Overview
Moderated usability studies are an established method to identify issues and pain points regarding effectiveness, efficiency and overall user experience of a digital asset. Users today hold high expectations for digital content that is easy to access, navigate and understand. Users’ impression of a website has a huge influence on how they perceive a company and their products. Understanding the paramount importance of this issue, our partner and client, Blackbaud, enthusiastically joined forces with Userlytics and Mouseflow, a behavior analytics platform, to assess a webpage’s overall user experience, with a focus on navigation and how users would request a demo. To support the existing team and to include an impartial perspective, teams from Userlytics and Mouseflow were brought on board to uncover gaps, explore opportunities, and pinpoint areas of concern throughout the users’ website journey.
The Challenge
The idea was to introduce the user to Blackbaud, a leader in software solutions for social impact organizationssuch as non-profit organizations and educational institutions. The primary goal was to identify users’ perception of the navigation menu, how they would identify relevant pages for themselves and finally how they would request a demo on the website, including their impression of the required form. We strived to find areas of confusion or struggle, researching the reasons behind these problems and looking for possible improvements and solutions.
Discovery
Before attempting this challenge, the team started with gathering user insights from the client’s website using Mouseflow. The focus here was to identify the exact pages and elements where users struggle or drop off, using tools such as heatmaps, session recordings and form and conversion funnel analytics. Watching user sessions recorded with Mouseflow, the team was able to identify that Blackbaud’s website visitors struggle with the navigation menu, confusing terms and struggling to single out products matching their needs. By using form analytics and funnel analytics, the team was able to spot the relatively low conversion rate of the demo booking form and little interaction with CTAs on the product pages. This data gathered allowed the team to define the key areas that required attention and the main goals of the research, such as identifying users’ perception of the navigation menu, how they would identify relevant pages for themselves and finally how they would request a demo on the website. This encompassed a thorough examination of 3 key pages on the webpage – Homepage, a product page depending on the users sector, and the demo form.
The Approach
To accomplish this task, we leveraged the Userlytics platform to recruit users from various regions in North America and Europe. A diverse group encompassed individuals from the education and the nonprofit sector. In a series of comprehensive 60-minute usability interviews, we thoroughly examined numerous features and elements across key touchpoints of the website. Our approach extended beyond reviewing content, layout and text; we delved into the intricacies of user interaction, carefully evaluating the users’ understanding and expectations of known pain points regarding the navigation and conversion for demos.
The Insights
After exploring Blackbaud’s website, users had the feeling that they could find products that were relevant for them, even though they might have had to spend some time going through different pages. The way products and solutions were presented in the navigation showed some difficulty and seemed to require previous knowledge of the company’s offerings. Once users moved on to pages detailing solutions for specific needs or types of organizations, product lists were difficult to find because they were hidden below general information that might be interesting but not necessarily as relevant.
The low conversion from the demo form seemed to be less due to the form itself, because once users decided that they want to get a demo of a product, they were very likely to fill in the information required from them in the existing form. They liked the focus given on company related information and didn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary was being requested. Users did not react well to CTA’s that asked them for information or to sign up when they weren’t yet expecting it (e.g., “Watch a Product Tour”), and this could cause users to abandon a page or at least try to find information somewhere else. So the findings showed that low conversion was less the result of the form itself and rather a need to provide information for users to make them willing to move on to the next step (i.e., the demo) without first requesting personal information.
***The Userlytics platform is a catalyst of ux testing and accessibility testing, and the platform continues to help organizations become compliant with accessibility standards, curating an inclusive and diverse user experience for all digital assets. Reach out to us today to support you on UX testing journey***
