DTC eCommerce – How to Optimize with UX Research

Higher conversion rates and higher customer retention rates

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A recent survey of 15,000 consumers performed by PwC found that 1 in 3 would leave a brand they love after just one poor experience.

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Regularly performing user research in order to optimize the user experience of your website is critical and should be baked into your design/development process to ensure you’re satisfying the needs of every potential customer who visits your website.

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This will lead to higher conversion rates and higher customer retention rates.

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Employ quantitative and qualitative methods in tandem to maximize the potential of your UX research. Qualitative UX research will give you deep insight into why your users behave the way they do. Quantitative tells you how they behave, allows you to validate or disprove your design hypotheses, and also enables you to measure the impact. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

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What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research?

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Quantitative research deals with numbers and statistics, while qualitative research deals with words and meanings. Quantitative methods allow you to test a hypothesis by systematically collecting and analyzing data, while qualitative methods allow you to explore ideas and experiences in depth.

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Creating a best-in-class digital shopping experience is a cyclical and iterative process. No matter how well-informed, aesthetically beautiful, and carefully crafted your brand’s site is when you launch, or when you last refreshed, there is always room to improve, optimize, and provide additional content and features to engage customers. The best experiences, that have extended life spans, share something in common: they incorporate quantitative and qualitative user-experience research throughout every stage of the planning, design, and development process.

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User research can take many forms. It refers to a toolkit of research activities including quantitative analytics, A/B testing, usability testing, customer support analysis, card-sorting, contextual inquiry, on-site satisfaction surveys, task scenarios, and more.

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Here is an in-depth look at a few of our most commonly employed UX research test types:

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A/B & Multivariate Testing

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Data sources such as Google Analytics can shed light on where your site’s users encounter obstacles, which pages are performing well and which aren’t, and generally how users behave while visiting your site.

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These quantitative findings lead us to hypotheses; for example, if users aren’t clicking on the primary “Buy Now” CTA on product pages, we might think that the issue is with the button itself. We might hypothesize that making the button more prominent, or changing its color to something more noticeable will increase the conversion rate of a given page.

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A/B and multivariate testing provide a methodology by which we can test these hypotheses without committing to them–and return metrics to validate or invalidate those hypotheses. Tests are executed by simultaneously displaying different variations of the same page to two different sets of users, and measuring the effectiveness of each on the ability of your users to complete the desired task.

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Another use/case for A/B testing is to help evaluate creative ideas and optimizations before committing to a change. We can even segment our audience to test specific creative with specific segments. Say we have a page where we are seeing a significantly higher bounce rate for a certain segment of users. A/B testing allows us to isolate traffic from that segment, test various headlines for example, and see which performs best. The potential here is to take some of the guesswork and subjectivity out of the creative process and instead implement the solution our data tells us will perform best.

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In practice, robust and informed A/B tests have been shown to improve conversion rates by up to 69%.

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Satisfaction Surveys

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“How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things, but how well we are understood.”ANDREW GROVE, FORMER CEO AT INTEL CORP.

On-site surveys are one of the most simple forms of user research. These are typically triggered by a specific action or during a specific user flow.

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Card Sort Tests

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In order to create an intuitive navigation structure and information architecture and present information in a way that is intuitive for shoppers, it is essential to understand how they naturally organize information related to (or including) your products.

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One way to effectively get at this information is to perform card sorts with your users. Card sorting activities place a set of words, phrases, concepts, etc. in front of a user and asks them to group the cards in a way that makes sense. An open or mixed card sort also provides the opportunity for your participants to write in words you may have not included in your sort.

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These are just a few examples of the 40+ types of user experience research methodologies at your fingertips when you work with Aztech. Our goal is to understand why visitors abandon your website and product pages with the help of powerful qualitative and quantitative data. We work to match all feedback with analytics data to diagnose user journey drop-off.

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In conclusion, getting feedback from users of your website, or mobile app is a vital step to improve user adoption, loyalty, and satisfaction.

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Are you ready to start understanding your customers and mastering the CX of your online store?

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