Businesses of all sizes, structures, and locations must understand the factors driving their growth in the digital age. Testing your website, app, or products is an essential step in enhancing your UX/UI design and customer experience. You can develop the ideal app or website by conducting various user testing methods, A/B testing, and receiving feedback on overall performance, experience, and effectiveness.
In this article, we will delve deep into the concept of user testing and understand how it improves customer experience and drives ROI.
User testing is fundamentally about empathising with and understanding the core users of a digital product. Regrettably, most business owners consider it as an afterthought rather than including it as a major step in the development process.
Why Should You Invest in User Testing?
You might think you have addressed and fixed every website or app design flaw. But the truth is that you will never know how the end customer feels after using your product until you collect user feedback.
From usability studies to card sorting, there are several UX/UI design testing methods where the end user is involved in the decision-making process.
You can conduct early user testing to know what kind of UX/UI design is needed before such revisions become too costly to implement. With limited time and budget, you can delegate this work to a reputed user testing agency to collect feedback. Now your in-house resources are free to focus on other core competencies to ensure the timely launch of an app or website.
If you are still not running user tests on your app or website, here are three reasons why you should:
- User Testing Improves Return on Investment
The usability of an app, product, or website is directly linked to customer purchase patterns, loyalty, and an increase in ROI. Several studies by Jakob Neilson reported that when a portion of the redesign budget was allocated for user testing, there was a 135% increase in the product’s usability. Early user testing will help you drive great results in two ways:
- By increasing your Conversion Rates
- By retaining more customers
While you might be running A/B tests, your efforts might go to waste if they are not guided by real-time user feedback.
By conducting user testing, you will be able to identify the issues that make your customers leave the website and move on to another one. By fixing these problems, you can continue the conversion process.
In addition to improving customer advocacy and retention, user testing also helps increase customer loyalty. Customers have grown accustomed to smooth user experiences and expect the same from all apps or websites.
Consequently, they will move on to a competitor’s website if they have a bad experience with an app or website. Moreover, this bad experience will stop them from recommending your app to their friends and family.
Early user testing will help you identify these issues and incorporate changes in the design. Later in the development cycle, making the same changes could be time-consuming and quite expensive. A smooth user experience will help you retain and gain loyal customers. You can take the help of a credible user testing agency to conduct the tests and get comprehensive results.
- Bring Down Costs
Besides increasing ROI, user testing will also help you stay within your budget and save money. It can help you reduce development and customer costs significantly. Fixing an error after launching a website or an app is much more costly than addressing it in the early developmental stages.
Most businesses lose 50 per cent of their engineering time in doing such reworks that could have been easily avoided with simple user testing. Your developers will also have an easy time working on the app or website with proper feedback from the customers. This will save time and money, which would have been otherwise wasted on doing pointless UX/UI research.
Apart from the development part, your customer support resources will not have to spend all day answering queries or helping customers navigate the app and purchase products or services. You can significantly reduce the time and money spent on customer support by working on recurring issues.
- Find Out the Issues That are Troubling Your Customers
One of the biggest highlights of user testing is that you get to see first-hand where your customers are getting stuck and fix those issues. For instance:
- Misleading or confusing navigation
- Problems while creating an account or signing into it
- Erroneous search results
- Buttons not working properly in the mobile interface
Your customers understand the difference between good and bad design and expect the former. So, do not expect good results if you launch a website or app that frustrates the user and has poor UX/UI design.
Consulting a reputed user testing agency will guide you properly and help you gather valuable customer feedback.