Website Not Providing the Returns You Expected?

You redesigned your organization’s app or website with lofty goals. We’ll increase engagement! Customers will use and love this new feature! Users will finally do this thing or take this action! But when the redesign is complete, the results are underwhelming.

In fact, post redesign, it’s hard to know if engagement has increased because no one bothered to investigate what “engagement” meant for your users. Your users aren’t adopting a new feature but it’s unclear why not. To your frustration, users aren’t doing more of any of the things your team had hoped.

If your team failed to develop a UX strategy, these types of disappointing results aren’t surprising. No UX strategy means you didn’t conduct user research and your team made a bunch of assumptions around what your users want, how they behave, and what they are trying to accomplish.

You spent a bunch of time and resources creating a website or app and it’s not returning the results you expected. Now what? The only way to evaluate what’s not working well is to start including users in your process. What user research methods you employ will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish and what assumptions you need to validate. The examples below are two types of scenarios we see often at Voice+Code.

Don’t just hope you’re making the right design choices—validate them.

A new Voice+Code client had recently redesigned their website with the help of a marketing agency. Despite their excitement post-launch, they were receiving negative feedback: the site was difficult to use. The client’s team hypothesized that the advanced search functionality was to blame. Without evidence to support the hypotheses, we recommended conducting a usability study to evaluate how well—or not well—representative users could perform critical tasks. For this website, these were information-finding activities that website visitors must be able to complete in order for the site to be successful. For example, locating the company’s core competencies. Through the usability study, we were able to determine that users’ frustrations were the result of a combination of factors: the search functionality, navigation menu, and information architecture all played a role in making information difficult to find. These usability problems were compounded on mobile devices.

What’s the takeaway? We could have made changes to the website without conducting user research. But the probability of us pinpointing the exact combination of factors that contributed to the problem would have been extremely low. Even more importantly, by observing how users looked for key information on the website, we were better able to determine the right design solution.

Now, this usability study was conducted reactively, as a result of complaints. What if this team had conducted a usability during the design stages of this website, before it had launched? Not only would they have saved the time and resources building something that was difficult to use, they would have saved the frustration of diagnosing and fixing a problem post-launch. Reactive user research is better than no user research at all. But what value does proactive user research provide?

Minimize risk and uncover opportunities to provide more value

If you’re considering investing in a website or app redesign, you’re probably thinking about the ways you can minimize the risks associated with that investment. But you should also be thinking about how, by aligning business goals with user goals, you can maximize potential opportunities. Thankfully, user research allows you to do both.

By involving representative and/or actual users in your redesign process, you can get a rich understanding of what they need and how your organization can better serve them through digital channels. We recently worked with a nonprofit that was embarking on a redesign. One of their goals was to increase engagement. But, they weren’t sure what “engagement” really meant for their users. By conducting exploratory user research, we were not only able to define what engagement meant, we were able to uncover rich behavioral insights into core groups of users, as well as how those users relate to one another. Turns out, those groups of users impact each other significantly—an insight that had implications for not only the website but all digital and nondigital channels. This research helped us create a UX strategy for the nonprofit that aligned organizational and user goals. With it, the nonprofit had a much clearer—and goal-driven—path than it would have than if it jumped straight into design. Further, it never would have considered adding the functionality that is so important to encourage engagement. The icing on the cake? By defining engagement, we can measure it, giving us added insights and a way to demonstrate a return on investment.

This user research, by the way, is not a one-off exercise. Usability studies, for example, are conducted on design prototypes pre- and post-launch and as new features are added. If we’re making significant changes to the information architecture on a website, we often conduct specific exercises with users—card sorting and tree testing, for example—to examine those issues. We learn with each round of user research and that is added to our body of UX knowledge and shapes our UX strategy. So, if you’re not thrilled with the results of your website or app, consider a similar approach. Instead of making changes blindly—hoping the right design, content, and features magically fall into place—consider involving your users to shape a dynamic and evolving UX strategy that is far more likely to deliver the results you expect.