You might have heard of Wordle. In case you haven’t, it’s a game with a simple interface in which users have six tries to guess a five-letter word. Once a user figures out how it works it is easy to remember exactly what to do upon return. In early 2022 Wordle went viral, particularly among Millennials. According to a survey by Morning Consult 26% of millennials and 14% of all adults play
A good design is not just pure aesthetics. It also requires a good deal of understanding of your user’s intent – how they plan to interact with a given device or platform. This principle applies to the most important component of your lead generation funnel – The Website Landing Page. While the marketing message and design choices play a big role in attracting the visitor, a website’s usability score is responsible for driving the action from the visitor and bringing tangible results.
To begin with, weigh your website pages against these usability metrics:
- How easy is it for your site’s users to carry out the core tasks within their first visit?
- How fast can a user reach the information that they came for?
- Can they memorize it easily enough to remember where to go next if they come back again? (just like Wordle users do)
- How many errors does the user make? How does the user respond to those errors?
- Do they find the experience and design pleasant? Will they be motivated to come back?
There are apps like HotJar.com and CrazyEgg.com that have an amazing array of tools like heat-maps, scroll-maps, and click-analysis to gather data around the user activity on the page.
I also recommend running a survey and using the usability tools to gather information about the user.
STEP #1 – CREATE A SIMPLE SURVEY
Invite a small group of clients, internal team, prospects, and partners to submit their feedback through a short survey. Even working with a small group of 20-30 people is a great start. This can be done through Google Forms or Survey Monkey. You can use the questions listed above as the starting metrics and build on them based on your product/service offerings.
STEP #2 – SET UP A USABILITY TOOL TO TRACK RESPONSE
A usability tool like CrazyEgg.com can help you record the actions of this group on the website. Set up a 5-second test that shows where the user is clicking within the first five seconds. That’s your most important real-estate area. Similarly, a heat-map or a scroll-map can give you valuable insights about user-behavior patterns. Are they clicking and watching the video more vs clicking on the top menu often because they want to find more product information?
Here’s the real catch (and why you can’t go wrong boosting your website’s usability):
Higher Usability Score → Longer website sessions
Longer Website Sessions → Lower Bounce Rate
Lower Bounce Rate → Higher Search Ranking Results
I would say the Usability Score is as important as the Content and Design of a web page. Without a user-friendly experience, the “shows” may not go on! Make your website as easy to use as possible and the likelihood your users will return is much higher.
Please connect with me if you have questions.
