5 Ways to Measure Website User Experience

Website user experience (UX) has become the subject of intense focus among both consumer-facing and business-to-business companies and deservedly so, given the competitive benefits to be gained by offering customers and prospects a rich, intuitive UX. 

How does your website measure up? What type of website user experience are you providing? The following are five ways to measure website user experience.

1. Time spent on site

If visitors to your site are interested in the content they find there, this will show up in metrics that track time on page and related visitor behavior. There are a number of metrics you can use to track this in solutions such as Google Analytics and more specialized SEO programs.

Though time spent on site is an important metric, it should not be examined in a vacuum. Rather, it should be considered in light of other engagement and visitor behavior metrics such as bounce rate if marketers are to understand the context behind the statistics.

2. Task completion time

Simply drawing visitors to your site with engaging graphics and quality content is not enough; you must also get them to sign up for your service or purchase your products. One way to measure the customer experience in this regard is to track the time your visitors spend completing tasks on your site. For instance, if forms are too complicated to fill out quickly, it may result in lower conversions as people abandon the process prior to completion.  By identifying such issues, you can look into taking steps to make your website forms easier to fill out. 

Generally speaking, you want users to be able to complete tasks in as short an amount of time as possible. You can gauge task completion time in several ways. One method is to track the average time it takes to complete a task. Another is to track the average amount of time it takes before a user gives up on a task; this is known as mean time to failure.

3. Task success rate

Measuring task success rate is a crucial part of monitoring the effectiveness of your website customer experience. This measure typically quantifies the percentage of users that successfully complete a task associated with your site. Such tasks might include signing up for a service, requesting more information on a product, finding your contact information, or adding an item to a shopping cart, among others. Even if your site is not an ecommerce site, task success rate is still critical because this metric may reflect the level of frustration a typical user may have with your site when completing a simple task. The higher the success rate, the less likely the user is to have a negative experience with your site. Conversely, a low success rate may signal a potential area of your website that needs to be adjusted to better meet customer expectations.  Seek out ways to measure success rates for the tasks you want your web visitors to take on your site.

4. Conversion rate

This rate takes into account the percentage of visitors to your site who take a certain step or perform a specified action such as clicking on a link or signing up for more information about or purchasing a product or service. The rate can be applied to your site as a whole or to specified landing pages where people who click on an advertising link are directed. Though it is closely related to task success rates, it differs in one key respect: it is specific to one defined task, whereas task success rates may apply to multiple tasks on the site. The conversion rate itself should be monitored closely to determine how many users of your site are actively interested in learning more about or purchasing your product or service. If your visitor numbers are high but your conversion rate is low, it could be a sign that your customer experience is not as targeted as it needs to be.

5. Qualitative feedback

While tracking time spent on your site and task completion time can supply useful quantitative feedback on the stickiness of your digital content and help you identify points of friction, it is also valuable to acquire qualitative feedback. This feedback can come from calls to your customer service center, emails, and social media sites. It can also come from session recording tools like FullStory or UX testing apps like UserTesting.com.

Qualitative feedback combined with other measures of CX can be a big help in providing you with specific action steps you could take to improve the quality of your content and website. For instance, qualitative feedback may be especially useful in helping you to pinpoint exactly why a specific website feature or marketing piece doesn’t appeal to your audience.

Why digital agility is key to delivering a great website experience

A modern web content management system (CMS) can help you create and rapidly distribute engaging, timely website experiences. Because hybrid headless CMS allow you to create digital experiences faster, you can try more things with your users, measure their responses, and then optimize the website experience according to your findings. 

In recent years, hybrid headless CMS technology has gained in popularity as a way to accelerate changes to content development, presentation, and delivery. These platforms are architected to enable developers to work with the programming tools of their choice (such as JavaScript or React), using APIs to distribute content widely, at speed, without sending it through a proprietary front-end presentation manager. 

And importantly, they also provide for marketers to make rapid changes to content presentation directly using WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) functionality, enabling them to launch campaigns, test and iterate at speed.

Crownpeak's Digital Experience Platform: boost customer experiences with agile Headless 2.0 CMS

Crownpeak’s Digital Experience Manager (DXM) is an example of a hybrid platform that offers developers the use of their favorite tools on the back-end while enabling marketers to make presentation changes on the front-end without the need to send change tickets to the development staff. We like to call this approach Headless 2.0 because it is a significant evolution from traditional CMS and headless systems in terms of speed, agility, user/customer experience, and delivery method as a SaaS model.

Crownpeak’s Headless 2.0 CMS offers agility, flexibility, and speed for marketers looking to provide a great digital experience to customers. At the same time, it offers significant savings in time and money, enabling organizations to use their development and marketing resources in the best way possible.

Request a demo of Crownpeak to find out more about how to improve your website UX today.