If you're a marketer and want to improve your UX design skills, hopefully this resource will help 🙂 - Of course, when it comes to UX, there's a lot more that goes into the process, but hopefully these tips can help you to keep in mind when thinking about customer experiences through products, website, and how marketing channels play a role.
Have you done a detailed user persona? Do you understand their goals + needs for what they're looking for? What does the pathway look like for users who visit your website to engaging with your product post-signup?
Ensuring you develop (or have developed) a detailed user persona profile is crucial to do, which dictates key factors such as messaging + signup flow as just two examples.
Combine user personas with developing a customer journey map + user flows to optimise your UX.
Have you recently talked to users? Both those who are happy and those who aren't happy? Have you reviewed your analytics reports to identify gaps/leaks and opportunities?
Reflect on your core product goals and cross-check user behaviour analytics and feedback from users. Always be proactive with customer feedback.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to UX. I mean, if you're up against a certain competitor that generates millions in revenue and gets a lot of traffic, it'a a good sign with their existing site, they have fairly good UX principles and strategies in place.
Take inspiration, learn and prioritise what you like/think is contributing to better UX that you can implement. Just do it better!
Your website analytics (assuming it's setup properly) has all the answers to your UX optimisations efforts. If you're using Google Analytics, use the user behaviour flow section under "Behaviour" to find how users interact from original destination and then with other pages?
Website - What are the drop-offs or where do users leave? Where do users go to next after reading a blog post? How long are they reading pieces of content? Which content pieces are getting the most visits + engagement + time spent on them? All of these are questions you need to list + find answers to them. Put them into a spreadsheet and list down action items to improve.
Application/product - similar questions can be asked in relation to your product & UX. Whilst as a marketer you most likely aren't responsible for the product's UX core decisions, having an understanding does help with decisions around user sign up flows, automation, activation + other strategies.
In conjunction with the above, have you identified how long users spend on the site or application?
Website - what pages are they visiting + how much time do they spend on them? How can you improve CRO for these pages to ensure you get a desired action out of them, whether it be a newsletter signup for possibly a free trial to the product.
Application/product - which sections of the product or key features are they using often? Why's this? How can this improve or potentially be used as a focus for users who are yet to activate or at risk of churn?
Having an optimised landing page experience is critical for a variety of factors, but most importantly for conversions. Optimise for users depending on which channels they come from? Of course, you can't do this for every channel but for any channels that involve performance ads campaigns, you want to make sure the UX is awesome!
What are some other UX analytics metrics to take into account? Here are some you should consider I personally use:
- Scroll tracking/Scroll Depth
- Bounce rate/Exit pages
- Uniques/returning visitors
- Social shares
- Newsletter subscribes (+ which page source)
+ many others
I've mentioned this a few times across numerous checklists and for good reason. It's critical to optimise for desktop + mobile speed as much as possible. Of course, for some sites (such as those in ecommerce that rely on images), it's hard to achieve significant improvements. This of course is fine as long you've done all the items for speed optimisation that is possible.
You can split-test until your heart is content, but why even do A/B split-testing if you aren't tracking your experiments? With anything you test, ensure to keep track of these experiments. Determine a reasonable window to test and of course a decent sample size.
Need some ideas to help with what you could split-test on your site? Here's some;
- Pop-ups - Showing a pop-up on the homepage vs. a static form at the bottom
- Video - auto-playing vs. press to play
- Forms - shorter forms vs. longer forms
- Menu Bar - sticky vs. fixed headers
- Banners - sticky promo banners vs. fixed
- Pricing/Value - showing full pricing value vs. % discount
The list is endless.
I highly recommend using tools such as the above for your specific use cases to understand what happens within your website + application that goes into detail.
- Hotjar = great for your website for video recording + heatmapping.
- Amplitude = amazing details analysis for understanding how users engage with your product features
- Full Story = detailed product that helps you visually see product performance + analytics. It's an amazing product.
How can you create content that captures the attention of your audiences? What content do you have now? Is it maximising the chances to draw the attention of your target audiences' interests.
What's the landing page or blog page experience? It is filled once they land with other related pieces of content?
How can you at least them to your site with an engaging piece of content, which then you can try convert into a user, or at the very list retarget them with ads.
They key to creating content at the top of the funnel is to ensure it's entertaining + educational, or in other words, content that is engaging that capture's users interest to read more.
Serving the right content, at the right time, plays a critical role is ensuring the right messaging is being served based on the user's behaviour across the site and application.
I recommend creating a customer journey map which you can build on overtime, to understand with a bird's eye view the journey of a typical user segment. Evaluate the current content strategy and align with the customer journey map to understand gaps + opportunity.
As part of this journey map, identify the relevant channels and promotional windows/periods + automated flows required to serve content that is tailored to the user's behaviour.
In conjunction with the above, once you have done your customer journey map, a key area that needs to be developed is advocacy.
How can you make the UX so easy for existing users to share content with minimal effort? Email automation + pop-up modals are triggered for existing users only as a test can help increase chances of more shares.
Content is a great strategy for trying to win-back customers when they churn. It's good to remind them why you're the authority in the space. Create content that educates, is personalised + provides value without expecting much in return. Remind them what they're missing out on, but not with a hard sell.
Whilst many of you would have setup your website analytics (most likely Google) and a tool for your product analytics, how are these tied together? Do you have a funnel view from end-to-end which is easy to understand?
Setting up custom dashboards is a great way to get a full view of what's happening and how this relates to improving the customer journey.
Again, I go back to the importance of having a customer journey to make key decisions around messaging. Mapping out content + messaging to ensure it's personalised overall improves UX and increase chances of desired user actions (mostly conversions).
Where do users land based on engaging with content or buttons clicks through ads or automated/campaign emails? What messaging do they say? What CTA's are there? As mentioned numerous times now, it needs to make sense + personalised for the user to increase conversions.
In relation to your signup/login screens + within the product, what is your strategy around micro copy?
Short, snappy sentences can help guide users to do desired actions. Other tips for microcopy to help improve activation + retention include avoiding jargon, keeping things human (not robotic voice), fun tone (if it makes sense), pairing copy with visuals or links to resources.
I've mentioned this a few times now and whilst stating the obvious for many readers, you need to ensure your content responds correctly on mobile. Too often I see with media formats such as images, video + other pieces of content look odd on mobile.
