Overcoming UX Apathy to Build A Website That Truly Supports Your Business Growth

We’ve built and optimized countless websites in our nearly 10 years of business, and one of the biggest issues we see over and over and over again is UX (user experience).In most cases, business owners recognize that UX research is critical to their long-term success, but they’re just not ready to invest in it.

Instead, they pick one of two pathways:

1. Build the website, then collect user data over time and use that data to revamp their website later on.
2. The client makes careful assumptions about their target audience—and we use that information to inform our UX decisions.

Neither of these are ideal. Waiting for enough user data can take months or years—and then there’s the cost of revamping the website. And making assumptions is a dangerous game, especially since there’s a chance we could be wrong! In some cases, though, teams forget those assumptions we ever assumptions, and they eventually accept them as truth.

The UX Research Problem

UX research is a major investment in time and financial resources when all you really wanted at the beginning was a high-performing website.

Worse, many departments we work with are simply given a rigid budget to build their website—and that budget can’t always accommodate UX research.

Ultimately, though, this creates a vision cycle: Users get an experience that isn’t perfect out of the gate, so then we have to conduct additional research down the road to make enhancements.

Bottom line: Everybody wants the rewards of user research, but few are ready to pay for it upfront.

UX Research Solutions

We’ve started leveraging three solutions:

1. Upfront Competitor and Industry Research

As Much As Possible – This is a risky position to take, but it empowers us to build a website with some UX best practices and insights.

There are risks here, of course:

• We might miss data early on.
• We might develop a page that ultimately doesn’t work.
• We could have had a better initial build if we had UX research to work with.

In some cases, though, that’s all there’s budget for, and it’s better to have a website that isn’t 100% optimized than to not have a website in a hyper-digital world.

2. BLOSSOM

BLOSSOM is our brand-led approach to building and optimizing websites. So although we’ll build the first version of your website with UX in mind, we’ll leverage user data to enhance it over time.

We love tracking user data through:

• Heatmaps – Heatmaps provide a visual representation of the average user’s engagement with the site, helping us understand where a user looks, what they click on, and where they’re most engaged. Just as important: It also shows us where users aren’t engaged.
• Site Analytics – We leverage GA4 extensively to better understand user behavior on the website—including which pages they visit, how long they engage with the site, where they click, and what they click on.
• Screen Recordings – All user sessions on client websites are recorded so they can be watched later to better understand user behavior. So, if we notice a form is rarely completed or that a button is rarely clicked, we can observe how users interact with those pages and respond accordingly.

3. Detailed Data Tracking

As we said, leveraging heatmaps, site analytics, and screen recordings offers a detailed illustration of how users actually engage with your site, giving you detailed information on how to improve it. All of that is measured in our Data Analysis.

There’s No True Replacement for UX Research

But everything we listed above is ultimately a workaround. There’s no true shortcut to good UX research, and that’s important to understand because UX is important for business.

In a perfect world, companies should prioritize upfront UX research to better understand their target audience and user behaviors to build a website that caters to their wants, needs, and desires immediately upon launch.

Yes, there will always be room for improvement, but that initial research will make the first version of your website so much better.

Ultimately, you’re left with three options:

1. Ignore good UX altogether, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.
2. Conduct your research before designing your website, and build a terrific first product that fulfills user needs. This has higher upfront costs, but it has the potential for bigger, more meaningful payoffs upon launch.
3. Skip the initial research and collect it later through site data. This has lower upfront costs, but it means all of your research will be reactionary based on the quality and volume of site traffic you receive. The enhancements you make will come slowly over time, and it may take a while before your website is truly providing value to your business.

Case Studies: The Business Value of Great UX

Case Study 1: One Change Increased Leads By 31%

DQE Communications is a telecom company we’ve provided web support to. In one of our initial audits, we discovered their interactive map—which is used to help users determine whether or not DQE services are available in their area—doesn’t provide a call to action after someone uses it.

So, we added a CTA that invites users to visit the company’s sales page after using the map. That small modification to the site increased their online leads by 31%, resulting in better business outcomes for the company!

Case Study 2: How We 8Xed Online Inquiries

Medical Equipment Source is an all-in-one lab solutions provider that wanted to rank on Google for their lab setup services. We got to work by analyzing the performance of their lab setup page, then conducted keyword research and developed new copy. We nudged Google to index the page, then we got to work gradually improving its rank position.

Eventually, that page went from generating four leads to generating 34 leads—all from our intense focus on improving overall UX!

Enhance Your UX For Better Business Results

If you’re ready to leverage UX for better business outcomes, check out our UX-driven services, including:

• UX Web Design
• BLOSSOM (our brand- and user-led strategy for enhancing websites over time)
• Data Analysis (to better understand the metrics your website generates)

Want to chat about how UX can impact your brand and website? Lets chat, we love talking about this stuff