No matter the purpose or function of your WordPress sites, user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) play direct roles in your success.
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Without a comprehensive strategy for improving your UX and UI, you’ll lose out to competitors who have exactly that. Auditing the effectiveness of these features is necessary to gain the kind of traffic and engagement you’re looking for, so assess your sites now.
Start by putting the user first and follow this guide for auditing UX and UI on WordPress sites.
1. Put the User First
For your UX to be successful, you’ll need to examine it from the user’s perspective.
Getting a UX/UI audit right means putting yourself in the user’s shoes, interacting with the site exactly as might a user who wants to fulfill a set of specific tasks. From here, you can explore how the site’s design might affect the experience.
Data can help you create complete user profiles to more accurately get in the headspace of your audience. However, simply approaching your site as if you were a new user is often enough to catch problems in page organization, function, or comprehension.
Companies that focus on client satisfaction report an 84% average increase in revenue. Your users are your clients, and you can improve client satisfaction with a good UX and UI. Put your users first as you move through your site, evaluating accessibility and usability as well as visual appeal.
2. Assess the Data
Next, look at what the data has to say.
In this case, your data are the various metrics that track performance and engagement on a WordPress site. You can look at all of these with a Google Analytics plugin since WordPress doesn’t have built-in analytical tools.
No matter what analytics tool you use, however, there are a few key metrics that could indicate problems in the UX/UI. These include:
- New users
- Bounce rate
- Average session duration
- Pages per session
- Sessions by channel
Examine how users are interacting with the site and where. Then map these metrics onto your UI to see where you might be losing engagement because of a poor experience. A poorly designed or misleading landing page, for example, might be contributing to a high bounce rate.
3. Test for Functionality
Then, it’s time to systematically analyze your site for functionality issues that may impact UX now or will later on.
Start by taking inventory of the goals you want to accomplish, then conduct thorough interviews with users and stakeholders to gain feedback. Surveys, questionnaires, and even social media comments can be great sources of qualitative data. Apply this information to a comprehensive review of your UX/UI.
With such specific and targeted feedback, you’ll be able to streamline every aspect of your UI, from its borders to its font sizes.
4. Test for Performance
Optimizing your sites’ performance is a key element of user success. To ensure that your sites measure up, you need to run tests and evaluations regarding the back-end functions of your platform.
For instance, you need a fast page speed and load time if you want to improve your traffic and conversion rates. Page speed is an indication of how quickly an entire web page downloads and displays, and the accepted time for an e-commerce site is about 2 to 3 seconds.
Measure page speed with any one of many online tools. Then, focus your efforts on evaluating accessibility. Since accessibility overlaps with performance and UX, these tests will be meaningful in your audit.
5. Improve Your Site
Your UX/UI audit will not be complete without an action plan for improving your WordPress sites. In your evaluations, you likely spotted many things that could be improved with the right adjustments. Now is the time to plan for these adjustments as a UX designer.
The role of a UX designer requires extensive research, information architecture, and product testing. This is because there are a million ways to design a site but only a few function well for the majority of your users. Finding the right solutions from your audit can be a challenge that may require bringing on outside help.
Regardless, you’ll have to apply data analytics and problem-solving skills if you want to improve your sites through a UX/UI audit.
Evaluating an Effective Site
All your efforts to devise an engaging digital platform could be in vain if your UX isn’t up to par. Evaluate your WordPress sites with these strategies in mind, making sure to put the user first and develop a data-driven approach to decision making. Plenty of tests and evaluative tools are available to help you get there.
Audit your UX, then continue to prioritize UX in follow-up user tests. An effective site engages the user at every step in the process and gives them opportunities to voice their feedback. Pay attention to this feedback to build a better site.
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