Understanding User Testing and Experience
Needs and requirements from your user testing is a must, to understand the functionality of an existing website you want to grow or a new adventure.
Whether you need a redesign or are waiting to fully understand how your users are using your website, the first step really is to know who your customers are by user testing. At Blend Commerce, we have a team of Shopify UX experts and designers who can help offer this.
What does Blend Commerce do?
Collectively with you and our team, we can come together to understand the full required scope of work. We've recently done this with one of our leading Shopify Growth Partnership customers in the Collagen sector. We teamed up to know what was needed to creatively and effectively push their site further to gain more sales and better understand their customers.
Once the scope of work is defined, this is where the real fun begins. You can user test many ways, whether this be a moderated session such as observations or the unmoderated approach such as phone and video testing. In the growing pressures of the world we are currently in, we, alongside our client, have opted for the unmoderated approach, having session recordings as our testing of choice. Shopify also allows us to gain access to the merchants' analytics. We perform a simple calculation of drop-off rates to outline any other potential gaps within the site to boost conversion.
Persona Optimisation
Most Shopify Merchants (not all) already have a clue on what their personas/customers are. However, if you don't, please do not worry. This is something that Blend Commerce has much experience in, and we love to help you out with this. Our clients' know who their customers are; however, for user testing purposes having your users as persons is helpful. With these personas, we can build a base set of questions or tasks to ask and complete, rather than honing in on all types of customers and in turn, we were able to find the right users to test.
Finding these users can be tricky, and it takes time.
Understanding your users is something that we will help profoundly. We then propelled our client with working together; armed with the knowledge of their customer base using their Google Analytics, we came up with 4 personas. These personas are made up of a male persona and three women personas across various ages, activity, job experiences, and life accomplishments. Including that, what is also needed and key to this is why they are a persona, it's their habits of shopping with our client.
Not only that, we can ask simple questions such as 'Who are the most engaged customers?' or 'What are their likes, dislikes, shopping habits' as all these types of questions will help us determine who you're trying to reach as a target audience and to those who are already a target audience on your Shopify Store. Find and target your target market by reading some of the tips in our blog here.
User Testing
Now we have the personas all locked in, the next thing is to build what you want to test. This can be a variety of different things such as a small component on a product page or in our clients' case they wanted to get users to test the entire site. With the personas, we were then able to generate a list of activities that our client wanted to accomplish whilst in the testing phase. But first we need to make sure that these users were what our client needed, so a handful of audit questions are formed.
Now with all this in one central place, we were able to deploy this to get our video sessions we need. It's always wise to know how many sessions you want, in this case our client opted for 15 user testing sessions across the various personas we have gathered.
The results are in
These tests are video sessions where users go into each task, verbally act out what they have been asked to do. Some were asked to complete their user testing on a mobile device and others on a desktop. This would typically be advised so you can get a good feel for what to expect across both platforms when growing your business.
Once all the sessions have been completed, our UX Team would then analyse these in detail. When we mean in detail, we mean with a fine-tooth comb. These sessions that are being analysed will be turned into user needs. These user needs would then be turned into user stories. and in our clients' case, there were over 90 different stories. "As a user, I want the ability to…so that I can…" would be the words that make up the user story allowing us then to generate a deck of functionality pieces for our client.
How we use the MoSCoW method.
As all the requirements, stories, and functionality have then been laid out, the next piece to finally be brought in to start creating a new website would be a group session that we like to call MoSCoW session. Must Have, Should Have, Could Have and Won't Haves are columns created where each piece of existing functionality and new functionality are discussed and grouped together.
From here the MoSCoW session would allow us to fully understand any other functionality that is needed across the business to add any more to the table. With this, a new website can be created with a user-centered approach being applied at its core.
What Blend Commerce can do for you
It's tough to find something that will help your users without actually testing it first and here at Blend we think it's true. Without testing, a Shopify Merchant can not grow. Therefore it's really important to think about your customers and think about your Conversation Rate. At Blend Commerce, we help our Shopify Merchants with this. We are passionate about CRO and always strive to do better and better each month for our customers. Read our blog on why CRO is so important and how we can help you optimise yours.
A note from our Brand & Creative Lead - Stephan Salt
There’s nothing I like more than being able to find a solution to our client’s problems. So when our client came to us, asking us to help them understand their customers’ requirements and needs, we saw an opportunity to implement our unique User Testing approach.
What resulted was more than 90 user requirements, across 15 user sessions equaling 60+ user stories which furthered their expectations, delivering in-depth insights that shone thousands of words through a well-choreographed document. These user-centered results enabled our client to actively motivate reasons for a site rebrand that focused more on the User Experience.
This ongoing, successful partnership resulted in our team being referred to various clients with similar problems, who we are now working with to find equally successful solutions.
If your company is looking for an integrated team, ready to deliver “world-class” solutions to your User Experience related obstacles, Get In Touch to get the conversation going.
