Use UX research to create A/B tests

Contributors

@andreea-macoveiciuc-content-expert


Business Benefits

Improve A/B test conversion results by optimizing tests beforehand.


Look at what your users and your business are trying to achieve on your website, and develop flows that help both to achieve their aims.

For example, a user objective might be to find a specific product, and your business objective might be to sell products. Your corresponding website flow should direct a user through finding and buying a product to meet both objectives.

Conduct customer interviews and on-site surveys to ask participants about their intentions and motivations, and if they managed to fulfill their goals.

In the customer interviews, ask questions about how the experience can be improved, where they have issues, and how fast they find your value proposition. Ask participants questions such as Which questions did you have, but couldn’t find answers to?, What made you not complete the purchase today?, and What made you almost not buy from us?

Talk to your customer support team and review support tickets to identify any issues reported by users.

Identify weak points in your UX by gathering a group of users and asking them to perform common tasks related to a site area you plan to test, like sales funnel.

Set a goal for the tasks users are performing. For example, your task might be, Complete a purchase of 3 or more items from the shopping cart page, and the associated goal could be, 75% of all participants will be able to complete this task within 3 minutes.

Use metrics to create a benchmark, such as time on task, success rate, failure, number of system errors, or satisfaction rating. Ask participants to read the tasks out loud and verbally confirm when they have completed the task.

Gather the findings in a report to include the number of users who successfully completed each goal.

Get user feedback using a tool like UserTesting to further investigate issues that you found during UX testing.

You can use heat maps during the user testing to identify if adjustments made in the process, increase your page usability.

Ask users to navigate to specific locations on your website, recording their journey with a tool like Treejack to check your findability and information architecture.

Look at how quickly users are finding the locations you directed them to, and the paths that they took to find them. Are they ideal? Could they be shortened?

Create an information architecture workflow to help organize your website information.

Reduce your website options. Add information clusters into buckets to have an overview of where information is stored. Use prototypes and patterns in your website design.

Test the information architecture you have set up, using tree tests to measure how effective it is currently.

Use TreeJack or a similar alternative to track and record if users are following your flow. Your tests’ results will showcase if your IA is effective or not, by looking at how users accessed information.

Before running A/B tests with hypotheses developed from the data you gathered, run cross-browser, cross-device, and website speed analysis tests to find contributing issues that aren’t UX-related.

Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T11:55:44Z