So you’ve just re-launched your website, revenue has dropped in fact page views has dropped and your bounce rate is up.
What went wrong?
In the ideal world you make small changes as you respond to the results of your marketing analytics. If you are considering changing your web supplier then any changes are unlikely to be iterative - you are going to be concerned about major change and how that may impact on the continuing successes you are experiencing.
A lot of website redesigns are very successful at losing repeat customers. Remember users don’t want to be made to think and changing the wallpaper will make a place feel less like home. It takes visitors a long time to adjust when faced with a new website if it’s not targeted at them.
Change may be necessary if you are growing, introducing new services or are responding the changes in the way people use your website.
So where should you start?
We have created three steps to get you started and help increase your results;
1. Create your persona - If you know who your customers are then you can target them.
2. Design your customer journeys – make it easy for them to do what they want to do.
3. Create specific content for each journey – make it easy for them by giving them all the content they need to make a decision.
How do I make the right choices?
You could ask your customers. By finding out exactly what they want from your website it takes out internal opinion and guess work. Look back at your analytics and base everything on empirical evidence of what users do on your website – this includes both desktop and mobile.
Try this.
Create three tasks, then try completing them on your competitor websites – you will get an idea of how difficult it can be to get right.
Thinking aloud usability tests.
Consider simple usability tests where users think out loud, they are cheap, robust, flexible and easy to learn. To run a basic thinking aloud usability study, you need to do just 3 things:
1. Recruit representative users.
2. Give them representative tasks to perform.
3. Shut up and let the users do the talking.
Once you have done this you will be well on the road to improving your stats.