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Hey 👋,

The thing about great user experience (UX) is that when it’s done right, it’s practically invisible. 🔍 You may not realize when every button is exactly where you’d expect it to be, every page is easy to navigate, and all of the content and design is clear and accessible—but boy oh boy do you realize when they’re not.

A seamless, delightful website experience can be the deciding factor that gives you an edge, while poor UX—like broken buttons, unusable sign-up forms, or links that go nowhere—can send prospects running for the hills
and into the arms of a competitor.

In this month’s edition of Love to Grow, we share five practical, people-focused ways to improve your website UX, so you can create better experiences—that help you drive business growth.

đŸ€ż Before we dive in

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5 tried-and-tested ways to deliver delightful UX (and impress your customers)

Here are five ways to analyze, understand, and optimize your website UX to create better user experiences.

1. Learn what users actually do on your site

The first step to improving your users’ experience on your site is to understand how they currently experience it. After all, the best way to connect with your visitors is to empathize with them.

Heatmaps are visual representations of where users scroll, click, tap, and engage—or don’t. (And they’re free forever with Hotjar!) Use them to quickly identify

  • 👀 Which page elements capture user attention
  • âŹ‡ïž How far down your pages users scroll
  • 😠 Areas of frustration
  • đŸ“±How mobile and desktop versions of your site compare

Then, turn those insights into action and implement data-driven UX improvements that make a real impact.

Even better: combine heatmaps with other insight-providing tools—like session recordings, feedback widgets, web analytics, and A/B tests—to get even more in-depth knowledge of how and why site visitors behave the way they do.

2. Team up with other customer-facing teams to get the full story

Each team has its own micro-goals, but every team shares the same macro-goal: to create better experiences for your users so they’ll convert and stick around. So why not pool your resources to get a full 360-view of user behavior?

Depending on your company culture, try these strategies:

  • Host Watch Parties where teams come together to review recordings of real user sessions related to a specific goal
  • Sit in on existing research projects run by other teams
  • Send regular updates about your customer learnings in a shared Slack channel

By sharing insights across all teams that collect customer knowledge—like marketing, UX, sales, data, and customer success—every team is empowered to make better decisions that improve your user’s experience at each stage of their website journey.

💡 Pro tip: Jennifer Dorman, Head of User Insights at Babbel, and Paula Herrera, UX Research Team Lead at Hotjar, sing the praises of shared knowledge repositories, like insight hubs on valuable topics that every team can access.

3. Examine your failures (or even better: learn from ours)

We’ve all been there. Even when improving the customer experience is at the very heart of what you do—mistakes can happen.

Instead of trying to sweep them under the rug while whistling nonchalantly and hoping nobody noticed anything, take a good look at your failures and examine what went wrong. Why didn’t your latest campaign, landing page, or feature launch perform the way you’d hoped? And what can you do better next time?

💡 Want some inspiration? Here are seven UX fails we made so you don’t have to (and how we turned them into wins).

4. Get more from your A/B tests

A/B tests are a great way to get solid data about how different website elements—like button placement, copy length, and customer testimonials—affect user behavior
and conversions. But that data only tells you which versions users preferred, not why they preferred them.

To understand why your winning pages won, use product experience insights tools like heatmaps and session recordings to dig into user behavior on each variant. By seeing exactly which parts of the page your users liked (and didn’t), you can replicate your success for future campaigns.

5. Ask users what they want (what they really, really want)

One of the best ways to improve people’s experiences on your website is to use always-on surveys or feedback widgets to ask them, “How can we improve our website?” and then implement their feedback.

If you’re not surveying your users, you’re missing out on a wealth of insights and opportunities for quick wins. Obviously, we don’t recommend changing everything just because one person said so, but if you see the same feedback responses again and again, it’s probably a sign that you need to listen to the voice of the customer.

💡Pro tip: to make it even easier and faster to get actionable insights, leverage AI to create goal-oriented survey questions, so you can pinpoint exactly which UX improvements to make next.

In a nutshell đŸ„œ

Great UX sets the scene for everything else. An enjoyable, easy-to-use website

đŸ€© Delights prospects and existing users alike
đŸ„° Shows your users you value them and their time
đŸ€ Reassures people that they can trust your company

But to create a website experience your users love—and the kind that encourages them to convert—you need to understand their needs, preferences, and expectations.

By empathizing with your users, analyzing their behavior, and really listening to their feedback, you can deliver standout experiences that keep them coming back for more.

Meme of the month

See you next month!

Nicole from Hotjar

Your next good read 📚

10 ways Hotjar helps you optimize your website UX
Learn how to quickly and easily identify UX improvements your customers will love with Hotjar’s suite of tools.

How to improve UX to ramp up your website conversions
Discover the link between UX and conversion rate optimization (CRO)—and enhance both at the same time.

Live training: building systems for UX improvements
Level up your UX improvement system and create more efficient, impactful processes with this Hotjar training session.

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