Enhancing User Experience of a Website with Good Quality Control
What any marketing project aims to do, whether it’s for creative design, video production, web development or lead generation, is make a good impression with prospects in the hopes of ultimately translating them into paying customers. If we’re talking about website design specifically, this is done by creating a good user experience.
Whether you are a professional designer or developer, or delve into any other form of marketing, you know all too well how easy it is to lose perspective on the user experience after spending countless hours working on a project and seeing it with a pair of eyes that now only register functionality and engineering.
When I was working with my former marketing company, apart from doing copy I was also responsible for quality control.
This entailed reviewing end result projects to see if they were able to create a positive experience for end users. Once a project was complete, whether it was a website or brochure, I was in charge of simulating the user experience to see how well the product would respond with users.
Watching the developer and designer spend countless hours working on a website, I was able to see how disconnected they eventually became from the final result. In the end, they weren’t able to appraise a product objectively after tinkering with functionality for endless hours. I understood that it’s very hard to shift perspective from development to user experience.
Someone who’s working on a project behind the scenes is a very different judge of character from the person who is experiencing it as an end user. While every design project and SEO job has to be functional for its own purposes, the user experience is ultimately the most important.
How users find your website is a matter of good SEO practice; however, keeping them on the site once they’re in, is a very important factor for financial success. There are two sets of visitors to any site: search engine spiders and robots that aim to index and archive your website in order for it to show up in search engine results pages (SERPs), and the second set of visitors – the people who visit from search engines, directories, and various social networks.
It’s a waste of time working hard on a project only to see that in the end it’s not interactive. If you’re spending time attracting traffic you should ensure that that those visitors are going to stay and browse your website. This is only accomplished with a user friendly experience.
This is why quality control is so important.
Google approaches this matter with a very clear agenda and objective because it understands how important it is to retain visitors once they’ve arrived.
If you look at the Google page itself, you will notice that it carries a very clean template. In order to tackle the matter of good end user experience, Google has clearly stayed adamant about maintaining a minimalist approach. Don’t be fooled thinking that Google has been easily developed from a design perspective just because it looks simple; it in fact hold heavy duty functionality and tools.
How does Google know that this is the best user-experience?
Every piece of the website and every tool on Google is tested by a human team that listens to what it is that users want to see more and less of. If Google runs a test for a number of people and a good number of them report issues and discontent, Google will make sure to address each and every issue until the testers are satisfied with what they see and satisfied with what they experience.
Unless a tool provides user friendliness and real value, you can be sure that Google will eliminate it.
As Google packs on more features and tools, it simultaneously ensures that more time is spent testing the product – sometimes as frequently as on a weekly basis.
While your website will inevitably be functioning on a smaller scale than something like the Google search engine, you will need to adjust quality assurance and testing accordingly. There are various test companies out there that can give you essential feedback for an amount of money that is relatively minimal and provides real value to your business.
While end users are mostly forgiving if something doesn’t function to their liking on a small scale, you can be sure that they will not forgive larger design and functionality issues that waste time. This is the audience that you could potentially lose and since you’ve been working hard on development, you don’t want your most important possession, the prospect, to bounce out of your website as soon as they find it.
Fortunately, there are many tools that analyse the activity on your website and reveal to you the experiences that users are having. For example, you can track things like which pages visitors stay on the most, and which pages they respond to the least, which search engines and networks they are coming from and how far they are going in your landing pages. This in turn allows you to make appropriate adjustments in order to create a better user experience. And this is exactly what you ultimately want – a responsive audience.
The Key is User Experience
So while you spend a lot of time on design and development, you need to ensure that you focus on the importance of quality control just as much.
Designers and developers are not finicky about the user experience as someone who has perspective from a pair of fresh eyes. Invest in getting a good quality control team to act as testers. How users behave on your website is ultimately the decisive factor of whether or not they will want to do business with you and whether or not they are going to take action and purchase your products and services. (If you’re a Facebook user you could compare how easy they make retrieving a lost password with other websites, and you will see that much of their success is due to the ease of use).
Quality control is vital to ensure that all errors and details that may have been overlooked by designers and developers is caught and avoided.
This is in fact the key difference between features and benefits; what you are offering on your website may be very useful to the consumer but the usability of the website is just as important.
Ensure you have strong quality control that will enable you to make appropriate changes and accommodations on your website in order for the user experience to be enhanced. You visitors are your most important asset, don’t lose them to errors that can go unnoticed by designers and developers. Invest in good quality control, it will pay off.
Cheers,
Anna @ Toronto
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