Web user research

Website traffic statistics can go a long way toward understanding how people are using your website and how they came to visit it in the first place.

However, direct user research can provide you with far more detailed qualitative information that may uncover new opportunities to improve your site and address the 'why factor'.

Common examples of questions that web user research can solve include:

• Why are users always leaving my site at a specific point?
• What aspects of my site are difficult to use?
• How do users perceive my website compared to competitors?
• What extra features would users like my site to contain?

Implementing user research

It may be that you have a specific problem to resolve, or you want to conduct some exploratory research to uncover new opportunities. In most cases your website user research will need to follow a number of stages:

• Problem definition
• Research design
• Research implementation
• Data collection and analysis

Every stage of this process needs to be conducted in an objective and carefully controlled fashion if it is going to provide meaningful results. Two ways in which an online businesses can conduct effective research are:

• Online questionnaire forms - these are a cost effective way of getting feedback from your website's users. Completion can be low, however, and the way in which the forms are designed and distributed needs to be considered. You also need to assess whether the sample you capture is representative of all your users.
• Direct testing of a small user sample - this research can provide some good qualitative results if handled correctly and such testing can also be combined with focus group activity, allowing for some exploratory research to be carried out at the same time

How The Web Marketing Workshop can help

We work with a number of recommended partners to conduct different types of user research for our clients. We can therefore advise you on the best options to meet your objectives and budget available and we can help to implement the entire research project or provide consultancy at different stages.

If you feel you could be getting more from your website through a better understanding of your users, contact us now for more information or request our FREE 30-minute marketing report.