The benefits of mobile UX testing for bricks-and-mortar brands

It’s a simple fact that the better your website works for your users, the more revenue it can generate for you. When your users can’t find information easily on your mobile site, they will leave your site and go elsewhere – usually to a competitor.

So it’s in your best interests to make sure you’re carrying out user testing on your mobile site to make sure your user experience (UX) is up to scratch and not losing you traffic, or more importantly, footfall.

An attractive mobile site isn’t enough – it has to be useful, too, and user testing is the most effective, efficient way to make sure your mobile site is doing its job. Here are four great reasons why user testing needs to be on the agenda for bricks-and-mortar brands.

1. It’ll give you better insight into your users’ behaviour

While tools like Google Analytics are great at revealing page traffic, statistics and funnels, UX testing reveals why your users behave the way they do, including:

Why your users stay on your website, or why they leave it.

Why they pay or book online, or why they abandon their transaction.

Why they choose your competitors over you, or the other way round.

By observing people as they use your website, you’ll be able to find out what they love as well as where they struggle, allowing you to identify where you need to improve things.

2. It’ll generate more revenue from your site

Once you know what’s causing your users to stumble and why, you’ll be able to identify solutions to the obstacles they’re facing and implement them – leading to a lower bounce rate and a higher rate of conversions.

Whether it’s broken links, counter-intuitive navigation or poor prioritisation of information, by reducing the number of user errors and increasing ease of use and ease of learning, your website will become infinitely more useable. As a result, your site will retain users better and increase the number of return visitors – as well as attracting new ones and increasing traffic.

3. You’ll get one up on your competitors

The importance of a user-friendly mobile site shouldn’t be underestimated. According to Google, 61% of users said that they’d quickly move on to another site if they didn’t find what they were looking for right away on a mobile site, while 50% said that even if they like a business, they will use them less often if their site isn’t mobile friendly.

To put it simply, if your mobile site isn’t doing its job, then you’re pushing potential customers straight into the arms of your competitors. But that works both ways, of course – if you can provide your site visitors with a seamless mobile experience that your competitors can’t match, you’ll be the ones with the commercial edge.

4. The return on investment can be huge

Putting your site through UX testing doesn’t have to break the bank. Often, the best results come from testing with no more than five users and running as many small tests as you can afford. Testing with five users is usually enough to find 85% of usability issues on a design.

What’s more, investment in UX will soon pay its way. A survey carried out by Nielsen Norman Group suggests that spending 10% of your development budget on usability should improve your conversion rate by 83%.

Before you test, though, make sure you’ve got the UX basics down – read our five lessons on UX design to find out which boxes your website is ticking, and which aspects still need work.