At the COVID'19 year-end, the client team was desperate to ramp up their online presence. I took the opportunity to explain why user experience(UX) should go hand in hand with Search Engine Optimization(SEO) to ensure a high impact on leads and sales.
The objective was to find "what is working well, what is not working, and what they should start doing well" on their corporate and eCommerce websites.
I had the opportunity to expose the usability problems based on the evidence available from analytics tools and provide in-depth recommendations for its improvement. The websites were targeted both B2B and B2C customers in the United States. As a UX evaluator teamed up with a Technical specialist and Digital Marketing specialist - collectively came up with strategic suggestions and artifacts that helped the client team prioritize their revamp plans.
I prepared a list of questions and cleared my assumptions before commencing the audit. The stakeholder's answers helped me to understand,
The website had a vastness of products across different industries to be assessed. With the stipulated timeline, the assessment was not possible. We got into consenses to conduct only a general audit.
The client had installed HotJar and Google Analytics (GA) for tracking visitor behaviors. From the analytics data, I was able to deduce,
As the next step, I picked 7 key user flows to analyze.
For product-related tasks, I selected the product pages having high traffic and a high bounce rate. Because users might be interested in those pages but are bouncing off due to unknown reasons.
I walked through the website based on the tasks to uncover potential usability problems. To improve the effectiveness of this method, I invited my colleagues to evaluate them too. Additionally, I also checked GA's user flow report to verify "how visitors' are reaching the page?". I documented the report findings and the feedback from the evaluators as a visual map.
As part of an internal accelerator initiative, I curated guidelines to create a scorecard for ranking the website's usability. The evaluators need to check the website's compliance with the checklist (only applicable to the context). We arrived at a score based on the number of compliance.
I conducted this user research method to measure first impressions. Only the home page of both websites was considered. The findings were collected from 6 participants and documented.
With the help of the Core AXE tool extension in Google Chrome, I was able to run a basic Accessibility check for the selected pages. For the performance used GT metrics.
Based on the findings, I came up with recommendations categorized into Navigation, Usability, Accessibility, and Performance. Usability findings covered the severity and the effort to fix it.
I concluded the report with industry best practices and a list of KPI metrics to be tracked in terms of Google's user experience framework (HEART).
