March 20, 2023
1 min read

Using User Engagement Metrics to Improve Your Website's User Experience

Are your users engaged in your website? The success of your website will largely depend on your answer. After all, engaged users are valuable users; they keep coming back and will recommend your site to colleagues, friends, and family. So, if you’re not sure if your users are engaged or not, consider looking into your user engagement metrics.

User engagement can be measured using a number of key metrics provided by website analytics platforms. Metrics such as bounce rate, time on page, and click-through rate all provide clues to user engagement and therefore overall website user experience.

This article will help you understand user engagement and why it’s important to measure. We’ll also discuss how to apply user engagement insights to improve website success. Combining a little bit of data with some user research is a powerful thing, so let’s get into it.

Understanding User Engagement Metrics 📐

User engagement metrics provide valuable insight for both new and existing websites. They should be checked regularly as a sort of ‘pulse check’ for website user experience and performance. So, what metrics should you be looking at? Website metrics can be overwhelming; there are hundreds if not thousands to analyze, so let’s focus on three:

Bounce rate


Measures the percentage of users that visit just one page on your site before leaving. If your bounce rate is high it suggests that users aren’t finding the content relevant, engaging, or useful. It points to a poor initial reaction to your site and means that users are arriving, making a judgment about your design or content, and then leaving.

Time on page


Calculated by the time difference between the point when a person lands on the page and when they move on to the next one. It indicates how engaging or relevant individual pages on your website are. Low time on page figures suggest that users aren’t getting what they need from a certain page, either in terms of the content, the aesthetics, or both.

Click-through rate


Click-through rate compares the number of times someone clicks on your content, to the number of impressions you get (how many times an internal link or ad was viewed). The higher the rate, the better the engagement and performance of that element. User experience design can influence click-through rates through copywriting, button contrasts, heading structure, navigation, etc.

Conversion rate


Conversion rates are perhaps the pinnacle of user engagement metrics. Conversion rate is the percentage of users that perform specific tasks you define. They are therefore dictated by your goals, which could include form submissions, transactions, etc. If your website has high conversion rates, you can be fairly confident that your website is matching your users’ needs, requirements, and expectations.

But how do these metrics help? Well, they don’t give you an answer directly. The metrics point to potential issues with website user experience. They guide further research and subsequent updates that lead to website improvement. In the next section, we’ll discuss how these and others can support better website user experiences.

Identifying Areas for Improvement 💡

So, you’ve looked at your website’s user engagement metrics and discovered some good, and some bad. The good news is, there’s value in discovering both! The catch? You just need to find it. Remember, the metrics on their own don’t give you answers; they provide you direction.

The ‘clues’ that user engagement metrics provide are the starting point for further research. Remember, we want to make data-driven decisions. We want to avoid making assumptions and jumping to conclusions about why our website is reporting certain metrics. Fortunately, there are a bunch of different ways to do this.

User research data can be gathered by using both qualitative and quantitative research techniques. Insights into user behavior and needs can reveal why your website might be performing in certain ways. Research can include both qualitative and quantitative techniques.

Qualitative research techniques

  • Usability test – Test a product with people by observing them as they attempt to complete various tasks.
  • User interview – Sit down with a user to learn more about their background, motivations and pain points.
  • Contextual inquiry – Learn more about your users in their own environment by asking them questions before moving onto an observation activity.
  • Focus group – Gather 6 to 10 people for a forum-like session to get feedback on a product.

Quantitate research techniques

  • Card sorts – Find out how people categorize and sort information on your website.
  • First-click tests – See where people click first when tasked with completing an action.
  • A/B tests – Compare 2 versions of a design in order to work out which is more effective.
  • Clickstream analysis – Analyze aggregate data about website visits.
  • Tree-testing - Test your site structure using text-only categorization and labels

The type of research depends on what question you want to answer. Being specific about your question will help you identify what research technique(s) to deploy and ultimately the quality of your answer. If you’re serious about website improvement; identify problem areas with user engagement metrics, and investigate how to fix them with user research.

Optimizing Content and Design

If you have conducted user research and found weak areas on your website, there are many things to consider. Three good places to start are navigation, content, and website layout. Combined, these have a huge impact on user experience and can be leveraged to address disappointing engagement metrics.

Navigation


Navigation is a crucial aspect of creating a good user experience since it fundamentally connects pages and content which allows users to find what they need. Navigation should be simple and easy to follow, with important information/actions at the top of menus. Observing the results of card sorting, tree testing, and user testing can be particularly useful in website optimization efforts. You may find that search bars, breadcrumb trails, and internal links can also help overcome navigation issues.

Content


Are users seeing compelling or relevant content when they arrive on your site? Is your content organized in a way that encourages further exploration? Card sorting and content audits are useful in answering these questions and can help provide you with the insights required to optimize your content. You should identify what content might be redundant, out of date, or repetitive, as well as any gaps that may need filling.

Layout


A well-designed layout can improve the overall usability of a website, making it easier for users to find what they're looking for, understand the content, and engage with it. Consider how consistent your heading structures are and be sure to use consistent styling throughout the site, such as similar font sizes and colors. Don’t be afraid to use white space; it’s great at breaking up sections and making content more readable.

An additional factor related to layout is mobile optimization. Mobile-first design is necessary for apps, but it should also factor into your website design. How responsive is your website? How easy is it to navigate on mobile? Is your font size appropriate? You might find that poor mobile experience is negatively impacting user engagement metrics.

Measuring Success 🔎

User experience design is an iterative, ongoing process, so it’s important to keep a record of your website’s user experience metrics at various points of development. Fortunately, website analytics platforms will provide you with historic user data and key metrics; but be sure to keep a separate record of what improvements you make along the way. This will help you pinpoint what changes impacted different metrics.

Define your goals and create a website optimization checklist that monitors key metrics on your site. For example, whenever you make an update, ensure bounce rates don’t exceed a certain number during the days following; check that your conversion rates are performing as they should be; check your time on sites hasn’t dropped. Be sure to compare metrics between desktop and mobile too.

User’s needs and expectations change over time, so keep an eye on how new content is performing. For example, which new blog posts have attracted the most attention? What pages or topics have had the most page views compared to the previous period? Tracking such changes can help to inform what your users are currently engaged in, and will help guide your user experience improvements.

Conclusion 🤗

User engagement metrics allow you to put clear parameters around user experience. They allow you to measure where your website is performing well, and where your website might need improving. Their main strength is in how accessible they are; you can access key metrics on website analytics platforms in moments. However, user engagement metrics on their own may not reveal how and why certain website improvements should be made. In order to understand what’s going on, you often need to dig a little deeper.

Time on page, bounce rate, click-through rate, and conversion rates are all great starting points to understand your next steps toward website improvement. Use them to define where further research may be needed. Not sure why your average pages per session is two? Try conducting first-click testing; where are they heading that seems to be a dead end? Is your bounce rate too high? Conduct a content audit to find out if your information is still relevant, or look into navigation roadblocks. Whatever the question; keep searching for the answer.

User engagement metrics will keep you on your toes, but that’s a good thing. They empower you to make ongoing website improvements and ensure that users are at the heart of your website design. 

Share this article
Author
Optimal
Workshop

Related articles

View all blog articles
Learn more
1 min read

5 tips for running an effective usability test

Usability testing is one of the best ways to measure how easy and intuitive to use something is by testing it with real people. You can read about the basics of usability testing here.

Earlier this year, a small team within Optimal Workshop completely redesigned the company blog. More than anything, we wanted to create something that was user-friendly for our readers and would give them a reason to return. I was part of that team, and we ran numerous sessions interviewing regular readers as well as people unfamiliar with our blog. We also ran card sorts, tree tests and other studies to find out all we could about how people search for UX content. Unsurprisingly, one of the most valuable activities we did was usability testing – sitting down with representative users and watching them as they worked through a series of tasks we provided. We asked general questions like “Where would you go to find information about card sorting”, and we also observed them as they searched through our website for learning content.

By stripping away any barriers between ourselves and our users and observing them as they navigated through our website and learning resources, as well as those of other companies, we were able to build a blog with these people’s behaviors and motivations in mind.

Usability testing is an invaluable research method, and every user researcher should be able to run sessions effectively. Here are 5 tips for doing so, in no particular order.

1. Clarify your goals with stakeholders

Never go into a usability test blind. Before you ever sit down with a participant, make sure you know exactly what you want to get out of the session by writing down your research goals. This will help to keep you focused, essentially giving you a guiding light that you can refer back as you go about the various logistical tasks of your research. But you also need to take this a step further. It’s important to make sure that the people who will utilize the results of your research – your stakeholders – have an opportunity to give you their input on the goals as early as possible.

If you’re running usability tests with the aim of creating marketing personas, for example, meet with your organization’s marketing team and figure out the types of information they need to create these personas. In some cases, it’s also helpful to clarify how you plan to gather this data, which can involve explaining some of the techniques you’re going to use.

Lastly, find out how your stakeholders plan to use your findings. If there are a lot of objectives, organize your usability test so you ask the most important questions first. That way, if you end up going off track or you run out of time you’ll have already gathered the most important data for your stakeholders.

2. Be flexible with your questions

A list of pre-prepared questions will help significantly when it comes time to sit down and run your usability testing sessions. But while a list is essential, sometimes it can also pay to ‘follow your nose’ and steer the conversation in a (potentially) more fruitful direction.

How many times have you been having a conversation with a friend over a drink or dinner, only for you both to completely lose track of time and find yourselves discussing something completely unrelated? While it’s not good practice to let your usability testing sessions get off track to this extent, you can surface some very interesting insights by paying close attention to a user’s behavior and answers during a testing session and following interesting leads.

Ideally, and with enough practice, you’ll be able to answer your core (prepared) questions and ask a number of other questions that spring to mind during the session. This is a skill that takes time to master, however.

3. Write a script for your sessions

While a usability test script may sound like a fancy name for your research questions, it’s actually a document that’s much more comprehensive. If you prepare it correctly (we’ll explain how below), you’ll have a document that you can use to capture in-depth insights from your participants.

Here are some of the key things to keep in mind when putting together your script:

  • Write a friendly introduction – It may sound obvious, but taking the time to come up with a friendly, warm introduction will get your sessions off to a much better start. The bonus of writing it down is that you’re far less likely to forget it!
  • Ask to record the session – It’s important to record your session (whether through video or audio), as you’ll want to go back later and analyze any details you may have missed. This means asking for explicit permission to record participants. In addition to making them feel more comfortable, it’s just good practice to do so.
  • Allocate time for the basics – Don’t dive into the complex questions first, use the first few minutes to gather basic data. This could be things like where they work and their familiarity with your organization and/or product.
  • Encourage them to explain their thought process – “I’d like you to explain what you’re doing as you make your way through the task”. This simple request will give you an opportunity to ask follow-up questions that you otherwise may not have thought to ask.
  • Let participants know that they’re not being tested – Whenever a participant steps into the room for a test, they’re naturally going to feel like they’re being tested. Explain that you’re testing the product, not them. It’s also helpful to let them know that there are no right or wrong answers. This is an important step if you want to keep them relaxed.

It’s often easiest to have a document with your script printed out and ready to go for each usability test.

4. Take advantage of software

You’d never see a builder without a toolbox full of a useful assortment of tools. Likewise, software can make the life of a user research that much easier. The paper-based ways of recording information are still perfectly valid, but introducing custom tools can make both the logistics of user research and the actual sessions themselves much easier to manage.

Take a tool like Calendly, for example. This is a powerful piece of scheduling software that almost completely takes over the endless back and forth of scheduling usability tests. Calendly acts as a middle man between you and your participants, allowing you to set the times you’re free to host usability tests, and then allowing participants to choose a session that suits them from these times.

Our very own Reframer makes the task of running usability tests and analyzing insights that much easier. During your sessions, you can use Reframer to take comprehensive notes and apply tags like “positive” or “struggled” to different observations. Then, after you’ve concluded your tests, Reframer’s analysis function will help you understand wider themes that are present across your participants.

There’s another benefit to using a tool like Reframer. Keeping all of your notes in place will mean you easily pull up data from past research sessions whenever you need to.

5. Involve others

Usability tests (and user interviews, for that matter) are a great opportunity to open up research to your wider organization. Whether it’s stakeholders, other members of your immediate team or even members of entirely different departments, giving them the chance to sit down with users will show them how their products are really being used. If nothing else, these sessions will help those within your organization build empathy with the people they’re building products for.

There are quite a few ways to bring others in, such as:

  • To help you set up the research – This can be a helpful exercise for both you (the researcher) and the people you’re bringing in. Collaborate on the overarching research objectives, ask them what types of results they’d like to see and what sort of tasks they think could be used to gather these results.
  • As notetakers – Having a dedicated notetaker will make your life as a researcher significantly easier. This means you’ll have someone to record any interesting observations while you focus on running the session. Just let them know what types of notes you’d like to see.
  • To help you analyze the data – Once you’ve wrapped up your usability testing sessions, bring others in to help analyze the findings. There’s a good chance that an outside perspective will catch something you may miss. Also, if you’re bringing stakeholders into the analysis stage, they'll get a clearer picture of what it means and where the data came from.

There are myriad other tips and best practices to keep in mind when usability testing, many of which we cover in our introductory page. Important considerations include taking good quality notes, carefully managing participants during the session (not giving them too much guidance) and remaining neutral throughout when answering their questions. If you feel like we’ve missed any really important points, feel free to leave a comment!

Read more

Learn more
1 min read

Content design for startups: how to work lean, have maximum impact, and get all the high-fives

When you have a small design team or none at all, how do you ensure that your content is consistent, has the right tone, and is captivating? It can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be! Julia Steffen, Principal Content Designer at Varis, spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about how startups can achieve impactful content and delight users. 

In her talk, Julia shares her most useful tips, tricks, and rules of thumb to ensure meaningful content design. She also shares some helpful tools to achieve maximum efficiency.

Julia Steffen bio 🎤

Julia has worked in content for 10+ years at St.Jude, Wunderman Thompson, MetaLab, and Grubhub. She is based in the United States and is the Principal Content Designer at Varis.

Contact Details:

Email address: julia.steffen@govaris.com

You can find Julia on LinkedIn

Content design for startups - How to work lean, have maximum impact, and get all the high-fives ✋🏽✋🏻✋🏿

Why should you care about content design? Julia argues that “content design is product success”. Because Julia specifically talks about content design in relation to startups, she focuses on how to achieve the best results possible with a small, lean team. To that end, Julia discusses four must-haves for content design:

  1. Voice
  2. Tools for efficiency
  3. Words in the experience
  4. Ways to check, test, and perfect your words

Voice 🎙️

Why is your company’s voice important? Voice tells your users who you are, creates meaningful connections, and provides valuable signals that convey whether or not your company is deserving of trust. Choosing the voice for your startup begins with a competitor audit.  Documenting who you compete against, and how you might want to differentiate your startup is crucial to finding your corner of the market. For example, is your voice welcoming, gentle, and positive, or are you more formal and technical? 

User research can also be really helpful when determining and monitoring your voice. Involve your research team and learn what does and doesn’t delight your audience when it comes to your messaging.

It’s also important to map your voice to your startup’s values. Be sure to connect to your mission and your brand. Julia sums up product voice as:

Product voice = your values + space to differentiate + what research tells you

So, when you find your voice, where can you lean into it? There are several key areas or moments that provide opportunities to share your unique voice, such as:

  • Notifications: Emails, SMS, and in-app messages are a great place to delight customers
  • Success states: Celebrate with your users in your voice (and remove any anxiety that may be there)
  • Empty states: They aren’t just a chance to educate, they’re a chance to add some interest or fun (or to mask a UX issue).
  • Placeholder text: If a field is well labeled, you can use this section to bring joy and reduce a user’s anxiety.
  • Onboarding: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Make it count!

Tools for efficiency ⚒️

To remain lean and efficient as a startup, one of the best things you can do is create a style guide. This helps to keep your content and voice consistent. For example, what pronouns do you use in your interface, do you capitalize certain words, etc? There is actually a lot to consider here, so Julia points viewers to various resources that allow you to copy and paste, such as Quinn Keast’s Product Language Framework.

A glossary or language bank is also important. Record branded words, terms that you never use, and terms that you’ve heard your users say organically. This helps to ensure that you’re using language that resonates with your audience and language that reduces cognitive load as much as possible.

Pro tip: Use the Writer app with Figma. This integration helps to ensure that your style guide is actually used! It includes your style guide and glossary so that you’re being consistent as you work. You can also use the Hemingway app or Grammarly to look out for passive voice, hard-to-parse sentences, and overall readability.

Words in the experience – writing for content design 📝

The first thing Julia points out when approaching writing is the need to be user-focused. This might seem obvious to UX practitioners, but word selection can be nuanced, and subtle changes can be powerful. For example, instead of writing “[Your company] introduces a new feature”, think about how can you change the statement to be more about what the new feature means for the user, rather than your company. Here are a few rules of thumb to help refine your writing.

  • Clarity over cleverness. Unless you’re clear and the message is understood by your user, even the best jokes and wittiest phrases in the world will be wasted.
  • Write like you’re having a conversation with your Grandmother. Be clear and don’t use too much jargon.
  • Think like the best content designers. Writing is a process and there are several things to consider, such as the purpose of your copy, the context that it’s being read, and what emotion the reader might be feeling at that moment, etc. Julia offers the Microcopy Canvas as a useful tool for startups, which is a helpful writing template/worksheet created by Jane Ruffino.

Ways to check, test, and perfect your words 👀

Julia suggests that design reviews are the perfect place to sense-check your words and content. Review your designs intentionally and through a content lens. Again, the Microcopy Canvas can be a useful tool when conducting this step, helping to ensure you have considered the right tone and achieved your purpose with your words.

Following a design review process, it’s important to test for clarity and affinity. Conduct user tests frequently to ensure your words and content are clear, understood, and hitting the mark in the intended way.

Finally, make sure your content goals are recorded in your dashboards. Be accountable to your own success measures, KPIs, and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results). Some metrics that help track success are:

  • Onboarding flows
  • Notification metrics
  • Feature adoption
  • Conversion rates

If you’re falling short on some metrics, review your content and try to figure out where words can be sharpened to be clearer, more friendly, or less technical, for example. Then, feed this information into your prioritization and planning. What changes are going to have the most impact on your product’s success? What changes are quick wins? 

Why it matters 🤯

Julia’s talk is important for UX and content designers, particularly those working in startup environments, as it highlights the critical role of content design in achieving product success. The content you share, the voice and tone you adopt, and the clarity of communication, all add to the user's overall experience with your product. Investing time into your content is critical and, as Julia explains, it doesn’t have to put too much stress on your team's workload. If time isn’t invested, however, you may find yourself with poor content, delivering poor experiences, resulting in high customer attrition. 

Efficiency, therefore, should be a focus for startups wanting to achieve great content design without being weighed down. Julia offers pragmatic advice on maintaining consistency through tools like style guides and language banks and by leveraging apps like Hemingway and Grammarly. Tools like these are incredibly helpful when streamlining processes and ensuring a cohesive and polished user interface. 

At the end of the day, Julia stresses the impact that content design has on user experiences and encourages startups to pay close attention to content in ways that are achievable for small teams.

Learn more
1 min read

Affinity mapping - an introduction

User research is key to discovering the inner workings of your users’ minds – their emotional, organizational, informative needs and desires. These are all super important to creating a user experience that is intuitive and meeting your users’ needs in a way that means they feel loved, cared for and considered. All the deep understanding stuff that keeps them coming back!

Qualitative research allows you to collect verbatim data from participants that give insights into why they do or feel things. You can even get into whether ‘Dee’ understood how the website worked or why ‘Andrew’ would (or wouldn’t) revisit the app outside of testing.

Gathering these awesome insights is one step. Analyzing and organizing these is a skill and talent in its own right. And armed with the right tools or methods it can be immersive, interesting and a great way to get under the skin of your users. Let’s take a look at affinity mapping as a method of analyzing this data - as a tool it can help researchers visualize and easily group and theme data.

Affinity mapping is used outside of the UX world and can be done independently, however is a great analysis method to use collaboratively. For researchers, it can be a great tool to collaborate and engage the team and potentially stakeholders. Bringing people together to identify, discuss and resolve user experience issues. 

Here we’ll lay out what affinity mapping is, specifically why it’s useful for user research and set out key steps to get you underway. 

What is Affinity Mapping? 🗺️

By definition, affinity mapping is the process of collecting, organizing, and grouping qualitative data to create an affinity diagram.

Put simply it is a tool to group, map, sort and categorize information. A tool where you’ll look at the information and patterns of your qualitative user research and work to group these together to make sense of them. It helps you to find patterns, similar outcomes and insights that allow you to draw conclusions and collate results in a cohesive manner, then report to the wider team in a way that makes sense and provides a clear road to applicable and achievable outcomes.

What is an Affinity Diagram? 🖼️

An affinity diagram is what you have once you have gone through the affinity mapping process. It is the final ‘diagram’ of your grouping, sorting and categorizing. An ordered visual sorting of insights and information from your user research. And the place to filter or funnel observations and information into patterns and reach final outcomes. 

Allowing you to see where the key outtakes are and where there may need to be improvements, changes or updates. And from here a roadmap can be decided.

An affinity map using Reframer by Optimal Workshop

Essentially the mapping part is the process of creating the diagram, a visual sorting of insights and information from your user research. So how do you make affinity mapping work for you?

1. Start with a large space

This could be a table, desk, pinboard or even a whiteboard. Somewhere that you can stick, pin or attach your insights to in a collaborative space. Becoming more common recently is the use of shared digital and online whiteboard tools.  allowing people to access and participate remotely.

2. Record all notes

Write observations, thoughts, research insights on individual cards or sticky notes.

3. Look for patterns

As a group read, comment and write notes or observations. Stick each of the notes onto the board, desk or whiteboard. Add, and shuffle into groups as you go. You can keep adding or moving as you go.

4. Create a group/theme

This will start to make sense as more sticky notes are added to the map. Creating groups for similar observations or insights, or for each pattern or theme.

Create a group/theme using affinity mapping

5. Give each theme or group a name

As more notes are added there will be natural groups formed. Openly discuss if there are notes that are more difficult to categorize or themes to be decided. (We’ve outlined some ideas for UX research themes in another section below.)

6. Determine priorities

You’ve tidied everything into themes and groups, now what? How do you decide which of these are priorities for your organization? Discussion and voting can be the best way to decide what outcomes make the most sense and may have the biggest impact on your business.

7. Report on your findings

Pulling together and reporting on the findings through your affinity diagram process should be key to putting actionable outcomes in place.

How to define research themes 🔬

Commonly, user research is digested through thematic analysis. During thematic analysis, you aim to make sense of all the notes, observations, and discoveries you’ve documented across all your information sources, by creating themes to organize the information. 

Depending on your role and the type of research you conduct, the themes you create for your affinity diagram can vary. Here are some examples of affinity groups that you could form from your UX research:

  • User sentiment and facial expressions when completing certain tasks
  • Frequently used words or phrases when describing a product or experience
  • Suggestions for improving your product or experience

Wrap up 🌯

Qualitative user testing and the resulting observations can be some of the best insights you get into your users’ minds. Filtering, organizing and ordering these disparate and very individual observations can be tricky. Especially if done in silo.

So, draw a team together, bring in stakeholders from throughout your organization and work collaboratively to sort, organize and categorize through affinity mapping. This opens the doors to discussion, buy-in and ultimately a collective understanding of user research. Its importance and its role within the organization. And most importantly the real-world implications UX research and its insights have on organizational products and output.

Seeing is believing

Explore our tools and see how Optimal makes gathering insights simple, powerful, and impactful.