Tools to Improve UX and Win Over Your Customers

This content originally appeared on CSS-Tricks and was authored by Geoff Graham

An enjoyable user experience and high conversion rates go hand-in-hand. It makes sense then, that if you want to improve conversion rates, your first task is to improve user experience.

To improve UX, deeply understanding your users is non-negotiable. But speaking with customers one by one to figure out their pain points isn’t a feasible or fast strategy.

Which is why today, we’re showing you different tools you can use to learn more about your customers so you can make quick and impactful changes that improve UX and increase conversions!

Why your visitors aren’t converting

Before we talk about the different tools to help you understand your users, let’s look at five main reasons why you don’t see as many conversions as you’d like:

Your website is confusing to navigate: If navigating your way through a cornfield maze is easier than trying to get to the checkout page on your website, you have a problem. Users like it when they can get from point A to point B with no roadblocks or confusion.

You’re guessing what your visitors want (but don’t actually know): As someone who knows your product inside and out, it can be hard to take a step back to try and get into the mind of your visitors. Unless you’re gathering voice of customer data, any changes you make will be based on guesswork.

Your visitors are distracted: If your visitors are distracted by unimportant elements on your page, they’ll miss your CTA and won’t convert. Even worse, they’ll get frustrated by a lack of flow and leave your website (and maybe even head over to your competitor).

There are roadblocks you aren’t aware of: Using your website might be easy for you and your team—you helped build it, after all—but that bias makes it challenging to see roadblocks and other issues that could prevent your users from having an enjoyable experience.

Your users don’t trust your website: Things like poor design, spelling issues in your copy, and low-quality imagery can turn potential customers away.

Simply put, if your website is clunky, you’ll irritate your users, and they won’t convert. But when you understand what your visitors want—and why they want it—you’ll be able to build an experience they love.

4 tools to improve UX and conversions

At Hotjar, we want to help you make your users happy and avoid the above problems! Here are four tools you can use to improve your user experience, make your customers smile from ear to ear, and as a result, skyrocket your conversions!

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are visual representations of your analytical data, organized so you can easily spot popular (and unpopular) areas of your website. With heatmaps, you can figure out which areas of your website contribute to a poor user experience.

You can use three types of heatmaps: scroll maps, click maps, and move maps.

Scroll maps

Scroll maps show you how far users scroll down your page. Red areas mean more visitors went to that part of your page, whereas the blue areas signal low activity. They can help you understand if users see key information.

Click maps

Click maps show an aggregate of where users click their mouse or tap the screen on desktop and mobile devices. Click maps help you understand if your CTAs are in the right place, if people are clicking on clickable items, and whether or not users are ‘rage clicking’ on your site.

Move maps

Move maps show where users move their mouse as they go through your page. Research suggests that mouse movement correlates with eye movement, helping you understand what people look at on your website.

You can use Hotjar’s Heatmaps to:

• See whether important information is within the “hottest” areas of your heatmap (or if it’s being missed because it’s in areas where visitors aren’t scrolling to)
• Decide where to move essential information based on where your users focus their attention
• Spot where your visitors’ attention drops
• A/B test to see how user behavior changes
• Make sure clicks and taps happen on “clickable” elements
• See how behavior changes on different devices (i.e., desktop, tablet, and mobile)

Recordings

It’s easy to improve UX when you know how your users are really using your website. Recordings let you watch live playbacks of each user on your site so you can see exactly how your visitors navigate through your website, identify roadblocks, and make sense of your web analytics.

Recordings let you see mouse movement, scrolling, clicks, and keyboard strokes across multiple pages on your site.

You can use Hotjar Recordings to:

• Make sense of your bounce rate by analyzing why your visitors are leaving your page(s)
• Empathize with your visitors by understanding their roadblocks and frustrations on your website
• Uncover what’s preventing your visitors from converting
• Find bugs and see if something’s not working as planned (like pages that load differently on mobile versus desktop)
• See how long it really takes for users to convert (and identify what’s preventing them from converting sooner)

Incoming Feedback

With Hotjar’s Incoming Feedback tool, you can eliminate the guesswork and get into your user’s mind by placing feedback widgets right on your website. Your visitors can tell you exactly what they like and dislike, and you can use that information to fix issues and provide more of what your users love.

Users can also highlight certain elements of your site, so you don’t need to guess what they’re referring to—you’ll know precisely what they’re talking about!

You can use Hotjar’s Incoming Feedback to:

• Get feedback on specific elements on your website and understand why your users like and dislike certain aspects of your site
• Gather the emotions of your website visitors
• Pinpoint exactly which areas are causing trouble for your users
• Track changes over time to see if user experience is improving

Surveys

Gathering voice of customer (VOC) data is easy with Hotjar Surveys. Hotjar has two types of surveys: on-site and off-site.

On-site surveys let you ask your users questions while on specific pages of your website. By asking open- or closed-ended questions (or a mix of both), you can get into the mind of your visitor and get valuable feedback to improve your website and increase conversions.

You can also use Hotjar’s on-site surveys to follow up on specific questions. For example, if you asked, “did you find what you were looking for today?” and someone clicked “no,” you can have a follow-up question asking them to explain why.

You can use Hotjar’s Surveys to:

• Validate new product ideas
• Understand why your visitors like or dislike aspects of your site
• Find areas of your site that need fixing (for example, place an on-site survey on pages with high bounce rates to figure out why users are leaving)
• Gather valuable insight from your users
• Improve conversions through post-purchase surveys
• how your customers you care about their input

Try Hotjar for free today!

All of Hotjar’s tools collect powerful data in ways everyone on your team will be able to understand. Using data to drive your decision-making process will steer you in the right direction, keep users happy, and improve your conversion rates!

Click to sign up and see how easy it is to understand your users with Hotjar!

P.S. To get you up to speed, we’ve put together checklists to help you improve user experience and increase conversions during your free Hotjar trial 💯

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The post Tools to Improve UX and Win Over Your Customers appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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This content originally appeared on CSS-Tricks and was authored by Geoff Graham