By Joshua Snape | 03/05/2018 10:30
How do you take the guesswork out of the conclusions you draw from your web analytics data? Take a lesson from Toyota.
20 years ago, I read about the Japanese design team at Toyota who spent hours in supermarket parking lots watching people load groceries into their cars before designing the trunk of their next model.
Don’t Watch the Mouth. Watch the Feet
When asked why they didn’t just interview people about the subject to find out their needs, the team responded by saying, “Don’t watch the mouth. Watch the feet!”
Without this exposure to the actual habits of your website visitors, you can easily start putting your own views above those of your users and wrongly interpret your web analytics data in a way that matches your assumptions.
Analytics is great for telling you in detail what your users are doing when on your website, but actually spending time watching your users navigate through your website will significantly enhance your understanding of why users are behaving in a certain way.
An immediate payoff of this investment can be that the expensive and time-consuming changes you were planning to make to your website are completely unnecessary.
So, in some respects, your customers should ultimately be the designers of your website. Combining your analytics data with User Experience (UX) design will allow you to reach that ultimate goal.
Spending time in user observation will also prevent you from falling into the trap of excessive stereotyping. Experienced UX designers will tell you that the only normal is that there is no normal.
Move Forward With Confidence
Here are 7 factors that should influence your decision making when updating or developing a website. When applied, you can move forward with full confidence.
Source: Interaction Design Foundation
This kind of research needs to be ongoing because neither your competitors nor technology standstill. As a result, the expectations of your users, as well as their habits, are constantly changing and their expectations of how your site or app. should perform will also change.
UX research and design may take a little more time but doing it right is so much better than doing it fast.
If you would like assistance with your UX strategy connect with Strategis today!
Featured Image source: GrowthX Academy
Joshua is an accomplished writer, blogger and marketing consultant. His successful track record includes sales and marketing across four continents—Europe, N. America, the Middle East and Africa. Josh is also a successful entrepreneur and established his own marketing consultancy in Cyprus, which serviced clients throughout the Middle East. He now enjoys living and working in Vancouver for part of the year, and spends the rest of his time in the Turkish Riviera working remotely to assist clients communicate effectively in a wired world. Connect with Josh at: joshua@strategisconsulting.ca.