The User Experience (UX) testing of an e-Commerce website is one of the best practices for the growth of an e-Commerce business. How can you make your site better without understanding how users percept it? A nice and clear UX increases sales while a bad one decreases sales. We have prepared the tips on how to do it.
Identify the Audience
Before you start testing, it is essential to determine who your users are. Who are the types of people interested in what you offer? What are they looking for? Which devices do they access the site with? Providing answers to these questions makes it possible for you to put yourself in the shoes of a user, which is the aim of UX testing.
How to begin:
- Leverage the possibilities of Google Analytics to collect the demographic information of the users of your site.
- Make user personas, which are fictitious representations of your ideal audience.
Conducting User Testing
User testing entails seeing real users use the website and tracking the areas that seem easy and difficult to use.
Here is how to conduct UX testing of this type:
- Get some people who fit the personas you have crafted.
- Give them specific tasks to complete; for instance, let them search for a certain item in a catalog or let them attempt the purchasing process.
- Analyze how comfortable they are moving around your site. Pay attention to any clearly identifiable issues they experience.
Test On Different Devices
Desktops, tablets, and smartphones are the main types of devices through which your users will interact with your site. Make sure the experience is seamless on all of them.
What to do:
- Examine how the layout for the responsive design of your website will appear to users at various resolutions and devices.
- Make sure that the buttons, images, and text you include in websites are accessible and viewable even in small screen phones.
- Don’t forget to evaluate the checkout procedure using mobile phones and see if it is as easy as when using the desktop version.
Check Page Load Time
A slow website can be the reason for the loss of customers. Users appreciate it when a web page loads within two to three seconds. Anything beyond this is likely to cost you sales.
How to test load speed:
- Check the load speed of your website using Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix.
- Aim to reduce the load times for important pages such as the home page, products, and checkout page.
- Decrease the size of images that are excessive.
Analyze Navigation Usability
Clarity and simplicity in navigation structure are essential features which will enhance UX. Users will log out if they fail to find what they were looking for.
How to measure the testing effectiveness:
- Perform a tree test. This activity involves displaying to the users a text-only version of the website’s menu and asking them on which one they would go in search of a particular item. The aim of undertaking this is to determine how each of them can be able to look for the relevant classification or item.
- Check for consistency. Such navigational bars should remain constant on all pages so as to avoid confusion on the part of the users.
- Check out more tests on https://testfort.com/ecommerce-software-testing.
Review The Checkout Process
Any e-Commerce website contains the checkout process. This process should not be complex or take much time. Otherwise, users will leave their carts filled with products.
How to measure the testing effectiveness:
- Try the whole operation by adding an item until one enters payment details that induce the purchase.
- Ask users to finish a purchase and note any difficulties raised.
- Watch out for areas of distraction, such as irrelevant fields, vague instructions, and so on and so forth.
Use Heatmaps and Click Tracking
Heatmaps are where clicks and actions get traced back to the pages of the website. This lets you know whether people are able or not to click important buttons or links.
How to do it:
- Use tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg to generate heat maps for your website.
- Analyze where users don’t click (from the maps you’ve drawn) and come up with ways to address it.
Test Accessibility
You want as many users as possible on your website, right? Of course, we must think about individuals entrapped by disabilities. Inclusiveness in achieving good UX is equally important.
How to check it:
- There are screen accessibility testers. They perform tests to verify if the website can be read by a screen reader and other developmental screening for color blindness.
- Make sure your buttons and links are within reach so that they’ll be comfortably clicked and that all the images have text descriptions.
Final Thoughts
Evaluating the usability of your e-Commerce site is a task to be performed indefinitely. There are several tasks that will improve your site as more testing is done. With our guide, you will be able to craft a design that simplifies the interaction of the users with the site hence making them want to return.