop some empathy for the real people who are using and will be using a site, and look at things from their perspective.
Ultimately provide a better user experience. Great customer experience is essential for a successful product. Usability testing can help us identify issues that wouldn’t be uncovered otherwise and create the most user-friendly product possible.
Using usability testing tools should really help improve a website’s sales or leads, and ideally we should repeat this improvement process regularly on the website, and definitely when we have just changed major elements on a website. And, ultimately, when a product works better, it makes it easier to market to, sell to, and onboard users.
What are your thoughts about this new usability testing tool? Connect with us now and let us know what you think!
Drop us a message at: transformation@globaldigitalmojo.com or contact us.
