7 Questions to Ask UX Developers | Blue Compass

Whether you’re planning an entire site redesign or you’re interested in improving the user experience of your website, you’ll probably find yourself partnering with UX developers to get the answers. UX research allows you to make data-driven decisions when making changes to the design of your website and marketing campaigns - that’s where UX developers step in.

If you’re starting a project with UX developers, there are a few must-haves you should ensure you receive. Before jumping in, here are some questions you should ask throughout the process to get the most from it and to create a great UX experience for your target audiences.

1. How Are Our Target Audiences Interacting With The Website?

Your UX developer will likely begin with customer research to understand your target audiences. After all, you can’t improve the user experience without first knowing who you are designing for and the problems your users are trying to solve.

UX consulting often includes the use of surveys, user interviews, interviews with stakeholders and website analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, to discover the primary tasks your users are trying to complete, as well as any pain points they are experiencing. At this stage, the UX developer will be able to share this information using visual techniques, such as empathy mapping and personas.

Empathy Maps Show User Experience

When studying how users are interacting with a website, it’s important to put yourself in their mindset. To do this, UX professionals often utilize empathy maps to visualize what the user feels when they arrive at a website and use the site. This allows them to understand pain points and where users feel frustrated. Empathy map layouts can vary, but the maps normally consist of four sections:

• Seeing
• Thinking
• Feeling
• Doing

Empathy maps will help give the UX developers and your team a new perspective as you discuss UX design improvements. Mapping out the users’ emotions is key to designing a website that is appropriate for your target audiences.

2. How Can We Create A Great UX Experience On Our Website?

While you want to make changes to your site that align with your target audiences’ needs, there are often user experience best practices that can improve the website for every type of visitor. Your UX developer will be able to share improvements you can make to your website that can help increase conversions and improve user satisfaction.

For example, if your pages load very slowly, this will lead to a poor user experience for every audience - not just your target audiences. These types of improvements will be essential to resolve even before optimizing the experience for your specific customers.

Your UX developers will also be able to help you determine which design trends to adopt that will improve the user experience and increase conversions and which could actually hurt the performance of your website based on their extensive research. While many business owners and marketers may want to apply the latest design trends to their sites, it’s better for you or your UX developer to carefully examine which will actually improve the experience and increase conversions.

3. How Will UX Research Help Our Digital Presence With Target Audiences?

After conducting the initial user research and providing a recommendation, your UX developers will likely recommend usability testing before implementing any changes. This can be done by creating a prototype or wireframe of the approved design and then testing the prototype with real users. At Blue Compass, we often test the new design with a panel of users that matches our clients’ target audiences to determine its success. This way, we can address any remaining user pain points before the new design is launched. This saves time down the road, as it’s easier and quicker to modify a wireframe than a fully developed website.

Through user testing, we’ll learn if the target audiences can easily navigate the website, complete their tasks and ultimately convert. If they can’t do these things, we’ll be able to determine where they’re getting off track and what we need to do next.

4. How Do UX Developers Measure Success?

When you partner with UX developers, you can expect that there will be benchmarks in place to measure the performance of any efforts. Many UX developers use a data-driven approach so that they can measure the performance of improvements made to the website and throughout the process.

At Blue Compass, we often utilize website metrics, such as views, average engagement rate, key events and engaged sessions to measure the user experience on websites. These behavior metrics can indicate the success of user experience enhancements because when a user spends more time on your website, it’s likely an indication that they are finding relevant and useful information. If there is an increase in conversions, that is a clear indication that it’s easier for users to complete their tasks on your website - again, a sign of an improvement in user experience and the value of UX research.

If these metrics are not improving after UX design updates have been made, there should be a strategy in place to continue the research to discover a solution. Ongoing measurement is the only true way to know whether the UX recommendations are effective for your users.

5. What Deliverables Can I Expect From UX Developers?

Good UX developers will ask a lot of questions before they get started. They’ll want to know what your end goal is, questions you are trying to answer and what you are hoping to gain from the analysis to determine the most effective research method. At this time, you’ll also likely discuss the scope of the project. Some projects may end with the UX team delivering the research results to you, and others could end with full recommendations and redesigns based on the research.

If you partner with a UX agency with an in-house team of designers, developers and content creators, you’ll have the option to end up with a deliverable that includes the initial research and design mockups that can even be developed and implemented on your website using one consistent team.

6. What Other Relevant UX Experience Does The Team Have?

You should ensure the UX developers you chose have relevant experience to your concerns. Even if they haven’t encountered the exact problem, they should be able to show success in different situations where they helped a company by conducting thorough user research, providing data-driven recommendations and implementing the changes.

7. How Else Can UX Developers Improve Our Digital Presence?

If you work on a marketing team, you’ve probably dealt with user experience at some point. Whether you’re trying to get users to convert on a landing page or sign up for your newsletter, you’ve already thought about the user experience as you’ve updated the design or content on the page to be more compelling.

Similarly, UX is starting to overlap with other digital marketing tactics, such as SEO. Google pays attention to how users interact with your website; for example, they monitor whether users stay on the page for a long time, if they view multiple pages throughout their session and more. This means that having a good user experience (one that encourages users to view multiple pages and spend longer on the website or convert) can boost your SEO and digital presence.

If Google sees that users are spending a lot of time on a page, that indicates that this is relevant, compelling content, so Google will likely improve this page’s ranking in the future. If a user is landing on your page and quickly leaving the site, this tells Google the content didn’t match their intent, indicating this page wasn’t a good fit for the keyword. This could cause Google to drop your page ranking for this keyword in the future.

This is another benefit of partnering with UX developers that have an in-house SEO team. The team will be able to alert you to any UX recommendations that could impact SEO to enhance the value of the project in the long run.

Get Expert End-to-End UX Developers & Solutions From Blue Compass

At Blue Compass, our focus is everything digital. Our team of UX specialists, designers, developers and digital marketing strategists provide a well-rounded solution for any problem your team has. Contact us today to learn how our team of UX developers can spark new ideas to improve your website and boost conversions.

Mac & Cheese

Mac and Cheese is on the Digital Bark-eting team at Blue Compass. He loves greeting his team members when they arrive for the day, encouraging fun breaks during the workday and taking naps in various places throughout the office. He also enjoys saying hello to clients and other visitors - especially the mail carriers who bring treats! Mac is an important part of our team of digital experts at Blue Compass, where we help brands succeed online through web design, development and digital marketing strategies.