What is Optimization and Why It Is Essential?

You create your website with new and great design and you’re going to publish it at 12:01. Well, did you do UX Optimization on web and mobile applications or do you think your users ready for your website which you design UX and UI amazingly(!) ?

Life experiences and habits are the important parts of User Experience… It mostly corresponds to feelings in human life and sometimes it corresponds to behaviors in same way. Feelings underlie these behaviors however also habits can be causes of this. The habit being good or bad can not effect or develop the experience, we also observed that often manifested in the opposite direction.

It is difficult to change habits, like all we know, whether good or bad way, or convince them into something new. Especially in digital times, it is actual shock when you realize how bad the old interfaces are and how people use them. Even today we can easily say these bad interfaces are in use in public offices and it causes a lot of workforce loss.

User Experience is a life-cycle. World is changing, people are changing and naturally people’s habit and behaviors are also changing. Especially, a new generation of user behaviors which is leaded by social networks and new ventures, doesn’t matter right or wrong, can affect millions people. On the one hand, there are experiences changing constantly and the other hand there are experiences which are trying to combine needs with firm’s targets rather than to create new products and all of these take us to UX Optimization service.

If you have a website or mobile application already, it is difficult to change from scratch intended for the new behaviors and needs which developing everyday. However, you can change the new experiences which are changing in modular way in pieces; in other words you can optimize them. You can do this with UX Optimization. For example, there is new social sharing experience and you can not decide where it will be used. Test it. You observed people are not shop with credit card on mobile anymore and you think it’s reason is the new generation of mobile payment. In that case, why you should change the all structure? Put the mobile payment into two different checkout phase, display the first phase for specific group, display the other phase to everyone then test it! Which one you gain more, make its design and apply. Solve the your user’s requests immediately in addition to the time and cost of the workload. That is the benefit of optimization!

Before the UX Optimization

In the structure that I mentioned above, actually we need to start with the main point of UX methodology to concertize providing experience in the line of product or service vendor’s aim: Research, but more detailed…

UX Research

If you always want to take actions including continuous improvement from your population you need to know your population very well. For this, I do not think it is enough to optimize just the user population which divided into segments. Instead of that, It is needed to do user research which is focused on persona‘s. Speaking of persona, creating these personas is crucial for the firms which have various and many operations. These persona studies will be helpful both for optimization team and the employees such as call center workers, graphic designer, developers, forum moderator, editor, cargo workers or store workers who is in operation because they can easily understand who they are talking with and how they should communicate with them.

Choosing Right Tool for UX Optimization

If we continue with websites and mobile applications, there are many tools for optimization in this sector. However, your targets and some researches are going to dominate to find which is best for you. We can discuss this subject with the most used tool, Optimizely.

A/B Tests

A/B test is the most preferred UX Optimization method. This test is usually done in minor and major ways. For example, in minor test; “buy now” button can suffused with orange and red then you can observe the consequences. However, a major A/B test concerns flow of website. In a buying action, one check-out process can be tested in 3 steps and another can in 4 steps. Aim is really important at this point. According to your strategies and aims, you can test the 3-steps-process and 4-steps-process with various groups in different times or changing the content or its design. In other words, change just one variable.

Split Test

It mostly used in landing page optimization. All pages can be fictionalized in A and B version. For instance, half of website users can reach to A page and the other half can reach to B page. It will be better to keep these two pages similarity less than %50.

Multivariate Test

Multivariate test is very similar to A/B test, but the only difference is that UX Optimization is aimed with different factors testing in same action but different variation. “Buy Now” button’s color can change with the next image in the same page. Naturally, there will be 4 variable. You measure the rates which going to the final consequence with these variables. The most important point when you make these tests is that you should distribute the variations significantly. As a consequence, do not try to change many thing in the same time on test flow.