UX Research Can Be Insightful

I’ve been working on a project (more details to come on that later) for a client. At first I worried they weren’t super excited about investing in user research.

They know their site visitors fairly well and so do I. We’re both very engaged in the community, so I wasn’t expecting to find anything super riveting.

UX Research could provide you with details you already know. Or it could add a few nuggets that you knew, but hadn’t realized it’s true importance.

For example, I learned, during my research, that a pop-up focused on survey results appeared to be more of a distraction than value add. Visitors I observed would close the pop-up immediately rather than reading the content.

This tells me that the pop-up needs to be removed, a change of content, and/or we need to find a new way to engage readers. In this case, the survey came out 5 months ago, so the data likely has already been seen given that the majority of our visitors are repeat visitors.

Another cool insight I noticed is that when visitors are asked to “click to see more” often times, they don’t click. Which means if items are buried on page 2, they may not be seen.

This tells you that important content must be upfront and pull the interest of the visitor.

Not that any of this really surprising. However it is nice to have your assumptions confirmed.