How to Use Qualitative UX Research to Identify Conversion Roadblocks

As the world of e-commerce continues to expand, businesses must prioritize their user experience (UX) in order to remain competitive. A key component of creating a successful UX is identifying and removing conversion roadblocks – issues that prevent users from completing a desired action, such as making a purchase. One way to identify these roadblocks is through qualitative UX research. In this post, we’ll explore how to use qualitative UX research to identify conversion roadblocks, and why this approach is essential for creating a successful e-commerce website.

What is Qualitative UX Research and Why is it Important?

Before diving into how to use qualitative UX research to identify conversion roadblocks, let’s define what it is and why it’s important. Qualitative UX research involves gathering feedback from users in the form of interviews, surveys, and observation, with the goal of understanding their experiences and behaviors on a website or app. By analyzing this data, businesses can gain insights into how users interact with their website, what frustrates them, and what motivates them to take action.

So why is qualitative UX research important? First, it allows businesses to better understand their users and create a more user-friendly experience. By identifying roadblocks and pain points, businesses can make necessary changes to improve the user experience and increase conversions. Second, qualitative UX research provides valuable insights that can inform design decisions and help prioritize future improvements. By understanding what users want and need, businesses can make informed decisions that lead to a better overall experience.

How to Conduct Qualitative UX Research to Identify Conversion Roadblocks

Now that we understand the importance of qualitative UX research, let’s dive into how to conduct it to identify conversion roadblocks. There are several methods businesses can use to gather qualitative data, including:

  • User Interviews: Conducting interviews with users can provide valuable insights into their experiences and behaviors on a website. Businesses can ask questions about what users like and dislike about the website, what they find confusing or frustrating, and what motivates them to take action.
  • Surveys: Surveys are a quick and efficient way to gather feedback from a large number of users. Businesses can use surveys to ask specific questions about the user experience, such as how easy it was to find a product or complete a checkout.
  • Observations: Observing users as they navigate a website can provide valuable insights into their behavior and frustrations. By watching how users interact with a website, businesses can identify areas where users get stuck or confused. (We use FullStory to help us with this!)

Once businesses have gathered qualitative data, they can use it to identify conversion roadblocks. Some common roadblocks include:

  • Confusing Navigation: If users have a hard time finding what they’re looking for on a website, they’re more likely to abandon their purchase. Businesses should ensure that their website is easy to navigate, with clear labels and a logical hierarchy.
  • Complicated Checkout Process: A complicated checkout process is a major conversion roadblock. Businesses should strive to make the checkout process as simple and streamlined as possible, with clear calls to action and minimal steps.
  • Lack of Trust: If users don’t trust a website, they’re unlikely to make a purchase. Businesses should ensure that their website is secure and that they have clear policies in place for things like returns and refunds.

The Importance of Using Qualitative UX Research to Improve Conversion Rates

In conclusion, qualitative UX research is an essential tool for identifying conversion roadblocks and creating a successful e-commerce website. By gathering feedback from users and analyzing their experiences and behaviors, businesses can identify pain points and make necessary changes to improve the user experience. This, in turn, can lead to increased conversions and a more successful online business.

When conducting qualitative UX research, it’s important to use a variety of methods, including user interviews, surveys, and observations. By leveraging qualitative data pre- and post-optimization, organizations can track their impact and make data-driven decisions about future investments. Roboboogie is the one-stop-shop for uncovering user pain points, gathering feedback, and measuring the success of digital transformation efforts. Our expertise in Analytics, User Research, Design, and Technology provides actionable and measurable insights, with flexible services to meet you where you’re at in your optimization efforts.

Navigating the Path to Conversion Success: Let Conversion Compass Guide You

In an ever-evolving landscape of digital optimization, prioritizing what and where to test can often feel disorienting.

With countless variables like testing runtimes, page selection, and scope for design and development, it’s easy to feel directionless. But fear not, our Conversion Compass can point your optimization efforts in the right direction.

Imagine having a personalized testing plan for your e-commerce site, designed just for your brand. We create this plan using two key ingredients. First, we dive into your customer behavior data to gather valuable insights. Second, we leverage proven optimization techniques that work specifically for your industry.

That’s the magic of our Conversion Compass program. It’s a strategic tool that reveals the clearest path to success and gives you the confidence to take measurable steps towards increasing conversions. With Conversion Compass, you’ll have a roadmap to guide your testing efforts, ensuring that each experiment brings you closer to your goals

But roadmapping isn’t just a list of random tests; it’s a strategic process involving stakeholder collaboration, objective setting, data analysis, and prioritization based on impact and alignment with business goals.

In this blog, we break down 5 pro-tips for key roadmapping phases.

Account Onboarding & Business Objectives Distillation

  1. Ensure alignment: Collaborate closely with key stakeholders across departments to ensure that the defined business objectives align with the overall organizational goals. Make sure to break down the WHY behind the objectives.
  2. Focus on measurability: Clearly define measurable goals and key performance indicators that will be used to track the success of the A/B testing roadmap.
  3. Prioritize objectives: Identify and prioritize business objectives based on their potential impact on revenue, customer satisfaction, or other relevant metrics. Build a few ROI models to best understand what your biggest levers are.
  4. Set realistic timelines: Establish realistic timelines for achieving each objective, taking into account resource availability and potential dependencies. Break them into phases and milestones enabling you to track progress effectively and determine if adjustments to the overall goal or strategy are necessary.
  5. Document thoroughly: Document all discussions, decisions, and action items from the onboarding process to ensure clarity and accountability throughout the roadmapping journey.

Data & Insights Analysis:

  1. Gather comprehensive data: Collect data from various sources, including website analytics, historic tests, customer feedback, and market research, to gain a holistic portfolio of data.
  2. Transform data into insights: Data isn’t useful by itself. It’s the insights and application that derives from it that creates value. Focus on extracting meaningful insights that provide clarity on their significance and potential impact.
  3. Rank your Insights: Make note of your favorite insights, these can be ones that offer biggest ROI potential, spark the most design ideas, or perhaps it reveals several follow up questions that can be answered through testing.
  4. Define 3-4 optimization themes: Identify patterns, trends, and correlations within the data that directly connect to the business objectives. Define these patterns as optimization themes by attaching a strategy that can create a better experience for users. Every test should be connected to an optimization theme.
  5. Bucket insights into themes: With optimization themes defined, begin to organize your insights by bucketing them within your themes, this will help create clear direction and guardrails for future ideation sessions.

Ideation Session & Generation of Backlog:

  1. Foster creativity: Create a collaborative and supportive environment that encourages team members to think outside the box and share innovative ideas.
  2. Set clear guardrails and structure:  Focus on one optimization theme at a time. Make sure ideas fit the theme and are based on data insights. Look at specific parts of your site, and move on when you’ve explored all the ideas for that area.
  3. Prioritize quality over quantity: Focus on generating high-quality test ideas that are based on data insights, user research, and best practices rather than aiming for sheer volume.
  4. Test hypothesis diversity: Include a mix of hypothesis types, such as usability improvements, feature enhancements, messaging variations, and design changes, to cover a wide range of potential tests.
  5. Document and organize: Document all generated test ideas in a centralized backlog, categorizing them based on themes, potential impact, and alignment with business objectives for easy reference and prioritization.

Prioritization and Roadmap phase:

  1. Rank Your Tests: Identify key factors that matter to your business. Score each test idea based on its potential impact on these factors. Give each idea a number score to easily compare and rank them.
  2. Balance Effort and Impact: Look at how much work each test takes to run and put into action. Compare this to the expected impact of the test. Prioritize tests that offer a big impact for a reasonable amount of effort. This helps you get the best bang for your buck in your optimization work.
  3. Iterative vs Innovative Approach: Create a roadmap that balances two types of tests: innovative and iterative. Innovative tests are big, complex changes that can have a major impact, either good or bad. Iterative tests are smaller, focused experiments that help you learn and improve gradually. Aim for about 75% iterative and 25% innovative tests. This mix helps you test quickly, boost revenue, and gain clear insights.
  4. Stakeholder Alignment: Involve key stakeholders when prioritizing tests. This ensures your testing plan aligns with your organization’s goals and priorities. Work to get everyone’s buy-in on the final roadmap.
  5. Capture, Monitor and Review: Once everyone agrees on the roadmap, take a screenshot for your records. Regularly check on running tests and review finished ones. Make sure you’re meeting your testing goals and deadlines. After each test, think about what worked, what didn’t, and what you learned. Use these insights to make your testing process even better.

Conversion Compass is a strategic solution designed to simplify the complexities of digital optimization. Our team of experts will work closely with you to develop a custom roadmap tailored to your site’s unique needs and goals. The program combines the power of data-driven insights with proven optimization strategies to help you identify and prioritize the tests and changes that will have the greatest impact on your bottom line. Contact our team today to schedule a consultation and discover how Conversion Compass can help you chart a course to conversion success.

Top 5 Things You Need to Know about GA4

On July 1st, 2023, Google will sunset Universal Analytics and replace it with Google Analytics 4 (GA4). This new platform is designed from the ground up to be fully compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and is built for the future, allowing organizations to seamlessly integrate desktop, mobile, and app traffic in one centralized environment. There are numerous reasons to be excited about this shift in data collection, but digital organizations around the globe are faced with the challenge of migrating their analytics in an efficient and accurate manner. As a digital optimization consultancy, analytics is central to our mission of making the internet a better place through data-backed recommendations. Whether you’re an analytics pro or just getting started, here are our top five tips on preparing for GA4:

1. Event-based data collection, rather than session-based 

GA4 takes an entirely new approach to data collection than previous versions. Whereas in Universal Analytics (UA), events were captured and reported on within a duration of time called a “session”, GA4 processes each individual interaction as a standalone event. This allows for the seamless tracking of a user as they browse on their phone, research on their tablet, and convert on their home computer (for example).

2. New UI, new reporting 

GA4 isn’t just a new name and data structure, it also features a new and simplified user interface. You don’t need to be a professional analyst to get actionable insights right out of the box. Simply browse the pre-built reports and dive in! If you’re a seasoned vet looking for a familiar experience, you may find some of your tried-and-true reports look or behave differently, but with GA4’s Explorations you can slice and dice your data for more powerful custom reports, leveraging a gallery of robust templates or free-form analysis.

3. Events are simpler than ever

Implementing and analyzing events to understand your digital experience is easier than ever with GA4. Under Universal Analytics, events include a three-tiered structure, which relies heavily on Google Tag Manager (GTM). However, GA4 tracks unique interactions under a single event name, with necessary additional details being captured as event parameters. For example, “click_video” may be the event, with an event parameter of “Top 5 Things to Know About GA4”, which is the title of the video. You can even create events and conversions based off of either event or event parameter, allowing a page view for your confirmation page to fire a unique event to track conversion performance.

4. GA4 puts privacy first

GA4 is fully GDPR compliant and uses first-party cookies, but is also designed to leverage machine learning to work in a cookie-less future. The inclusion of machine learning-powered artificial intelligence offers deep insights and quality of life improvements to your reporting—like understanding when a user is sent off-site to complete a transaction but sent back to your site for confirmation.

5. GA4 is not retroactive 

While the mandatory switch to GA4 goes into effect on July 1st, 2023, it’s important to understand that analytics data is not retroactive. The sooner GA4 is up and running on your property, the better its machine-learning capabilities will be able to serve your business goals. Running GA4 and Universal Analytics—or GA360—will not result in any breakages, so there is no harm in running them in parallel. It’s likely GA4 will continue to see updates before July 1st with more features being released or improved. There’s no better time than now to jump in and start learning!

In Closing

With just five months until the switch to GA4, do you have your migration plan ready to go? From auditing your set-up to configuring events, we’re here to help create a custom solution for you. Don’t wait until July, connect with our team today to get started! 

The Mission for Fully-Perfect Customer Connections

Each step forward, no matter how winding the path, is a step closer to digital transformation.

Over a decade ago, Roboboogie humbly began as a specialized design boutique focused on solving complex UX challenges for our clients. As time went on, we rounded out our services to cover the full web experience with expertise across digital marketing, creative, and web development. Like our peer agencies, we had to rely heavily on institutional knowledge, best practice, industry insights, and a healthy dose of intuition.

In 2015, we layered on A/B testing thanks to a fresh partnership with our friends at Optimizely, which unlocked a new ability to run experiments in rapid fire. Shout out to our first A/B testing client, The Clymb! A/B testing opened a new and powerful way to help our clients through iterative site improvements. We could now validate our UX strategy and make swift improvements to bring about big, measurable change.

Experimentation made customizable data collection simple, creating the opportunity to let data drive design decisions. The data quality, paired with our ability to translate numbers into insights, provided a deeper path into client partnership. As we have gained experience in the field, the suite of analytics technologies we utilize has grown. We’ve harnessed an array of qualitative and quantitative analytics tools to drive new insights including Adobe Target, A/B Tasty, Google Optimize, Convert, UserTesting.com, FullStory, Crazy Egg, Hot Jar, GlassBox,  among many others. We even developed a healthy obsession with Google Analytics that led us to building a custom A/B testing algorithm within GTM.

However, our service offerings between data, design, and technology remained siloed and clients often connected with us for a single solution. We knew the value of integrating this work, which led to our transition from an agency to a consultancy. As our position within partner organizations continues to elevate, our role has increasingly been about charting the best path forward with our clients. Our teams have become intimately entwined, building off of each other’s work on the mission of digital transformation.

Unified in mission.

Optimization is no longer something we do at Roboboogie, it is how we live and breathe. It is not a product offering or deliverable. It does not live with one role, individual or department.

Everyone on our team is an optimization consultant, and every individual shares that same top-level goal. Our team is routinely asking themselves, “Does the work I’m doing help move my client toward ‘perfected brand-customer connection’? What is the most valuable thing I can do right now to advance that mission? “ 

The secret sauce of optimization is in process. It is the methodology in which you identify needs, prioritize opportunities, develop solutions, and execute plans. It’s in the deliberate weighing decisions against the mission: a lifetime customer bond. It’s a recipe we’ve been developing for over a decade.

Our optimization recipe.

  • Partner with innovative clients who are passionate about holistically driving transformation of their digital experience.
  • Develop audience personas and map customer journeys – informed by data –to understand the deep needs and desires of customers. 
  • Harness wide data sets and powerful technology to unearth gaps in the current digital experience that can be filled with design solutions. 
  • Integrate teams of experts across data, design, and technology.
  • Customize the optimization strategy for each client.
  • Let data guide the journey, but never let numbers stifle the creative process.
  • Stay nimble and responsive. Each step forward, no matter how winding the path, is a step closer to digital experience transformation.

True, authentic digital transformation takes time. It takes a continued commitment to reorient to ever-changing customers and the all-out pursuit of taking each experience one step closer to perfection. Each step provides reward with more customers, happy customers, and improved performance.

Looking ahead.

Internally, we use the playful mantra “Happy Customers Convert.” Since our beginning, we have always held the customer at the heart of everything we do because taking care of people gets the best results. Over the years as we have layered on measurement tools, we have been able to prove that to be true. When customers’ needs are met, business performance follows. It turns out, happy customers do convert.

As we officially transition Roboboogie’s focus from Website Performance Optimization to Digital Experience Transformation, we are eager for the next chapter ahead. You’ll still be able to expect that same great work and services we offer, but with a higher unified vision. There’s so much untapped potential across the digital landscape for organizations to connect their data, design, and technology efforts to create fully-perfect customer connections online. Investing in Customer Lifetime Value pays. We have witnessed it first-hand (with big business impacts) for some of our long-time client partnerships – NordicTrack, Adobe, and Wacom to name a few. 

If you are interested in partnering together to create digital environments that form undeniable connections and life-long bonds between your brand and customers, hit me up (Jed@teamroboboogie.com). I’d love to share more about how we can help you better meet your customer needs in the digital space. I can confidently say you’ll be thrilled with the business outcomes. 

Until then, just remember: Happy Customers Convert.

Jedidiah Fugle, Roboboogie Chief Operating Officer

Spark 2022 Interview

Last month, our team had the opportunity to attend the first ever Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI) conference hosted by our partner, FullStory. The event brought together digital experience leaders and trailblazers to connect and share their passion for all things DXI. 

After three action packed days, we came home filled with ideas and tons of excitement for the new platform features that will make it even easier for our customers to drive strategic growth. At Roboboogie, we help our customers leverage the full power of FullStory through training and enablement, implementation support and more.

Hear all about our team’s experience at the conference and what got them jazzed about the future of DXI.

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