It’s common for us to hear from prospective clients that they’re having trouble with customer conversion on their sites. Sometimes the problem is a simple lack of visitors. Other times, there are problems with the design and user experience. And sometimes, our clients can’t tell us why they don’t like their sites. They know that there’s something wrong, but can’t pinpoint what.

One of the areas that we specialize in at FFW is user research and site design. We can help you pinpoint the problem areas on your site, and help you build solutions, with some of the following exercises:

Understand who’s visiting your site and what they’re looking for

Chances are that you have multiple different audiences visiting your site. Each segment is likely looking for different content. But how easy is it for those different users to find the content they need?

For example, a public transit authority might cater both to regular commuters and also to out-of-town visitors. Commuters will need content that affects their daily journeys; tourists will need more basic information on paying fares, navigating the transit system, and so on. While you may know where everything is located on your site, if your information architecture isn’t clear, your site visitors will be unable to find the content they need. This leads to frustration all around, and contributes heavily to poor site performance.

Knowing who’s visiting your site, why, and what they need helps you understand what gaps there may be in the content you have on your site.

Map out what content you have, identify any gaps, and prioritize which content you think is most important

This may seem like an obvious exercise, but sometimes simply listing out what you already have can be a great exercise for understanding what’s happening on your site... and what’s missing. It is important to define what specific types of content your key audiences are interested in. This can be done through an analysis of both your current analytics and the insights gained from your visitor research.

Approaches like this can be used to seek answers to some key questions: Is the most searched-for content also easily found through your site’s information architecture? Is important content buried at the bottom of a page? Is it difficult to locate pieces of content? Is information clearly labeled for each of your audiences? Knowing what you have and how it’s organized helps you figure out whether users are able to find the content that’s most valuable to them, or if that content even exists.

What’s the competition up to?

Understanding what others in your industry are doing, and how well they’re doing it, can help you better identify your own strengths and weaknesses.

When we work with new clients trying to determine a new digital direction, one thing we often encourage them to do is look at their competitors’ designs and determine what they like and dislike, and what they think works. There are numerous tools that you can use to pull data into your decision making process, and there’s a lot of value in using comparative insight tools such as similarweb to provide you with high-level analytics about your competition's digital platforms.

The combination of data, insight, and an understanding of what visual styles you do and don’t like for your organization forms an important foundation for making improvements to an existing site, or for launching a new project. Having a clear picture of your industry helps you identify where and how you can carve out your own digital niche.

We’re here to help

Have an exciting new direction? Not sure where to start? If you’re stuck — or if you’ve got a great idea and can’t wait to implement it — call FFW. Our team can help you refine your design and user experience, and can build you a top-notch new digital experience platform.