Your website (app, etc.) doesn’t have a user experience, your users do.

That’s why you have to understand your users’ behavior and find out why they do what they are doing on your site.

There are 3 different ways to better understand your website users’ behavior:

Analytics

Customer support

User testing

Combine all 3 of them and you’ll find out how to improve the experiences your users have on your website.

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The parts of every User Experience

User: a person using your website

a person using your website Website: the navigation, design, technology and content that are your website

the navigation, design, technology and content that are your website Goals: both yours and those of your users

Looks pretty simple, but there’s a downside to it.

No matter what kind of tool you use (analytics, customer support, or usability testing) you will never understand all 3 parts by using just one method alone.

Analytics teach you about your website and your users:

Analytics give you lots of information about how people are using your website. But since you don’t know your users’ goals, you don’t know what motivates their behavior. Some might just be browsing, some might research your product, some might be here to buy.

You would need to talk to your users to find out what their goals are and make sense of all your data.

Customer support teaches you about your users and their goals:

Customer support lets you understand your users’ goals. They will actually talk to you about their goals (problems, questions, etc.). However, you will not be able to see how these people are using your website. Maybe some share their screens, but this support situation doesn’t teach you much about their actual experience.

To see more real user experiences you have to do user tests.

User testing teaches you about the experience users have while they’re trying to achieve these goals on your website:

User testing bridges the gap between analytics and customer support because it allows you know exactly what goals users are trying to achieve while you are observing their behavior at the same time. The way this works is by writing a test scenario based on actual users’ goals (and of course your business goals) and then just watch and listen to real people as they do a user test of your website.

Watching these user tests is the most efficient way to see real user experiences.

Combining all 3 for a successful UX

Each tool or method has its own strengths and weaknesses. To really understand your website users’ behavior and to create a great user experience you’ll have to combine all 3 methods.

Use analytics to identify and measure trends and patterns among your users. This gives you the big picture of your most important user behaviors.

Provide great support and talk to your users to find out more about their goals and what they say about the service so you can resonate their thoughts through your designs and your copy.

Use usability testing of your website where you’ll see exactly how they use your website and hear their thoughts to understand why they do what they are doing.

To understand your website users means to know their goals. Not just speculations about their goals, you have to be absolutely sure about what your users want. Otherwise you’ll draw the wrong conclusions and overlook one of the most important aspects of every user experience: motivation.