If you operate a website for personal use or a business, chances are you may be due for a redesign. But where exactly do you begin? If you’re looking to start your project off on the right foot, there are numerous UX activities that you can take advantage of.
One of these activities is referred to as competitive usability testing, which are usability studies of not only the existing website design, but also several competitor websites. Whatever you do, do not decide to just hop on your computer and begin the redesigning process immediately.
If you find that you need to redesign your website, you will still want to hang on to the original design so that you can learn from it, as well as use it as a starting point for your new design.
Before proceeding with redesigning your website, figure out exactly just how big of a change you will need to make. If you are part of an Agile team, you will want to consider competitive usability testing, which will need to be performed during sprint zero.
The best prototype to use for your new website is your old one, as it solves the problem of designing a website for your business. By looking at your old website, you will be able to determine exactly what is bad about it so that your new website will not suffer the same issues.
In addition, you will want to determine what people actually like about the old design so that those qualities can be incorporated into the new design.
What you need to ask yourself before starting to redesign
Set a goal for the new design
Before beginning the process of redesigning your website, take the time to really think about your content. This will allow you to become more clear about exactly what it is that you want your new website to achieve.
The clearer you are about the actions that each user should take, the easier the design process will be. As a result, both you and the users of your website will be satisfied with the overall results.
What’s working and what’s not
Before going on with the redesigning process, think about what aspects of the website that you want to keep and which ones you want to toss out. Make note of any past complaints from users, as well as any information that you can obtain from a service such as Google Analytics.
The best example would be to see which portions of your website have seen a drop in the number of users. If this is the case, come up with ideas that can help raise their interest.
This is where you will really want to dig into any available data instead of simply relying on your own instinct.
What to focus on
Things that can cause you to get easily distracted when redesigning your website are things such as extremely creative graphical elements, which really are not needed. This is mainly for business owners who “want it all” right away; however, a website must evolve just as the web itself must evolve.
It’s also important to keep in mind that your website will never be truly “finished”; rather, focus on what you will absolutely need, then continue to make the necessary changes and additions along the way.
Competitive usability testing. Learning from your competition
The method of competitive usability testing is used to determine how well your website performs in comparison to the websites of other individuals. This can be holistic (ranking) or more focused (comparing elements, features, etc.).
These kinds of evaluations can take the form of expert reviews, which is when someone experienced in competitive usability testing reviews website designs based on their own expertise and knowledge of usability. This usually involves the user using two or more competing websites to complete a set of certain tasks.
A thorough evaluation will allow the website design team to determine exactly what works and what doesn’t, all from the perspective of either an expert or a user of the website. This is more useful than you simply looking at the website of a competitor to figure out what you think is different and/or interesting about it, as well as see what they’re doing overall.
These kinds of evaluation will allow you to properly assess not only if the design of your website is better or worse than that of your competitors, but also discover the many strengths and weaknesses of completing designs. The overall goal is to determine what your competitors are doing, what’s working and what’s not, and how they’re going about their designing.
These evaluations are also great activities for initial research on projects, as they can help in determining exactly what direction a design needs to go in or how great of a need there is for feature development. Make sure that the following goals are clear in the evaluation: what main challenges with the design are you trying to solve? What features used by your competitors are the most interesting to you? What is the biggest feature on your website that you want to compare to other websites?
What you can gain from it
Competitive usability testing evaluations can assist the design team in making decisions about what specific elements work the best rather than thoughts based on personal opinions.
Other benefits of these evaluations are risk reduction, which will help you to eliminate features that are pushed too hard on your website. Tackle this issue early on, taking advantage of the opportunity to look at competing websites, as these are often found to be early adopters.
Besides that, usability testing can also help you add value, which can assist you in adding design approaches or other features that users can identify as being helpful to them.
Based on the usability work of your different competitors, the design team will be able to obtain these kinds of insights. Show yourself the various strengths and weaknesses of a design that may have already gone through one or more rounds of competitive usability testing.
This will allow the team to benefit from work that has already been performed by your competitors. Before completing any design work for your website, consider having one of these evaluations performed in order to test several approaches to a similar design by a competitor.
Evaluations also accurately reflect what your customers already do, as they compare things such as content, experience, and overall functionality that your website offers as opposed to what other websites offer. Generally, people will navigate between several different websites before ultimately deciding on which business to go with. Therefore, it is very beneficial for your design team to understand what users of your website do and see as they look over your competitors.
Learn from these tests
One common issue that design teams face occasionally is debating over design solutions, using personal opinions to make decisions about various things. This is where competitive usability testing becomes essential, as it will allow the team to make more informed decisions by obtaining feedback from your website’s target users.
By looking at the websites of competitors, you will be able to solve design problems, as these websites often experience the same issues that you have. These websites are also fully-implemented design instances that numerous other companies have invested in.
Competitive usability testing can also assist you with evaluating future features of your website. Take the time to learn whether or not customers consider your website to be valuable and/or how it can be better designed. Customers’ opinions can assist you with determining whether or not certain features are worth including.
Examine similar features on competitors’ websites. While you may find features on similar websites that you’re looking to add to your own, the ones on the other websites may work slightly better. Take the time to note and identify the various elements what will work better, as well as make your website design look better, while at the same time avoiding mistakes being made on other websites.
You will most likely discover better and easier ways to do things. If you test your own website, you may find things turning out to be very well; however, testing other websites could reveal things you may not have thought about including, such as various features and customer interaction options. People will compare and contrast these things in order to give a proper reaction to different designs, especially since they will have several different examples to look at.
Ending thoughts
In conclusion, before making the decision to redesign your website, ensure that you completely understand all of the various strengths and weaknesses that are in your current design. Take the time to study the websites of your competitors in order to obtain different ideas and alternatives.
The main focus of competitive usability testing is to gain more of an insight as to why different design elements work or not, which will allow you to make more informed decisions as you move forward.
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