The MacKellar Memo
Sorting Through the Noise
Let’s face it—marketing can be hard. We have dozens of services we’re providing for clients while taking in thousands of inputs on a daily basis from blog post about best practices to seemingly 8 million newsletters and new white papers every day, not to mention actually getting the work done. So it’s easy to see how in the face of this information overload we can begin to over think, to over complicate things.
This can be especially true when it comes to how we work with clients when designing and developing websites where we can easily find ourselves caught between a rock and a hard place of what’s best for the end-user and what the clients thinks is best for the end-user.
Website visitors are like snowflakes—no two are exactly alike. Unfortunately, we often don’t have the ability due to time, budget, etc., to reach out directly to every user to ask them what they like and dislike about the old website, but what we can do is tap into user research to get a deeper understanding beyond anecdotal feedback from the client.
Enter Hotjar, a wonderful behavior analytics company that we can use to observe user behavior on a site prior to any design and development work on a future-state site. Hotjar’s analytics can help us identify patterns and trends that can shape everything from the information architecture to the page length of the future site through its heat mapping and session recording options.
Looking at this data, paired with other insights from platforms like Google Analytics, Search Console and Semrush, among others, early in the process can help ensure we’re placing the end-user at the forefront of everything we do from day one but giving us an accurate picture of how real life users, not just hypothetical buyer personas, are interacting with the site.
That data can be incredibly valuable when paired with user research activities, like a card sorting exercise, which give us insights into how people conceptualize, group and label ideas that can help shape a site’s information architecture. Card sorts, which can be completed through companies like Optimal Workshop, are great because there is no right or wrong answer, just like there are no two users that are exactly alike. But what it can do is help us understand patterns and commonalities in how people would potentially approach different aspects of a site or different interpretations of a specific word/phrase. And in an ideal world, card sorts wouldn’t be limited to just our clients—engaging with external stakeholders (the client’s clients, industry associations, a recruitment panel, etc.) all can help move us away from confirmation bias and toward data-based decision making.
So the next time you set out on a website build, don’t forget to give a little love to the user research step in process so that we can continue to ensure every site we work on is built with data, not assumptions, at the core.
Looking for more tips and tricks from the team? Head over to The Inventing Room for more.