Do it like Speero: Identify website issues with the ResearchXL framework

To improve the effectiveness of your website, you need to identify the issues and friction points that are negatively affecting your website user.

You also need to understand your user’s behaviors and motivations in order to identify opportunities for improvement beyond small tweaks and bug fixes.

Speero’s ResearchXL™ is a comprehensive research framework that is designed to help you do just these things. It triangulates data from multiple UX research methodologies to provide a big-picture model of your current situation with the ultimate goal of supporting the creation of a data-driven roadmap for website optimization.

Ideally, use the ResearchXL framework to conduct a single piece of research utilizing different research methodologies. However, if you have limited time or resources, you can instead conduct each research activity on its own, focusing on activities that are most likely to provide you with insights that will positively affect your KPIs.

Steps

Create a report outline from the ResearchXL report template with sections for Introduction, Research insights, Insight analysis, Next steps, and Appendix.

Do this as early as possible in the project, so that anyone working on it can add content to the report.

Conduct research to gain insight into how users are using and interacting with your website, as well as their motivations and FUDs – fears, uncertainties and doubts.

Analyze your analytics data to understand who is using your website and how they are interacting with it.

Survey customers to learn more about their motivations.

Conduct usability studies to observe user behavior on your website.

Add exit polls to your website to get real-time feedback on sources of friction.

Once the customer survey, user testing, and polls are live and gathering data, run an internal UX heuristic review workshop and ask project team members to score key webpages against Speero’s UX principles.

Use heatmaps to get further insight into UX issues discovered in the exit poll, user testing, and UX heuristic review stages.

Watch and analyze session recordings to further understand real visitor behavior and intent.

As you complete each research activity, add data slides in the Research insights section that summarize what you did and the insights you found.

For example, for the Customer Survey, create a slide for each question, summarize the insights and add some commentary to the slide about what this tells us and the opportunities it presents.

Add a Key takeaways slide after the data slides for each research activity. Include the most important learnings or most interesting data points.

Once all the research is completed, run a themes workshop to group and label insights from each research activity into broader themes. Use these themes to structure the Insight analysis section.

Use and reference these themes throughout an experimentation program to inform the broader experimentation strategy.

Theme examples:

  • Navigation and user journey
  • Sizing or fit
  • UX friction
  • Pricing

Develop recommendations and test ideas from the insights you found. Include them on slides in the Insights Analysis section.

For each insight in the Insights analysis section of the report:

  1. Assign a category:
    • JDI: A fix that’s easy to make or the change is a no-brainer, this includes bug fixes.
    • Instrument: Need to fix, add, or improve tag or event handling within the analytics configuration.
    • Test: There is an opportunity to shift behavior, expose further insights, or improve metrics via experimentation.
    • Hypothesize: There’s a clear problem identify but no single solution.
    • Investigate: There needs to be further research or analysis to fully understand the problem.
  2. Write your recommendations. This might be obvious, like Fix the bug, or more complex, like an opportunity for experimentation with multiple executions. For example, if the research highlighted that users don’t trust the website, there are many potential ways you could solve this.
  3. Add supporting content where relevant. For example, screenshots of other websites that appear to solve similar issues, or mock-ups to help illustrate the suggested solution.
  4. Complete a list of sources.

Create summary slides for each of your themes. Add them to the Insights Analysis section of your report.

Include:

  • Why the theme is important.
  • What you found and from which research methods.
  • Your main recommendations relating to this theme.

If you organize your Insights analysis section by page, group these theme summaries together at the end of the section. If you organize it by theme, use each one to start the relevant theme segment.

Write a 1-2 slide executive summary. Include what you did, what you found, and what happens next.

Add links to all of your raw data sheets in the Appendix section, so people can look at the actual responses you received.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T15:05:15Z

6 Likes

@emma
how can we get our hands on Research template? It says access is denied ?

1 Like

@Sinology Hey Asmir – welcome! We’re working on fixing up those links now; they should be available in a day or two.

3 Likes

@naomi_kramer @Sinology and @boris.bicanic5

We are on it, we should be fixing that today with @emma

@Sinology Asmir – the link is working now. Let us know if you have any issues.

3 Likes

@Rene would be good to get some fresh eyes on this playbook from some peeps.