User Experience | The Blog Pros

January 9, 2024

16 User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask Website Visitors

Are you looking for some user experience feedback questions to ask your visitors?

By asking user experience feedback questions, you can better understand your users’ needs and expectations, identify areas that need improvement, and measure overall customer satisfaction. This can help you gain a competitive advantage over other websites.

In this article, we will share some of the best user experience feedback questions to ask website visitors and show you how to survey users in WordPress.

Why Ask User Experience Feedback Questions in WordPress?

If you have a WordPress website, then asking users for feedback will help you gather insights into their needs, preferences, and dislikes. This is essential for improving your website’s design, content, and functionality to align with user expectations.

Feedback can even reveal website areas that can be optimized to increase conversions, like improving the checkout process. You can then implement these suggestions to generate more leads and make more sales.

Additionally, asking for user experience feedback can also boost user engagement by showing visitors that their feedback is valued and you are actively working to improve your content.

Having said that, let’s take a look at some of the best user experience feedback questions to ask your website visitors.

User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask Website Visitors

Here are some general questions that you can ask your visitors to learn more about the UX of your website.

1. How would you rate the overall usability of our website?

If you have a WordPress blog, then asking users to rate the overall usability of your website can help you quickly and easily see if your website is doing well or if it has areas that need improvement.

It can also help you track your website’s progress over time as you make changes to improve the overall user experience.

Once you ask this question, you can also add a follow-up question that asks for the user’s reason for the rating that they gave. This will help identify patterns in usability issues and make it easy to troubleshoot those problems.

2. How would you rate the overall speed and responsiveness of our website?

A website’s speed is one of its most important factors because fast-loading page times can improve the user experience, increase pageviews, and boost your WordPress SEO.

You can gauge user satisfaction and engagement by asking users to rate your website speed. For example, if your visitors are giving you low ratings, then it means that your loading times are too long, and people are leaving your site frustrated.

If this is the case, then you can use different tips to speed up your WordPress site and improve the user experience.

3. What suggestions do you have for improving our website?

By asking users to provide suggestions for improving your website, you can identify usability issues that may have been overlooked by your developers.

For example, a call to action (CTA) on your website may not work, which has caused a lot of users to leave your site frustrated.

We recommend asking this question in a feedback form after users have provided a rating for the overall website usability. This question can help you find out about this issue and also show users that you care about their opinions and experiences.

4. What is your first impression of our website’s homepage?

The homepage is the introduction to your website and is usually the first page that visitors interact with. This page should create positive emotions in users and encourage them to explore your site.

By asking users about their first impression of your website’s homepage, you can assess if the page is effectively communicating your website’s purpose. It can help gain insights into the user’s impression of your branding and overall homepage look.

If you need to make improvements, then you can check out our guide on how to create a custom home page in WordPress.

5. What did you dislike most about our website?

Asking users what they dislike about your website can uncover specific issues that are causing frustration and dissatisfaction among your visitors and customers.

For example, you might discover that users are annoyed by the number of ads on your site or intrusive popups.

Once you have identified these issues, you can fix them to prevent users from abandoning your website. This can lead to better user loyalty, improve the user experience, and even help increase conversions.

6. What changes can we make to our website design?

By asking for user suggestions, you can gain more ideas for design elements and aesthetics that were overlooked when you were creating your pages.

Visitors can also provide suggestions that will ultimately help improve the user experience. For example, some people may find it difficult to use your navigation menu. This can give you the idea to make your navigation menu more visible and easier to navigate.

Additionally, this user feedback can help you stay up-to-date with the current website design trends and update your pages to match them.

User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask WooCommerce Store Customers

If you have a WooCommerce store, then asking these questions can help improve the user experience in your online store.

1. How was your shopping experience today?

Asking users this question immediately after purchasing can help you gather feedback about the customer’s experience.

It will also help you better understand the overall customer journey, from browsing through your products to completing checkout. This question will reveal patterns, trends, and any errors that are repeatedly being faced by your customers that need to be fixed or improved.

2. What can we do to make our product(s) better?

Asking users for suggestions to improve your products allows you to gain insights into your customers’ unmet needs. This lets you understand the type of solutions that your users are looking for and potentially come up with new features for your products.

This can help you gain a competitive advantage over other online stores by letting you tailor your products to meet users’ needs and expectations.

3. Did you find the information you were looking for on our product page?

This question improves the user experience by helping you identify information gaps. It determines whether your product page effectively communicates the necessary information to help users make informed decisions.

This allows you to understand the type of information that the users want to see for a product and change your pages accordingly.

For more details, see our guide on how to customize your WooCommerce product pages.

4. Were you looking for anything today that you couldn’t find?

Asking visitors if they were looking for something they couldn’t find allows you to broaden your store’s scope by taking user ideas into account and adding those products to your inventory.

For example, if you sell clothes online, and users on your website answered that they wanted to find matching accessories with their clothing items, then you could expand into jewelry as well.

5. Was there anything that made you cancel your order?

Customers cancel their orders for several reasons, like high shipping costs, delayed shipping, unexpected charges, or issues during the checkout process.

By asking this question, you can identify the main reason for users canceling their orders in your online store.

For example, if many customers are canceling their orders due to shipping delays, then you can improve the shipping process to reduce delays and improve customer satisfaction.

6. What is the one part of our checkout process that we should improve?

Your store’s checkout process should be seamless to provide a top-notch customer experience. By asking users this question, you can gain a variety of perspectives and identify common issues in the checkout section.

For example, if your checkout is too long and complicated, then you might switch to an express checkout.

An example of an express checkout form, created using FunnelKit Funnel Builder

Alternatively, see the tips in our guide on how to customize the WooCommerce checkout page.

7. What was your main concern or fear before purchasing this product?

By asking users this question, you can find out the potential barriers to purchase and take steps to address those issues on your site.

For instance, you can improve your product messaging and positioning to encourage more users to complete their purchases.

It is also a good idea to create a personalized user experience by setting up personalized recommendations, addressing customer concerns proactively, and offering customer support to boost engagement and satisfaction.

User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask Website Visitors on Mobile

The majority of your users will access your website using mobile devices. These are the user experience feedback questions you can ask visitors to improve your website on mobile.

1. Was our website easy to navigate on mobile?

Over 55% of your website traffic will come from mobile devices. However, your website will look different on mobile due to a smaller screen size and a touch-based interface.

Asking users how easy it is to navigate your site on a mobile device can help identify any design issues that are causing people to leave your site unsatisfied. For instance, you may need to use a responsive WordPress theme and other responsive design elements.

This will help you optimize your site for mobile navigation and can ultimately lead to more conversions.

2. Were any parts of the page not visible or hard to see?

A mobile device’s small screen size can limit the amount of information displayed on a page and make your site look crowded.

By asking users this question, you can identify areas that need to be optimized for mobile viewing. You can also check this information yourself by following our guide on how to view the mobile version of WordPress sites from desktop.

3. Did you find the website’s blog posts easy to read on your mobile device?

Blog posts can look different on mobile devices because the text is smaller and the images are more compressed, giving the page a cramped look.

By asking users if they could easily read your posts on mobile devices, you can identify parts of your content that may be difficult to read.

You can then change the font size, break up paragraphs, and use an uncluttered layout to make your blog posts more readable. For more details, just see our guide on how to improve readability in WordPress.

How to Add a User Experience Feedback Prompt in WordPress

You can easily add a quick user experience survey on your WordPress website with UserFeedback. It is the best WordPress feedback plugin on the market that comes with 25+ premade survey templates and lets you ask unlimited questions.

Plus, the plugin offers different types of questions that you can ask, including multiple-choice questions, an NPS survey, a quick rating question, radio buttons, email captures, or an open-ended question for feedback.

First, you need to install and activate the UserFeedback plugin. For detailed instructions, see our beginner’s guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: UserFeeback also has a free plan. However, we will be using the premium plan to unlock more features.

Upon activation, visit the UserFeedback » Surveys page from the WordPress admin sidebar and click the ‘Create New’ button.

This will direct you to the ‘Select a Template’ page, where you can choose any of the premade templates.

Since you want to ask for user experience feedback, you can select the ‘Website Experience’ template.

Choose the website experience feedback template

This will take you to another screen where you can start creating a user experience feedback survey.

By default, the website experience template asks users to rate their experience on your website. If you want, you can change the question from the text field and then choose a question type from the dropdown menu.

You can add checkboxes, radio buttons, star ratings, text fields, and more.

Once you do that, click the ‘Add Question’ button to add another question to the user experience feedback survey.

This will expand another prompt on the screen where you can add another question.

For example, if you asked users to rate the website user experience in the first question, then you can ask users about everything they think needs to be improved on your site.

After that, you can select ‘Long Answer’ as the question type so that users can answer without any word count restrictions.

Add a question asking for suggestions to improve user experience

You can then switch to the ‘Preview’ link at the top to customize your user experience feedback prompt.

Here, you can change the color scheme, button color, widget color, and text color for the prompt. Once you do that, just click the ‘Next Step: Settings’ button.

Customize the user experience feedback prompt

You will now be taken to the ‘Settings’ page, where you can start by scrolling down to the ‘Targeting’ section.

Here, you can choose the device type where the survey will be displayed. For example, if you created this survey to gather insights into your performance on mobile devices, then you can select the ‘Mobile’ option. The survey will then only be displayed to the visitors browsing your site on their mobile phones.

After that, you can select the ‘All Pages’ option if you want to display the survey on all the pages and posts on your website.

However, if you want to display the survey on a specific post or page, then you can select the ‘Advanced’ option.

Then, you can specify the conditions for the survey display from the dropdown menu.

For instance, if you want to display the survey on a single page, then you can select the ‘Page URL is’ option from the dropdown menu on the right and then add a page URL into the field on the left.

Add conditional logic for prompt display

Next, scroll down to the ‘Behaviour’ section to configure the display timing of your user experience feedback survey.

Here, you can decide when the survey will appear on your page, how often it will be displayed, and how long it will run on your website.

Once you have done that, simply click the ‘Next Step: Notifications’ button.

On the new page, you must toggle on the ‘Send Email’ switch and then enter the email address where you want to receive notifications every time a website visitor completes your feedback survey.

After that, click the ‘Next Step: Publish’ button.

Now that you are on the ‘Publish’ page, simply toggle the ‘Survey Status’ switch to ‘Publish’ to activate your survey.

If you want to schedule your survey for a later date, then you can do that by toggling the ‘Schedule for Later’ switch and adding a specific date and time.

Finally, don’t forget to click the ‘Save and Publish’ or ‘Save and Schedule’ button to store your settings.

You can now visit your WordPress site to view the user experience feedback survey in action.

Once the survey is published, you can easily view its results by visiting the UserFeedback » Results page from the WordPress dashboard.

You will now be able to check the number of responses, impressions, and all the answers provided by your visitors. This can help you improve the overall user experience of your website.

Bonus: How to Do a UX Audit of Your WordPress Site

Apart from gathering feedback to improve the user experience, it is also important to do a UX audit of your website. This means testing your site to see if there are any usability issues that you can fix.

This is a crucial step to ensure that your site is efficient and provides a high-quality experience.

To do a UX audit, you should first be able to recognize your target audience and understand their needs and preferences. Then, you can move on to finding pages on your website with poor user experience.

To do this, you can use MonsterInsights, which is the best Google Analytics plugin on the market. It lets you see where your users are coming from and how they interact with your website. MonsterInsights also allows you to see pages on your site where you get conversions.

The MonsterInsights Google Analytics plugin

Upon installing and activating the MonsterInsights plugin, all you have to do is visit the Insights » Addons page from your WordPress admin sidebar to install and activate the ‘eCommerce’ addon.

After that, go to the Insights » Reports page and switch to the ‘eCommerce’ tab. You will now be able to overview your top-performing products and conversion sources. This will also help you identify the pages and products where you don’t get many conversions.

Additionally, your UX audit may involve optimizing your website’s speed and performance, making your navigation menu simpler, testing conversion elements, and more.

For detailed instructions, you can see our beginner’s guide on how to do a UX audit of your WordPress site.

We hope this article helped you learn some user experience feedback questions to ask your website visitors. You may also want to see our tutorial on how to track user engagement in WordPress with Google Analytics and our top picks for the best WordPress survey plugins.

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The post 16 User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask Website Visitors first appeared on WPBeginner.

October 26, 2023

An Actionable And Reliable Usability Questionnaire With Only 7 Items: <span style=”font-variant: small-caps”>Inuit</span>

A lot of contemporary usability evaluation relies on easily measurable and readily available metrics like conversion rates, task success rates, and time on task, even though it’s questionable how well these are suited for reliably capturing a concept as complex as usability in its entirety.

The same holds for user experience. When an instrument is used to measure usability, e.g., in controlled user studies or via live intercepts, it’s often the simple single ease question, which is generally not a bad choice, but has its limits .

Note: For more information on usability evaluation, you can check the article “Current Practice in Measuring Usability: Challenges to Usability Studies and Research” by Kasper Hornbæk and “Growth Marketing Considered Harmful” by Maximilian Speicher.

Ultimately, when you intend to precisely and reliably measure the usability of a digital product, there’s no way around a scientifically well-founded instrument or, in everyday terms, a “questionnaire.” The most famous one is probably SUS, the System Usability Scale, but there are also some others around. Two examples are UMUX, the Usability Measure for User Experience, and SUMI, the Software Usability Measurement Inventory.

To join this party, in this article, we introduce Inuit (the Interface Usability Instrument), a new usability questionnaire. We will share how and why it was developed and how it’s different from the questionnaires mentioned above.

To immediately cut to the chase: With a scale from 1 (“completely disagree”) to 5 (“completely agree”), Inuit looks as follows. The parts in square brackets can be adapted to your specific interface, e.g., products in an online shop, articles on a news website, or results in a search engine.

Q1	I found [the information] I was looking for.
Q2	I could easily understand [the provided information].
Q3	I was confused using [the interface].
Q4	I was distracted by elements of [the interface].
Q5	Typography and layout added to readability.
Q6	There was too much information presented in too little space.
Q7	[My desired information] was easily reachable.

The Inuit metric (a score between 0 to 100, analogous to SUS) can then be calculated as follows:

(Q1 + Q2 + Q5 + Q7 - Q3 - Q4 - Q6 + 11) * 100/28

Why 11 and 28?

We have seven items rated on a scale from 1 to 5, but for some (Q1, Q2, Q5, Q7), 5 is the best rating, and for some (Q3, Q4, Q6), 1 is the best rating. Hence, we need to subtract the latter from 6 when we add up everything: Q1 + Q2 + Q5 + Q7 + (6-Q3) + (6-Q4) + (6-Q6) = Q1 + Q2 + Q5 + Q7 - Q3 - Q4 - Q6 + 18. This gives us an overall score between 7 and 35.
Now, we want to normalize this to a score between 0 and 100. For this, we first subtract 7 for a score between 0 and 28: Q1 + Q2 + Q5 + Q7 - Q3 - Q4 - Q6 + 18 - 7 = Q1 + Q2 + Q5 + Q7 - Q3 - Q4 - Q6 + 11. Finally, for a score between 0 and 100, we need to divide everything by 28 and multiply by 100: (Q1 + Q2 + Q5 + Q7 - Q3 - Q4 - Q6 + 11) * 100/28.

You might have noticed that compared to, e.g., SUS with 10, Inuit consists of only 7 questions. Apart from that, it has two more advantages:

Inuit has been designed to provide training data for machine-learning models that can then automatically predict usability from user interactions or web analytics data.
Its items (i.e., the questions) are diagnostic, at least to a certain degree. This means you see what’s wrong with your interface simply by looking at the results from the questionnaire. Have a bad rating for readability (Q5)? You should make the text in your interface more readable.

Now, at this point, you can either accept all this and simply get going with Inuit to measure the usability of your digital product (we’d be delighted). Or, if you’re interested in the details, you’re very welcome to keep reading (we’d be even more delighted).

“So, Why Did You Develop Yet Another Usability Questionnaire?”

You probably already guessed that Inuit wasn’t developed just for fun or because there aren’t enough questionnaires around. But to answer this, we have to reach back a bit.

In 2014, Max was a Ph.D. student busy working on his dissertation. The goal of it all was to find a way to determine the usability of an interface automatically from users’ interactions, such as what they do with the mouse cursor and how they scroll, rather than making participants in a user study fill out pages and pages of questions. Additionally, the cherry on top should be to also automatically propose optimizations for the interface (e.g., if user interactions suggest the interface is not readable, make the text larger).

To be able to achieve this, however, it was first necessary to determine if and how well certain interactions (mouse cursor movements, mouse cursor speed, scrolling behavior, and so on) predict the usability — or rather its individual aspects — of an interface. This meant collecting training data through users’ interactions with an interface and their usability assessments of that interface. Then, one could investigate how well (combinations of) tracked interactions predict (aspects of) usability using regression and/or machine-learning models. So far, so good, as far as the theory is concerned.

In practice, one important decision that would have huge implications for the project was how to collect the usability assessments mentioned above when gathering the training data. Since usability is a latent variable, meaning it can’t be observed directly, a proper instrument (i.e., a questionnaire) is necessary to assess it. And the most famous one is undeniably the System Usability Scale (SUS). It should’ve been an obvious choice, shouldn’t it?

A closer look showed that, while SUS would be perfectly well suited to train statistical models to infer usability from interactions, it simply wasn’t the perfect fit. This was the case mainly for two reasons:

First, many questions contained in SUS (“I think that I would like to use this system frequently,” “I found the various functions in this system were well integrated,” and “I felt very confident using the system,” among others) describe the effects of good or bad usability — users feel confident because the system is well usable and so on. But they don’t describe the aspects of usability that cause them, e.g., bad understandability. This makes it difficult to know what should be done to make it better. What exactly should we change to make users feel more confident? The questions are not diagnostic or “actionable” and require further qualitative research to uncover the causes of bad ratings. It’s the same for UMUX and SUMI.
Second, with just 10 items, SUS is already a very small questionnaire. However, the fewer items, the less friction and the more motivated users are to actually answer. So, is ten really the minimum, or would a proper questionnaire with fewer items be possible?

With these considerations in mind, Max went on and ultimately developed Inuit, the instrument presented in the introduction. He ended up with seven items that were better suited for the needs of his Ph.D. project and more actionable than those of SUS.

“How do you know this actually measures usability?”

Inuit was developed in a two-step process. The first step was a review of established guidelines and checklists with more than 250 rules for good usability, which were filtered based on the requirements above and resulted in a first draft for the new usability instrument. This draft was then discussed and refined in expert interviews with nine usability professionals.

The final draft of Inuit, with the seven factors informativeness (Q1), understandability (Q2), confusion (Q3), distraction (Q4), readability (Q5), information density (Q6), and reachability (Q7), was evaluated using a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

CFA is a method for assessing construct validity, which means it “is used to test whether measures of a construct are consistent with a researcher’s understanding of the nature of that construct” or “to test whether the data fit a hypothesized measurement model.”
— Wikipedia

Put very simply, by using a CFA, we can check how well a theory matches the practice. In our case, the “construct” or “hypothesized measurement model” (theory) was Inuit, and the data (practice) came from a user study with 81 participants in which four news websites were evaluated using an Inuit questionnaire.

In a CFA, there are various metrics that show how well a construct fits the data. Two well-established ones are CFI, the comparative fit index, and RMSEA, the root mean square error of approximation — both range from 0 to 1.

For CFI, 0.95 or higher is “accepted as an indicator of good fit” (Wikipedia). Inuit’s value was 0.971. For RMSEA, “values less than 0.05 are good, values between 0.05 and 0.08 are acceptable” (Kim et al.). Inuit’s value was 0.063. This means our theory matches the practice, or Inuit’s questions do indeed measure usability.

Case Study #1

Inuit was first put into practice in 2014 at Unister GmbH, which at that time ran travel search engines like fluege.de and reisen.de, and was developing an entirely new semantic search engine. The results page of this search engine, named BlueKiwi, was evaluated in a user study with 81 participants using Inuit.

In this first study, the overall score averaged across all participants was 59.9. Ratings were especially bad for informativeness (Q1), information density (Q6), and reachability (Q7). Based on these results, BlueKiwi’s search results page was redesigned.

Among other things, the number of advertisements was reduced (better reachability), search results were displayed more concisely (better informativeness), and everything was more clearly aligned and separated (better information density). See the figure below for the full list of changes.

After the redesign, we ran another study, in which the overall Inuit score increased to 67.5 (+11%), with improvements in every single one of the seven items.

“Why Wait 9 Years To Write This Article?”

There were various factors at play. One was what’s called the research–practice gap. It’s often difficult for academic work to gain traction outside the academic community. One reason for this is that work that is part of a Ph.D. project is often a little neglected after it has served its purpose — being published in a research paper, included in a thesis, and presented at a Ph.D. defense — which is pretty much exactly what happened to Inuit.

Case Study #2

Another factor, however, was that we wanted to put the instrument into practice in a real-world industry setting over a longer period of time first, and we got the chance to do that only relatively recently.

We ran a longitudinal study over a period of almost two years in which we ran quarterly benchmarks of multiple e-commerce websites using both SUS and Inuit, with a total of 6,368 users. The results of these benchmarks were included in the dashboard of product KPIs and regularly shared with the team of 6 product managers. After roughly two years of conducting and sharing benchmarks, we interviewed the product managers about their use of the data, challenges, wishes, and potential for improvement.

What a high-level analysis showed was that all of the product managers, in one way or another, described Inuit as more intuitive to understand, less abstract, and more actionable compared to SUS when looking at both instruments as a whole.

They found most of Inuit’s items more specific and easier to interpret and, therefore, more relevant from a product manager’s perspective. SUS, in contrast, was described as, e.g., “good for [the] overall score” and the bird’s eye view. Virtually all product managers, however, wished for even more specific insights into where exactly on the website usability problems occur. One suggested building an optimal instrument by combining certain items from both SUS and Inuit.

As part of the analysis, we computed Cronbach’s α for Inuit (based on 3190 answers) as well as SUS (based on 3178 answers).

Cronbach’s α is a statistical measure for the internal consistency of an instrument, which can be interpreted as “the extent to which all of the items of a test measure the same latent variable [i.e., usability].”
— Wikipedia

Values of 0.7 or above are generally deemed acceptable. Inuit reached a value of 0.7; SUS a value of 0.8.

To top things off, Inuit and SUS showed a considerable (Pearson’s r = 0.53) and highly significant (p < 0.001) correlation when looking at overall scores aggregated over the different e-commerce websites and tasks the study participants had to complete.

In layman’s terms, When the SUS score goes up, the Inuit score goes up; when the SUS score goes down, the Inuit score goes down. Both questionnaires measure the same thing (with a very, very rough approximation of INUIT = 0.6 × SUS + 17).

Since these first results were so encouraging, we decided to write this general, more practice-oriented overview article about Inuit now. A deeper analysis of our big dataset, however, is yet to be conducted, and our current plan is to report findings in much more detail separately.

“Why Do You Think Inuit Is Better Than SUS?”

We don’t think so (or that it’s better than any scientifically founded usability instrument, for that matter). There are many ways to measure the same latent variable, in this case, usability. Both questionnaires, SUS and Inuit, have proven that they can measure the usability of an interface. Still, they were developed in different contexts and with different goals and requirements in mind.

So, to address the question of when it’s better to use which, as true researchers, we have to say “it depends” (annoying, isn’t it?).

SUS, which has been around since the 1990s, is probably the most popular and well-established usability instrument. It’s been studied and validated over and over, which Inuit, of course, can’t compete with yet and still has a long way to go. If the goal is to compare scores at a high level and even tap into public benchmark numbers for orientation, SUS would be preferable.

However, by design, Inuit has two advantages over SUS:

Inuit has only seven items and is still a “complete” usability instrument.
30% fewer questions can be a major factor when it comes to motivating users to fill out a questionnaire. Assuming that a big part of remote online studies is done quickly in passing and with short attention spans, designing efficient studies that generate reliable output and minimize effects like participant fatigue can be a major challenge for researchers.
Inuit’s items have been specifically designed to be more actionable for practitioners and lend themselves better to manual analysis and inferring potential interface optimizations.
As we’ve learned in our second case study, talking to actual product managers revealed that for them, the results of a usability assessment should always be as specific as possible. Comparing the items of both, Inuit points to more concrete areas to improve than SUS, which was perceived as rather vague.

“Where Can I Use Inuit?”

Generally, in any scenario that involves an interface and a task — either defined by you or the user themselves. In the studies mentioned and described above, we could demonstrate that Inuit works well in controlled as well as natural-use settings and with news websites, search engines, and e-commerce shops.

Now, of course, we can’t evaluate Inuit with any possible kind of interface, and that is part of the reason for this article. Inuit has been around and publicly available since 2014, and we have no idea if and how it has been used by other researchers, but if you do, please let us know about it. We’d be thrilled to hear about your experience and results.

The questions presented at the beginning of the article are relatively focused on finding information because that’s where Inuit is historically coming from and because most of the things users do involve the finding of information of some kind. (Please keep in mind that information doesn’t have to be text. On the contrary, most information is non-textual.) But those questions can be adapted as long as they still reflect the underlying aspects of usability, which are informativeness, understandability, confusion, distraction, readability, information density, and reachability.

Say, for instance, you want to evaluate a module from an e-learning course, e.g., in the form of an annotated video with a subsequent quiz. To accommodate the task at hand, Q1 could be rephrased to “I had all the information necessary to complete the module” and Q7 to “All the information necessary to complete the module was easily reachable.”

Conclusion

There are plenty of usability questionnaires out there, and we have added a new one to the pool — Inuit. Why? Because sometimes, you find yourself in a situation where none of the existing questionnaires is the perfect fit. Inuit has been designed to be more diagnostic than existing usability instruments like, e.g., SUS and for use with machine learning, all the while asking fewer questions than other questionnaires. So, if any of this seems relevant to your use cases or context of work, why not give it a try?

From a scientific and statistical point of view, in a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), Inuit has demonstrated that its questions do indeed measure usability. On top of that, it’s consistent and correlates well with SUS, based on data from a large-scale, longitudinal user study.

Note: If you want to dive deeper into the science behind Inuit, e.g., how exactly the items/questions were chosen, you can read the corresponding research paper “Inuit: The Interface Usability Instrument,” which was presented at the 2015 HCI International Conference. If you want to learn more about how Inuit can be used to train machine-learning models, read “Ensuring Web Interface Quality through Usability-Based Split Testing.” And finally if you want to see how Inuit can be used as the basis for a tool that automatically proposes optimizations for an interface, you can refer to “S.O.S.: Does Your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Need Help?” which was presented at the 2015 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

References

“SUS: A ‘Quick and Dirty’ Usability Scale,” John Brooke (Usability evaluation in industry)
“Confirmatory and exploratory factor analysis for validating the phlegm pattern questionnaire for healthy subjects,” Kim, Hyunho, Boncho Ku, Jong Yeol Kim, Young-Jae Park, and Young-Bae Park (Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine)
SUMI Questionnaire Homepage, Jurek Kirakowski
“10 Things to Know about the Single Ease Question (SEQ),” Jeff Sauro (MeasuringU)
“Measuring Usability: From the SUS to the UMUX-Lite,” Jeff Sauro (MeasuringU)
“Ensuring web interface quality through usability-based split testing,” Speicher, Maximilian, Andreas Both, and Martin Gaedke (International Conference on Web Engineering)
“Inuit: the interface usability instrument,” Speicher, Maximilian, Andreas Both, and Martin Gaedke (Design, User Experience, and Usability: Design Discourse)
“S.O.S.: Does Your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Need Help?,” Speicher, Maximilian, Andreas Both, and Martin Gaedke (Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)
“Conversion rate & average order value are not UX metrics,” Maximilian Speicher (UX Collective)
“So, How Can We Measure UX?,” Maximilian Speicher (ACM Interactions)
“Growth Marketing Considered Harmful,” Maximilian Speicher
“Current Practice In Measuring Usability: Challenges to Usability Studies and Research,” Kasper Hornbæk
Latent variable, Wikipedia
Confirmatory factor analysis, Wikipedia
Internal consistency, Wikipedia

October 12, 2023

Everything I Know About UX Research I First Learned From Lt. Columbo

If you don’t know Lieutenant Columbo, I envy you. I wish I could erase my memory and watch this TV masterpiece for the first time again. Columbo, a Los Angeles homicide detective, has become a cult character in American crime drama in the 1970s. Each episode of this show reveals the murderer from the first minute, and the main mystery is how Columbo proves their guilt and distinguishes between lies and the truth.

When I reflect back on this series, it becomes apparent that the UX area has so much in common with crime scene investigation: the truth is unknown, people tend to disguise their real needs, and you have to discover missing facts as soon as possible to build and launch something useful. I’ve never specialized in UX research, but it has been part of my job as a designer for years. When I started, we rarely had the luxury of a dedicated researcher on a team.

So, let’s see what we can learn from a classical fictional character and apply it in the UX area.

Lesson 1: Understate Your Role To Users

It’s not a secret that people behave differently in the vicinity of police, state officials, or management. Columbo understood that if a suspect or witness realized who he was, they would try to disguise or tweak facts (either consciously or subconsciously). That’s why our hero preferred to blend in and keep his position out of sight as long as possible.

For instance, in the episode “By Dawn’s Early Light” (S4E3), the commandant of a military academy murders the chairman of the board. So, Columbo stayed in the barracks for several days and talked with cadets informally until he exposed the killer.

Sometimes, such an approach has caused funny situations. In the episode “Negative Reaction” (S4E2), Columbo was mistaken for a hobo at St. Matthew’s Mission. Lieutenant patiently accepted the nun’s caring and ate a bowl of stew, and only when she suggested a new raincoat instead of Columbo’s beloved old one, he revealed his purpose.

UX research is no less challenging because we explore human behavior but inevitably influence the findings since we are humans, too. Designers often run the risk of receiving twisted information when they forget to tackle users’ fears and insecurity, for example:

Interviewees believe their boss sent you to assess their skills;
Users think you created this design, and now they try not to offend you;
Customers worry that you’ll judge their computer literacy.

Understating your official role gives you precious moments to talk with people more sincerely. In contrast, here is a perfect intro to annihilate research accuracy: “Hello! I’m a Senior UX Designer and Product Manager. Today, I’ll conduct a usability testing session and jobs-to-be-done interview to identify UX gaps in our design…” After hearing that, people would probably flood you with socially expected answers.

Instead, designers should keep their fancy titles to themselves. Try to start a usability testing session humbly, “My name is <…>, and I was asked to check whether this website is useful and clear to you.” Don’t make people think you designed it (even if you did).

And here is an intro phrase I recommend using for a user interview, “I’m a researcher, and today I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about <…>.” Give a simple description without redundant details that may scare people and increase tension.

Depending on the situation, you can even say, “I didn’t design this, so I won’t be offended if you criticize it; please be honest with your feedback!” But it’s on the thin edge between ensuring less biased research and lying.

Lesson 2: “You Don’t Know My Boss…”

Lieutenant Columbo usually dealt with wealthy and mighty criminals who were sure they would go unpunished. So, he played the role of a “little man” and wasn’t ashamed of it. He realized that exposing his authority would only make people stay within their own shells. Not only did he hide his intellect, but he also encouraged others to feel superior towards him so that people behaved more freely and revealed their true motives.

Columbo looked messy — in a creased beige raincoat, with a cigar, driving an old Peugeot — and concealed his shrewd mind behind this slack appearance and sloppy communication manner. He often told naive stories about his wife and appeared henpecked:

Columbo: I’m a worrier. I mean, little insignificant details, I lose my appetite, I can’t eat. My wife, she says to me, “You know, you can really be a pain.”

Another quote is about the “strict” boss, although it’s apparent from the series that the Lieutenant was a self-organized expert:

Columbo: You’re a celebrity. Because of you, my boss, he won’t let me close up this case until I have covered everything. Every loose end gotta be tied up.

As a newbie designer, I was indoctrinated about the value of presentation skills, making a positive first impression, and the necessity of defending design decisions. However, later, these conventions played a cruel joke on me.

In UX research, a common misconception is that you should look confident and competent in front of users. Let me get this straight: conducting research is not the same as presenting designs to top management. During any research, the goal is to make people feel relaxed so that they tell you the truth. However, at a presentation, the main task is to assure everyone that your decision is well-informed and your input helps steer the business in the right direction.

Research is not meant to show off. You see a user for the first and probably the last time in your life; they won’t influence your career; they aren’t here to be impressed. Behave humbly while staying in control of the session. Yes, you may come across as an ordinary person, but it’ll pay off and bring more insights compared to “boss-subordinate” or “expert-noob” paradigms. I’m not saying one should literally look messy like Columbo. The idea is to blend in, for instance:

Match interviewees’ dress code (within reason, of course).
Try not to appear much more official or extravagant than a person in front of you, and you’d better keep that creative “Helvetica” T-shirt and “You ≠ user” pin for a UX meetup.
Avoid design jargon or terminology you have to explain.
However, a reasonable dose of your interviewees’ professional lingo will boost communication if you work on a specialized topic.
Behave neutrally but naturally.
It means balancing impartiality and separation from the subject with normal human behavior and empathy (simply saying, not being a robot).

Lesson 3: Deep-dive Into A New Topic

We call this approach “user safari” nowadays, but Lieutenant Columbo had been practicing it long before it became designers’ mainstream. If you want to understand your suspects (in our case, users), observe their behavior in a “natural habitat,” and don’t miss a chance to try users’ occupations. It’s better to see once than to hear a thousand times, right?

For example, in the episode “Any Old Port in a Storm” (S3E2), a wine connoisseur kills his brother to prevent him from selling the family winery. Columbo had to turn into a sommelier enthusiast for a while to investigate this crime and recognize unusual evidence, which would have been overlooked without specialized knowledge.

The episode “Negative Reaction” (S4E2) features a talented photographer and Pulitzer Prize winner who kills his wife and blames her death on a failed kidnapping. Columbo gets a camera and learns the basic principles of photography to convict the criminal. The detective had absolutely no proof, but owing to the newly gained knowledge, he set a cunning trap so that the murderer gave himself away.

Now, UX research. Of course, we shouldn’t literally follow the TV series and get expensive equipment just to step into users’ shoes. Fortunately, one can empathize much more easily nowadays. I mean observation studies and contextual inquiries when you can access users or documentaries, YouTube blogs, and professional communities if you want to prepare to face real users and avoid surface-level questions.

For example, several years ago, I was preparing for interviews with drilling engineers — future users of a new app suite for drilling planning. So, I watched “Deepwater Horizon,” a U.S. movie about a historical oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. This movie was recommended by a subject matter expert from the client’s side; he told me it realistically showed a drilling rig in action. As a result, I understood the technical jargon and used interviews with engineers to figure out really unobvious facts, not Wikipedia-level basics.

Another vivid example is a project I heard about from my former colleagues, who conducted product discovery for a Middle East logistics company several years ago. So, during an on-site, the discovery team observed the actual work of delivery crews and eventually witnessed a problem that couriers didn’t dare to report to their superiors. The app was designed for European address conventions and didn’t consider Middle-Eastern reality. Couriers only simulated using the navigation feature because the app required it to proceed to the next step. Frankly, I don’t believe this could’ve been learned from interviewing users or workshops with the client’s management.

Lesson 4: “Uhh… Just One More Thing!”

I guess Columbo used this catchphrase in each of the 69 episodes. In some cases, Lieutenant sounded like a narrow-minded, forgetful cop; sometimes, the question that followed “just one more thing” made a suspect worry. But does it have anything to do with UX research?

If we translate this phrase into modern language, we are talking about the skill of asking follow-up questions and improvising in pursuit of UX insights. Of course, our task in tech is way simpler than Columbo’s: we don’t have to provoke criminals to obtain irrefutable evidence for trial. But what detectives and UX folks share is the sense of valuable information and information buzz. This feeling pushes us to step aside from protocols and scripts and dig deeper.

“I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”
— Dwight Eisenhower

Even the best script for an interview, usability testing, or workshop won’t take into account all nuances.

In qualitative research, you cannot just read prepared questions out loud and call it a day; otherwise, it would’ve been already outsourced to robots.

I learned that what you want to know doesn’t equal the questions you ask.

Research questions are something you want to learn to make better design decisions. You keep them secret from respondents; they are only for your team’s internal use. For example, Will they buy this app? What is their top problem? Why are we worse than our competitors? In Columbo’s terms, they are equivalent to “Who is the murderer?”
Interview questions are what you actually ask. They are formulated in a certain way because not every answer can be retrieved directly. For example, Please tell me about the last time you ordered grocery delivery. How often do you buy non-fiction books online? They resemble Columbo’s “What did you do after 10 PM last Friday?”

While research questions are agreed upon with the team in advance, interview questions are left to the researcher’s discretion. For example, in one case, you ask a single “Tell me about the last time…” question and get tons of data from a talkative and relaxed person. But another respondent will give you a tiny piece of a puzzle at a time, and you’ll need to ask more granular questions, “What did you order? How did you choose? What payment did you choose? Why this option?” and so on.

Lesson 5: Don’t Take Words At Face Value

Why is “Columbo” so fun to watch? Because the Lieutenant always allows his suspects to justify themselves and compose plausible explanations in a naive attempt to ward off suspicion. I think the suspects should’ve kept silent instead of trying to divert Columbo’s investigation.

The iconic dialog between Columbo and Paul Gerard shows how early one can recognize lies. The episode “Murder Under Glass” (S7E2) tells about a food critic who extorted money from restaurant owners in exchange for positive reviews and poisoned one of them for fear of exposure.

Paul Gerard: When did you first suspect me?
Columbo: As it happens, sir… about two minutes after I met you.
Paul Gerard: That can’t be possible.
Columbo: Oh, you made it perfectly clear, sir, the very first night when you decided to come to the restaurant directly after you were informed that Vittorio was poisoned.
Paul Gerard: I was instructed to come here by the police.
Columbo: And you came, sir.
Paul Gerard: Yes.
Columbo: After eating dinner with a man that had been poisoned. You didn’t go to a doctor. You came because the police instructed you. You didn’t go to a hospital. You didn’t even ask to have your stomach pumped. Mr. Gerard, that’s the damnedest example of good citizenship I’ve ever seen.

Surprisingly, this strongly relates to UX.

All people lie. Influential stakeholders try to push forward their ideas. Some people desire to appear more knowledgeable than they are. Others are afraid to share opinions if they don’t know how they’ll be used. You can also find yourself in the center of office politics when officially declared messages contradict actual goals.

Due to classical UX doctrines, designers are called “user advocates” and broadcasters of the “user’s voice,” but it doesn’t mean we should listen to people indiscriminately.

If a person craves a feature but has zero examples of how something similar has helped them in the past, it might be an exaggeration. If a business owner says an app is successful but has only feedback from her colleagues, it may be overly optimistic. And so on. When we notice information discrepancies, the best choice is to continue asking questions, and then, maybe, your interlocutor will start to doubt their own words. For example,

Product owner: Hey, Ann! We need to have an export feature so that users can download nice-looking PDF reports.
Designer: Just for my understanding. Can you please explain the context of this feature idea?
Product owner: Well, I think it’s pretty clear. Export is a standard thing for engineering applications. Probably, there should be a button or icon above the dashboard; a user clicks, and then a PDF with our logo…
Designer: Jack, sorry for interrupting. I’m asking this not out of curiosity but because I want to get it right. If you remember the user interviews last month, engineers usually copy-paste data from the dashboard into a PowerPoint template with their company’s branding…
Product owner: That’s a very good question. I need to double-check it.

So, Columbo teaches us to trust but verify. Carefully listen to what you’re told, don’t show skepticism or suspicion, and continue asking questions until you reach the root cause of a problem.

Summary

Of course, the lessons I deduced from TV series aren’t even close to being comparable with mature research methodologies and UX culture. Unlike the time when I started my design career, today, I see more and more dedicated researchers who take care of insights that steer businesses in the right direction. So, I hope this article entertains you with unusual parallels between UX and fictional crime investigation.

If Lieutenant Columbo were a UX guru like Don Norman or Jacob Nielsen, he would probably give us the following advice:

Don’t flash your fancy UX title without necessity.
Don’t show off in front of users; this is not a job interview or top management presentation.
Strive to observe users in context, in their “natural habitat.”
Have plenty of contextual and follow-up questions up your sleeve.
All people lie (often unintentionally). Double-check their words.

What Is Google’s INP Score and How to Improve It in WordPress

Are you wondering what Google’s INP score is and how to improve it on your WordPress website?

Interaction to Next Paint (INP) is a Core Web Vitals metric from Google. Improving this score will make your website feel more responsive to your users.

In this article, we will show you how to improve your Google INP score in WordPress and explain what Google’s INP score is.

What is Google INP score and how to improve it in WordPress

Here is a quick overview of the topics we will cover in this guide:

What Are Google Core Web Vitals?
What Is Google INP?
Why Is Google Changing the FID Metric to INP?
How to Measure Google INP Score in WordPress
How to Improve Google INP Score in WordPress
How Website Owners Can Optimize Their Sites for INP
How Developers Can Optimize Their Code for INP
Examples of Good JavaScript Coding Practices for Developers

What Are Google Core Web Vitals?

Google Core Web Vitals are website performance metrics that Google considers important for overall user experience. These web vital scores are part of Google’s overall page experience score, which will impact your SEO rankings.

These metrics are useful because, even if your WordPress website loads fast, it may not be fully functional for users. Even if a page has loaded, a visitor might not be able to do what they want or access the information they need.

Core Web Vitals are designed to help with this. They let you measure how quickly your website loads, becomes visible, and is ready for your visitors to use.

To do that, Google uses three quality tests:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
First Input Delay (FID)
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

You can learn more about these tests in our ultimate guide on how to optimize Core Web Vitals for WordPress.

However, Google is replacing FID with a new test called INP (Interaction to Next Paint).

This change currently has the status of ‘Pending’ and will be finalized in March 2024. This gives you time to prepare so that your SEO rankings are not impacted, and we will show you how later in this article.

What Is Google INP?

INP stands for ‘Interaction to Next Paint’. It is a new Google Core Web Vital metric that measures the user interactions that cause delays on your website.

The INP test measures how long it takes between a user interacting with your website, like clicking on something, and your content visually updating in response. This visual update is called the ‘next paint’.

For example, a user might submit a contact form on your site, click on a button, or select an image that opens in a lightbox. The INP test will measure the time taken between the user performing these interactions and actually seeing the updated content on your website.

The Google test then comes up with a single INP score based on the duration of most user interactions on your website. The score will either be ‘Good’, ‘Needs Improvement’, or ‘Poor’, depending on how long your website takes to update visually.

Why Is Google Changing the FID Metric to INP?

The current FID test measures how quickly your website responds to the first user input after the page loads, such as a mouse click or keyboard press. It does this by measuring the time between the first input from the user and when your website starts to act on that input.

In other words, it measures how responsive your website is when it first loads and the first impression that it gives to real users.

However, this metric isn’t as helpful as it could be. There are two limitations to the FID test:

It only measures the first user interaction, not all of them.
It only measures until the website starts to process the interaction, not when the user can actually see the visual feedback on the screen.

So Google is changing the test to give a more complete picture of the overall responsiveness of a web page. INP will measure the entire time the user spends there until they leave the page.

How to Measure Google INP Score in WordPress

The easiest way to test your Google Core Web Vitals score is by using the PageSpeed Insights tool. Simply enter the URL you want to test and click the ‘Analyze’ button.

Analyzing a Web Page for Page Speed Insights

The tool will analyze the web page for a few seconds and then show you the test results.

Note: You can also view Core Web Vitals using DebugBear’s Free Website Speed Test or Site Speed Chrome Extension, which are preferred by some developers.

Now, along with other Google Core Web Vitals, you will also see the page’s Interaction to Next Paint (INP) score.

There will be different scores for mobile and desktop users.

In the screenshot above, you can see the INP score for desktop users viewing this web page on WPBeginner is 47 ms. The green dot means that this is a good score.

Once you can see the score for your own site, you will probably be wondering how it compares with other websites and whether it needs to be improved.

Google has provided some guidelines for interpreting your INP score:

Faster than 200 milliseconds – good responsiveness
200-500 milliseconds – needs improvement
Slower than 500 milliseconds – poor responsiveness

Make sure you check your score for both mobile and desktop users and aim for good responsiveness.

You can then improve your INP score by following the guidelines in the sections below.

Case Study: Finding Slow Interactions on Awesome Motive’s Websites

But first, it may be helpful to look at a case study. We have started measuring the INP scores on our brand sites, including All in One SEO, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.

When our team checked our website’s INP scores, the initial results showed that our most popular pages needed improvement.

Using the Chrome User Experience (CrUX) dashboard, we could see that:

80% of our sessions were rated ‘good’
12% of our sessions were rated ‘needs improvement’
8% of our sessions were rated ‘poor’

Now, we don’t yet know which specific interactions on our pages are slow and need to be optimized. This information isn’t provided by Google while testing.

That means that next, we will need to run our own tests to find slow interactions on pages with lower INP scores. This is a detailed and advanced task that is best performed by a developer.

It is done by going to each page that needs improvement and then testing each interaction with actual clicks, taps, and key presses. These need to be timed and evaluated using tools.

The Chrome Developers Blog lists a number of tools that can be used for testing, such as the Chrome Web Vitals extension and the new timespan mode in the Lighthouse Panel in DevTools. You can also see Google’s article on how to debug using the Web Vitals extension.

It’s important to note that the sessions with lower ratings most likely took place on slower devices or connections. That means that while testing, it is recommended to throttle your browser’s speed, or you may not spot the slow interactions.

You can do that using Chrome’s Inspect Element feature by going to View » Developer » Inspect Elements. You can switch to the ‘Network’ tab and select a throttling option from the dropdown menu.

Using Chrome Inspect Elements to Throttle Your Browser

Once you have found the INP scores for your pages, you can use the tips in the next section of this tutorial to improve them.

How to Improve Google INP Score in WordPress

Most of the INP score optimization work will need to be done by developers. That includes the authors of the theme and plugins you use on your website, plus the developers of any custom JavaScript you are running.

That’s because the INP score is mostly related to the time required to perform JavaScript interactions on your website.

For example, when a user clicks a button, some JavaScript code is run to perform the function expected by clicking the button. This code is downloaded to the user’s computer and runs in their web browser.

To optimize your INP score, the delays that happen during JavaScript user interactions must be reduced. There are three components to this delay:

Input delay, which happens when your website is waiting for background tasks on that page that prevent the event handler from running.
Processing time, which is the time required to run event handlers in JavaScript.
Presentation delay, which is the time required to recalculate the page and paint the page content on the screen.

As a website owner, there are steps you can take to improve the first and third delays. We will show you how in the next section.

However, to make real improvements to your INP score, you will need to improve the second delay, which is the processing time of the code itself. That’s not something that you can do yourself.

The developers of your WordPress theme, plugins, and custom JavaScript may need to optimize their code to give feedback to your users immediately. The good news is they are probably already working on this to meet the March 2024 deadline.

We offer some specific tips for developers with examples later in this article.

How Website Owners Can Optimize Their Sites for INP

While the most significant impact on your website’s INP score will come from developers optimizing their code, there are a few things that website owners can do.

In particular, you can make sure that your users’ mouse clicks and keystrokes are recognized as soon as possible by optimizing background processes on your site. Also, you can make sure the response to their input is displayed on the screen as quickly as possible.

Here are some steps you can take to achieve that.

1. Make Sure You Are Running the Latest Version of WordPress

The first thing you should do is make sure you are running the latest version of WordPress.

That’s because WordPress versions 6.2 and 6.3 introduced significant performance improvements. These will improve your website’s performance on the server side and client side, which will improve your INP score.

For detailed instructions, you can see our guide on how to safely update WordPress.

2. Optimize Background Processes in WordPress

Background processes are scheduled tasks in WordPress that run in the background. They might include checking for WordPress updates, publishing scheduled posts, and backing up your website.

If your website gets too busy running these background tasks, then it may not realize right away that the user has clicked the mouse or pressed a key, resulting in a poor INP score.

You may be able to configure your background scripts and plugins to reduce the amount of work they are doing, placing less strain on your website. Otherwise, you might be able to run them only when they are needed instead of leaving them running in the background.

For detailed instructions, you can see the Optimize Background Processes section of our ultimate guide on how to boost WordPress speed and performance.

3. Check the PageSpeed Insights Performance Recommendations

After you run the PageSpeed Insights test on your website, you can scroll down to the Performance section of the test results.

Here, you will find some opportunities to improve your site’s performance along with the estimated time savings if you follow the advice.

PageSpeed Insights Performance Opportunities and Diagnostics

For example, you may see recommendations to eliminate render-blocking resources. You can do this by following our guide on how to fix render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in WordPress.

You may also see a recommendation to reduce unused JavaScript. You will find a setting to do this in many of the best WordPress caching plugins, such as WP Rocket.

4. Minify JavaScript in WordPress

JavaScript needs to be downloaded to the user’s computer before it can be run. By making your JavaScript files as small as possible, you can make some small gains in performance.

Minifying your JavaScript makes the files smaller by removing white spaces, lines, and unnecessary characters from the source code.

This won’t have a dramatic effect on your performance, but if you are looking to shave a few extra milliseconds off your INP score, then you may find it worthwhile.

To learn how, you can see our guide on how to minify CSS and JavaScript files in WordPress.

How Developers Can Optimize Their Code for INP

If you are a developer, then the biggest INP score gains will come from optimizing your code. Here are a few things you can do.

1. Visually Acknowledge User Input Immediately

Here’s the one thing that will make the most difference when optimizing your code’s INP score: You need to give visual feedback to all user input immediately.

The user should see right away that their input has been recognized and that you are acting on it. This will make your code feel more responsive to the user and result in a great INP score.

Here are a few examples:

If a user clicks on an element, then you should display something that shows that the element was clicked.
If a user submits a form, then you need to immediately display something to acknowledge that, such as a message or spinner.
If a user clicks on an image to open it in a lightbox, then don’t just wait for the image to load. Instead, you should show a demo image or spinner immediately. Then, when the image is loaded, you can display it in the lightbox.

More than anything else, this will improve your INP score, especially if you need to do heavy JavaScript processing in response to user input.

Just make sure you update the UI before starting the task. After that, you can do the CPU-heavy work in a setTimeout callback or on a separate thread using a web worker, and then finally present the results to the user.

Once you get that right, there are a few more things you can do to optimize your code.

2. Optimize Where the Browser Spends Most of Its Time

The next thing you should do is investigate where the browser is spending most of its time and then optimize those parts.

In Google Chrome, when you navigate to View » Developer » Developer Tools » Performance, it is possible to inspect the JavaScript functions and event handlers that are blocking the next paint.

With that knowledge, you can see what can be optimized in order to reduce the time until the next paint after user interaction.

3. Reduce Your Layouts

Sometimes, a lot of CPU activity consists of layout work.

When that happens, you should check to see if you can reduce the number of relayout functions in your code.

4. Show Above-the-Fold Content First

If rendering the page contents is slow, then your INP score may be affected.

You can consider showing only important ‘above-the-fold’ content first to deliver the next frame more quickly.

Examples of Good JavaScript Coding Practices for Developers

It may be helpful to show you some examples of how bad code can result in a poor INP score.

We put together an example project on CodePen that you can experiment with. You can examine our sample code, read our short explanations, and see the difference it makes by clicking the buttons.

Here’s an animation from that CodePen project. You can see that the unoptimized sample code results in a poor INP score of 965 milliseconds. The button press will feel laggy to users.

By contrast, the optimized code updates the button text immediately, resulting in the best possible INP score.

Animation of CodePen Example Project for Optimizing INP Score

Read on to see four examples of how you can improve your code to optimize the INP score.

Example 1: Update the Screen Before Running a Heavy CPU Task

CPU-heavy tasks take time, and this can lead to poor INP scores unless you write good code. In this case, it’s best to update the screen before running that task.

Here is a bad example where the user interface is updated after a heavy CPU task. This results in a high INP:

// Bad example
button.addEventListener('click', () => {
  // Heavy CPU task
  for (let i = 0; i < 10000000; i++) {
    console.log(i);
  }
  // UI update
  button.textContent = 'Clicked!';});

In this improved example, the user interface is updated immediately when the button is clicked.

After that, the heavy CPU task is moved to a setTimeout callback:

// Better example
button.addEventListener('click', () => {
  // UI update
  button.textContent = 'Processing...';

  // Heavy CPU task
  setTimeout(() => {
    for (let i = 0; i < 10000000; i++)
 {
      console.log(i);
    }
    // Final UI update
    button.textContent = 'Done!';
  }, 0);
});

This allows the browser to update the screen before starting the slow task, resulting in a good INP score.

Example 2: Schedule Non-Urgent Processing

You should also make sure that you don’t run non-urgent or non-essential work in a script immediately when it may delay the response the user is expecting.

You should start by updating the page immediately to acknowledge the user’s input. After that, you can use requestIdleCallback to schedule the rest of the script when there is free time at the end of a frame or when the user is inactive.

Here is an example:

button.addEventListener('click', () => {
  // Immediate UI update
  button.textContent = 'Processing...';

  // Non-essential processing  window.requestIdleCallback(() => {
    // Perform non-essential processing here...    button.textContent = 'Done!';
  });
});

This will make the web page feel more responsive to the user and get you a better INP score.

Example 3: Schedule a Function to Run Before the Next Paint

You can also userequestAnimationFrame to schedule a function to be run before the next repaint:

button.addEventListener('click', () => {
  // Immediate UI update
  button.textContent = 'Processing...';

  // Visual update
  window.requestAnimationFrame(() => {
    // Perform visual update here...    button.style.backgroundColor = 'green';    button.textContent = 'Done!';
  });
});

This can be useful for animations or visual updates in response to user interactions.

Again, you should give the user feedback by acknowledging their input immediately.

Example 4: Avoid Layout Thrashing

Layout thrashing occurs when you repeatedly read and write to the DOM (Document Object Model), causing the browser to recalculate the layout multiple times.

Here is an example of layout thrashing:

// Bad example
elements.forEach(element => {
  const height = element.offsetHeight; // read  element.style.height = height + 'px'; // write});

This can be avoided by batching your reads and writes.

This is a better example:

// Good example
const heights = elements.map(element => element.offsetHeight); // batched read
elements.forEach((element, index) => {
  element.style.height = heights[index] + 'px'; // batched write
});

We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to improve your Google INP score in WordPress. You may also want to see our ultimate guide to WordPress SEO or our expert picks for the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post What Is Google’s INP Score and How to Improve It in WordPress first appeared on WPBeginner.

July 12, 2023

How to Do a UX Audit of Your WordPress Site

Do you want to perform a User Experience (UX) audit of your WordPress website?

User experience is an important factor in the success of a website. A good user experience can lead to more conversions and sales, while a poor UX can cost you money.

In this article, we will show you how to easily do a UX audit of your WordPress website step-by-step.

Performing a UX audit on a WordPress website

Here is a quick overview of all the steps we will cover to perform a UX audit on your WordPress website:

What Is UX, and Why Is It Important?
How to Perform a UX Audit of Your Website
Step 1: Define User Goals and Objectives
Step 2: Test Your Website for Usability Issues
Step 3: Find the Pages Performing Poorly
Step 4: Ask For User Feedback
Step 5: Optimize Your Website Speed & Performance
Step 6: Evaluate Website Navigation
Step 7: Test Conversion Elements
Step 8: Test User Flows to Find Bottlenecks
Step 9: Evaluate Website Content Quality

What Is UX, and Why Is It Important?

User experience or UX describes the feelings and opinions that users have while using your website.

A pleasant user experience means users find your website easy to use and helpful.

By contrast, a poor user experience means users find your website difficult to use and can’t do what they want to do.

Creating a good user experience allows you to help users make the most out of your website. This eventually leads to conversions, sales, and business growth.

On the other hand, a negative user experience can cause visitors to leave your website without signing up or buying something in your online store. This causes you to lose potential sales and customers.

How to Perform a UX Audit of Your Website

As a business owner, you need to regularly check your website to make sure that it offers a good user experience.

This practice is called a UX audit. You can perform a UX audit by yourself using a combination of tools (you may already be using some of them).

During this process, you will look for issues that may negatively affect user experience on your website. When you find a problem, you can document it and then start fixing it.

Ready? Let’s get started.

Step 1: Define User Goals and Objectives

First, you need to put yourself into users’ shoes to understand what they are looking for when they reach your website.

For instance, if your website is an online store selling pet toys, your audience’s goal is likely to look at pet toys, read customer reviews for those products, and make a purchase.

Similarly, if you run a how-to blog, then your audience’s goal would be to read a tutorial and learn how to do something.

Understanding what your users want to achieve will allow you to help them better.

The easiest way to do this is by creating user personas for your target audience.

This exercise allows you to better understand users and their expectations of your website. Most importantly, it helps you figure out the goals and objectives of your target audience.

You can then analyze your website using these personas to see how quickly your content, products, and services can help those users.

Step 2: Test Your Website for Usability Issues

Testing your website for usability helps you quickly find problems that could destroy the user experience.

However, many issues often go unnoticed by website administrators until a user reports them. Users are more likely to switch to your competitor’s website than tell you about issues on your site.

Luckily, there are plenty of excellent tools that you can use to quickly detect potentially harmful usability issues on your website.

PageSpeed Insights (Free)

Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool lets you quickly examine a URL for performance and usability issues.

It runs tests on your website and then presents the results for both mobile and desktop devices by assigning each one a score.

This score is given in four categories:

Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO

It also tests for Core Web Vitals, which are a set of website performance metrics that Google considers essential to a website’s overall user experience.

When you run the test, the language may initially sound too technical. However, you will also find links to resources explaining these concepts in beginner-friendly terms with tips on resolving each issue.

You can also read our guide on how to optimize your website for Google’s Core Web Vitals.

Google Search Console

PageSpeed Insights is a handy tool to quickly look up URLs.

However, you will have to manually run the tests, and you can’t find which pages on your website are having issues until you specifically test them.

What if you could automate this process, quickly find the pages with usability issues, and get alerts when a new problem is detected?

This is where Google Search Console comes in.

It is a free tool provided by Google for website administrators who want to see how their websites are performing in search.

User experience is an essential metric for search rankings. This is why Google wants to alert website owners when a usability issue is detected.

First, you will need to visit Google Search Console and add your website as a property. For instructions, you can follow our tutorial on how to add your website to Google Search Console.

Once you have added your website, it may take a while for Google to collect some data and start showing reports.

After that, you will see your site’s performance and usability reports in the ‘Experience’ section.

User experience section under Google Search Console

You can click on each report and drill down to find the pages where usability issues are detected.

For example, on this demo website, we found four pages in the ‘Mobile Usability’ section that were having issues.

You can click on each row to find the exact pages where the issues were detected.

Google Search Console will also alert you by email when a new crawling or usability issue is detected.

Besides usability and crawling issues, Google Search Console is a treasure trove of valuable data. To learn more, you can see our expert tips on using Google Search Console to get more traffic.

Step 3: Find the Pages Performing Poorly

Automated tools can help you catch many problems. However, they are not perfect and may not be able to identify many common UX problems.

If you have a small website, you can go to each page to manually review it yourself. However, it is impossible for most medium to large websites to do this manually.

So, how do you find pages with poor UX?

One easy way to find these pages is by using MonsterInsights. It is the best Google Analytics plugin on the market that allows you to see where your users are coming from and how they interact with your website.

First, you need to install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin. For more details, see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: There is also a free version of MonsterInsights that you can try. However, we recommend upgrading to the paid version and unlocking the full potential of the plugin.

Upon activation, the plugin will run the setup wizard and help you connect WordPress with your Google Analytics account.

For more details, you can see our tutorial on how to install Google Analytics in WordPress.

Once you are connected, MonsterInsights will start tracking your website visitors.

Next, you need to set up the plugin to easily track conversions.

Enable eCommerce Conversion Tracking

If you use an eCommerce platform on your WordPress website, MonsterInsights can help you easily track conversions.

Google Analytics comes with enhanced eCommerce tracking, which works for most eCommerce websites, including WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, and more.

However, you will need to enable it for your website manually.

Start by visiting the Insights » Addons page in your WordPress admin dashboard to install and activate the eCommerce addon.

Next, you need to enable enhanced eCommerce tracking in your Google Analytics account. Go to your Google Analytics dashboard and select your website.

From here, click on the ‘Admin’ button in the bottom left corner.

Switch to admin view in Google Analytics

On the next screen, you will see different Google Analytics settings.

Under the ‘View’ column, just click the ‘Ecommerce Settings’ link.

On the next screen, simply turn on the toggles next to the ‘Enable Ecommerce’ and ‘Enable Enhanced Ecommerce Reporting’ options.

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save’ button when you are done.

Enable eCommerce reporting in Google Analytics

Check Low Conversion Pages for UX Issues

Poor user experience is one of the main reasons for low conversions, abandoned carts, and high bounce rates.

You can view your conversion tracking reports in MonsterInsights to find pages with low conversions and higher bounce rates.

Simply go to the Insights » Reports page inside the WordPress admin area and then switch to the ‘eCommerce’ tab.

From here, you can see an overview of your top-performing products and conversion sources.

For advanced reports, you need to switch to your Google Analytics account and go to the Engagement » Pages and screens tab.

From here, you can sort the pages by conversion rate to see the pages with the least conversions.

Using Google Analytics, you can also track pages with the highest bounce rates, the least amount of time spent on them, and more.

For more conversion tracking options, you can see our complete guide on WordPress conversion tracking. It will also show you how to track form conversions, affiliate link conversions, and more.

Step 4: Ask For User Feedback

As you can see, many UX audit activities involve automated tools, analytics reports, and manual testing.

The entire point of the UX audit exercise is to improve user experience. So, why not just ask your users what they think?

Asking for user feedback can get you accurate input from real visitors about your website. It can help you find specific problems and fix them more easily.

This is where UserFeedback comes in.

Note: There is also a free plugin called UserFeedback Lite that you can try. We recommend upgrading to the Pro version to unlock the full potential of the plugin.

UserFeedback allows you to quickly run surveys and collect user feedback on your website. It also lets you show the surveys to the right users at the right time.

For example, you can show surveys to users on the pages with fewer conversions or display a feedback form to users on mobile devices.

For more information, you can see our UserFeedback announcement post.

Step 5: Optimize Your Website Speed & Performance

Website speed is a major contributor to user experience. Slow sites cause poor UX and prevent users from moving forward and accessing your content.

The tools we mentioned earlier, like PageSpeed Insights and Core Web Vitals, can help you evaluate the performance of your website.

However, if you are using MonsterInsights, then you can also run a website speed test inside your WordPress admin area.

Simply switch to the Insights » Reports page and then open the ‘Site Speed’ tab.

The report will run the same tests as PageSpeed Insights and show you a report. It will also give you practical tips to improve website performance.

Fixing Performance and Speed Issues

The easiest way to fix most performance issues is by simply installing a WordPress caching plugin.

We recommend using WP Rocket, which is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market. It lets you easily optimize your WordPress website without learning the technical stuff.

First, you need to install and activate the WP Rocket plugin. For details, see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, WP Rocket will start caching your website’s content.

Unlike other caching plugins that generate a cache when a user visits your website, WP Rocket automatically starts creating a cache in the background.

This means each new user on your website will see a cached version that loads much quicker and improves user experience.

You can learn more by reading our tutorial on setting up WP Rocket with more detailed instructions.

If caching doesn’t immediately fix your website speed, we recommend following our complete WordPress speed and performance guide. It includes step-by-step instructions on how to optimize your website speed.

Step 6: Evaluate Website Navigation

Users expect your site to have a navigation menu with the links they need to find the information they want.

Sometimes, a website may not have a navigation menu that helps users reach the page they want. This leads to a poor user experience, and visitors may leave and try some other website.

You need to make sure that your website has a straightforward navigation menu that takes users to the critical areas of your website.

Adding a search bar to your website’s header or navigation menu can also improve user experience. If users can’t find a link quickly, then they can try searching on your website.

However, the default WordPress search is not very good.

Instead, we recommend using SearchWP. It is the best WordPress search plugin on the market and quickly improves the search experience on your website.

SearchWP allows you to make everything on your website searchable, including custom fields, eCommerce attributes, custom tables, categories, tags, and more.

First, you need to install and activate the SearchWP plugin. For more details, see our tutorial on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, you need to visit the SearchWP » Algorithm page and switch to the ‘Engines’ tab.

From here, you can adjust the search engine settings for the different content types by scrolling to the Posts, Pages, and Media sections.

Here, you can choose which attributes are searchable on your website. You can also choose their relevance.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button to store your settings.

SearchWP will now replace your default WordPress search feature with its own custom search engine.

For more details, you can see our tutorial on how to improve WordPress search with SearchWP.

Step 7: Test Conversion Elements

A lot of the time, poor user experience is caused at the end of a conversion path.

For instance, you might have users trying to submit your lead capture form, but something is stopping them from doing so.

Luckily, you can run split tests and manually test elements on your website to identify and fix problems.

Run A/B Split Tests to Figure Out UX Issues

An easy way to test your conversion elements is by running A/B split tests.

An A/B split test allows you to create two or more versions of a page with slight differences. It then shows users a different version randomly.

You can then compare the results to find out which variation of the page performed the best among your users.

The easiest way to run these tests on your WordPress website is by using Thrive Optimize. It lets you quickly create and run A/B tests on your WordPress website.

First, you will need to install and activate Thrive Optimize plugin. You can purchase the plugin with Thrive Architect or get it with Thrive Suite bundle.

Next, install and activate the Thrive Product Manager plugin on your website. You can download it from your Account Dashboard on the Thrive Themes website.

Upon activating the plugin, you need to go to the Product Manager page in the WordPress admin area.

Next, you need to check the ‘Install Product’ box under the Thrive Optimize and Thrive Architect products.

After that, click on the ‘Install Selected Products’ button to continue.

After installing the plugins, you will need to create or edit a post/ page and then click on the ‘Launch Thrive Architect’ button at the top.

This will show a popup where you can choose how to edit the page.

You can edit the page as a regular page using your theme template or as a landing page with a custom template.

If you choose a pre-built landing page, then you will be asked to choose a template.

Thrive Architect comes with dozens of beautiful templates for various niches to choose from.

After that, you will be able to edit your page in Thrive Architect’s page builder.

It is an intuitive design tool where you can point and click on any element to edit it or click on the ‘+’ button to insert new elements.

Once you have finished editing your page, don’t forget to click the ‘Save Work’ button to store your changes.

After that, click on the ‘A/B’ button in the right column to create a new A/B test.

To run your A/B test, you need to have at least two versions of a page.

On the next screen, click on the Add New Variation button to create a new version of your landing page.

It will now create a new variation, and you can start editing it using the Thrive Architect.

Make the changes to the page you think will work better than the previous version.

After that, simply click on the ‘Save Work’ button to store your changes, and then click on the ‘A/B’ button again.

You can choose how much traffic you want to send to each page variation and then click on the ‘Set Up & Start A/B Test’ button at the top.

This will bring up a popup where you can configure the A/B test settings.

You need to give your test a title and description. Afterward, you can turn on Automatic Winner settings and set minimum requirements for a variation to win.

Click on the ‘Next’ button to continue.

Finally, you will be asked to choose a goal for the test. For example, if it is a product page, then you may want to choose ‘Revenue’.

Finally, click on the ‘Start A/B Test’ button to finish the setup.

Thrive Optimize will now start showing the two variations of the page to your users and keep track of user interactions on the page.

You can view the test results anytime by visiting the Thrive Dashboard » Thrive Optimize page.

Once the test has run its duration, you can see which page has performed better for conversions or the goals you set during the test. You will then be able to make changes to improve the UX on your website.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to run A/B tests on your WordPress website.

Manually Test Conversion Elements

A lot of time, you may not be able to run A/B split tests for all your pages. Luckily, there are other ways to test whether conversion elements on your pages are working.

Website owners are often just looking at the static representation of their website and not interacting with it like a real user would. That’s why many interactive failures go unnoticed for a long time.

This is when you will need to do some manual work. You can try to imitate a user journey as best as possible to complete a conversion.

For instance, if you run an eCommerce store, you can start from the page where your users usually land. Afterward, look at product pages, add items to the cart, and complete the checkout.

Within your UX audit, you must test all your forms, cart functionality, and checkout experience by interacting with those elements like a customer.

Plus, don’t forget to test these elements on both mobile and desktop environments.

Step 8: Test User Flows to Find Bottlenecks

A user flow is a customer’s journey across your website. A user will usually take a predictable path to different areas of your website until they buy something or submit a form.

The best way to track user flows is by using MonsterInsights. It comes with a User Journey addon that allows you to see every step of a customer’s journey throughout your site, including the pages and products they looked at and how long they were there.

Simply install and activate the MonsterInsights plugin.

Note: You will need at least the Pro plan of the plugin to use the User Journey addon.

After setting up MonsterInsights, you need to go to the Insights » Addons page. From here, locate the User Journey addon and then install and activate it.

Next, you need to install and activate the eCommerce addon. This will help you track customer journeys on popular eCommerce platforms for WordPress like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, MemberPress, and more.

Now, MonsterInsights will show the user’s journey on individual orders. For example, in WooCommmerce, you can go to WooCommerce » Orders page and click on an individual order.

On the order details page, scroll down to the MonsterInsights User Journey section.

This will show you all the user interactions on your site with their times and durations.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to enable customer tracking in WooCommerce.

If you are not using an eCommerce platform, then you can still track the user journey for your WordPress forms.

If you are using WPForms to capture leads, then it comes with user journey tracking that helps you track which path a user took to submit the form.

Like conversion elements, other areas of your website could disrupt user flow and block the path that leads them to become a customer.

You will need to manually evaluate user paths in Google Analytics to see where their journey abruptly ends. You can also simulate the user paths to see if you can come across a usability issue preventing the user from going forward.

Step 9: Evaluate Website Content Quality

Visual elements are not the only things that create a good or bad user experience.

Your website content plays a significant role in convincing users to stay on your WordPress blog or website and look around. It also helps search engines find your content more easily and send more visitors to your site.

We recommend performing a complete SEO audit of your website and optimizing your content for SEO.

To do that, you will need All in One SEO for WordPress. It is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market that allows you to easily improve your content for search rankings and user experience.

All in One SEO comes with built-in SEO analysis, a headline analyzer, and site-wide SEO audit tools. All these features help you improve the quality and discoverability of your content.

You will also need to evaluate your content. For example, if a particular page is not ranking or converting well, then consider making it more comprehensive by adding more helpful content.

For more details, you can see our guide on how to fix content decay in WordPress.

Don’t forget to check your content for spelling and grammar mistakes. They could make your website seem unprofessional and create a bad user experience.

We recommend using Grammarly. It is the best AI-powered writing tool that helps you automatically correct spelling and grammar mistakes.

Grammarly also has a free forever plan with spelling and grammar checks. However, we recommend buying a paid plan to unlock more powerful features.

We hope this article helped you learn how to do a UX audit of your WordPress website. You may also want to see our guide on how to do an SEO audit of your site or our expert picks for the best email marketing services to grow your website.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Do a UX Audit of Your WordPress Site first appeared on WPBeginner.

July 10, 2023

Why does quality website design matter for a company?

User Experience: A well-designed website enhances the user experience, making it easy for visitors to navigate, find information, and engage with your content. A user-friendly interface with intuitive navigation and clear organization helps visitors stay longer on your site and encourages them to explore further.
Professionalism and Credibility: A visually appealing and polished website creates a positive impression of your brand or business. It conveys professionalism, reliability, and attention to detail. When visitors perceive your website as high-quality and trustworthy, they are more likely to perceive your products or services in the same light.
Branding and Differentiation: Website design plays a crucial role in establishing and reinforcing your brand identity. It allows you to showcase your unique best, personality, and values, differentiating yourself from competitors. Consistent branding across your website builds recognition and strengthens your brand image.
Conversion and Engagement: Effective website design elements, such as clear call-to-action buttons, strategically placed forms, and optimized layouts, can significantly impact your conversion rates. A well-designed website guides visitors towards desired actions, such as making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, or filling out a contact form. It also encourages user engagement, such as commenting, sharing content, or participating in discussions.
Mobile Responsiveness: With the increasing use of smartphones and tablets, having a website that is mobile-responsive is crucial. A responsive design adapts to different screen sizes and devices, ensuring that your website looks and functions well on mobile devices. This is essential because a significant portion of internet traffic comes from mobile users, and a poorly optimized mobile experience can drive visitors away.

July 5, 2023

Understanding API Caching and Its Benefits in Improving Performance and User Experience

Caching plays a vital role in enhancing the performance and scalability of APIs, allowing for quicker retrieval of data and reducing the load on backend systems. By intelligently storing and serving frequently accessed data, caching can significantly improve response times and overall user experience. In this article, we will build upon the insights shared in our earlier blog post and explore different caching strategies that can be employed to optimize API performance further.

Before we dive in, we'd like to acknowledge the inspiration for this article. We draw upon the valuable insights and expertise shared in the blog post titled "Using Caching Strategies to Improve API Performance" by Toro Cloud, a leading provider of API management solutions. If you haven't read their insightful post yet, we highly recommend checking it out.

June 8, 2023

Optimizing User Experience in E-Learning Platforms: Designing Intuitive Interfaces and Seamless Navigation

E-learning allows individuals to gain knowledge and skills from the comfort of their homes. You don’t need to wake up early and visit classes anymore—the education happens online and starts when you are ready. That’s...

The post Optimizing User Experience in E-Learning Platforms: Designing Intuitive Interfaces and Seamless Navigation appeared first on 85ideas.com.

July 27, 2022

Developer Experience vs. User Experience

While they may seem similar at first glance, Developer Experience (DX) is not just “User Experience (UX) for developers”. Rather, DX is an extension of UX focused on users who build with technical languages and tooling. DX follows the same core principles of UX but extends it by recognizing that technical details and mechanical processes can be understood and utilized efficiently by a developer.

Great DX happens when developers feel they are being spoken to and having their needs met directly. This means showing code, providing lots of detail, and giving clear instructions for multiple use cases.

April 6, 2022

Automated Accessibility Testing

As more and more companies focus on making their apps accessible, a question that often comes up is "How do we make sure we don't let things slip?" We've done all this work to remediate our app, but how do we make sure we don't dig ourselves back into a hole six months later and end up in a similar situation that we are in now? How do we keep things accessible?

There are a few solutions. The first is education and training. Everyone in the company needs to be an accessibility advocate and understand accessibility best practices. The second is better organizational processes. Companies should include accessibility audits in natural checkpoints throughout the software development lifecycle, like when UX provides design mockups to the engineering team or when the engineering team is code complete on a new feature. The third is automated testing, and that's what I'd like to focus on today.

February 22, 2022

Here’s How You Can Kickstart Your Career in UI/UX Design

Before beginning, let us first understand what UX is.

UX (User Experience) can be said to be a process design team that is used for the creation of products that provide users with meaningful and relevant experiences. The acquiring and integration of the product is a complete process that includes types of branding, design of the product, usefulness, function, and successful accomplishment of this entire process is fully dependent on the design.

February 21, 2022

5 Epic Design Tips for Creating a Killer Mobile App

Design of any kind can be a huge concept to grasp. As we move from desktop to mobile, the complexity and questions we have to ask ourselves about design grow exponentially. Mobile users have a very different mindset compared to those who are at home by their computers. How do we design an experience for...

The post 5 Epic Design Tips for Creating a Killer Mobile App appeared first on DesignrFix.

February 12, 2022

How To Internationalize Your App’s Product Notifications

Internationalization in software development, known as “i18n” for its number of letters, is as vital as ever for modern companies. Web-based products and services are no longer tied to geographical and cultural boundaries and not every potential customer speak English. You might have designed your app with your native region in mind, but you’ll eventually need to expand your supported languages and regions to cater to a global audience.

In this article, you’ll learn about the scope of internationalization and the tools that are available to build software with internationalization logic. You’ll also see how our app's own internationalization workflow is designed and our suggestions for how to do it yourself.

February 4, 2022

The Real-time Web: Evolution of the User Experience

Over the last few years, companies have used real-time updates to add new experiences and features and increase their market share.

It's now standard to expect a page within an app or browser to update parts of itself without forcing it to refresh. For example, a news page of live sports scores updates with the latest goal scored, or an app shows a change as you track your taxi on a map.

January 31, 2022

How Can Backend Development Help To Improve User Experience?

We often confuse the User Experience (UX) with the User Interface (UI), which is associated only with the most visual part of a web or application.

In this article, we will briefly clarify what user experience refers to, and we will discuss the experience of my colleagues and myself providing solutions and improvements in this aspect of our application. We will also see how this has a direct impact on what is known as the Conversion Funnel. In short, we will understand how we can add value to our users, so we can get a better experience using our application and also, incidentally, end up improving our e-commerce sales.

January 28, 2022

Making APM a Company-Wide Effort

This is an article from DZone's 2021 Application Performance Management Trend Report.

For more:

Read the Report

Today, more than ever, users are unwilling to wait and tolerate failure. Nearly 50 percent of users expect a load time of less than two seconds. Hyperconnectivity has become the new status quo, and with it comes higher pressure on the industry to provide the best service possible. This has also transformed the software application landscape into an intricate net of components — from APIs to CDNs — each of which can easily become the weak link when a problem occurs, leading to poor customer experiences and unhappy end users.

January 19, 2022

Leveraging Gamification in your Mobile App for Superior User Experience: Top Tips

In general, video games are considered to be dopamine-releasing products. When you're happy or excited, the chemical is released into your system. To make a non-gaming app more enticing to users, you must provide them with a cause to return and compete with one another regularly. Therefore, it is safe to assume that incorporating this experience into any of your applications makes them more joyful for your customers to use.

Having to rewrite your website or app is the least appealing aspect of this solution. The addition of gamification to your program does nothing to improve its performance; rather, it just enriches the user experience by making it more entertaining and rewarding for the user. The inclusion of gamification elements directly influences the number of downloads of an app.

January 17, 2022

Backend Engineering Skills Are Emphasized Too Heavily for Principal Engineers

There is a bias toward backend engineers at the principal engineer level. This leaves frontend engineers heavily disadvantaged when it comes to promotion time.

When someone says they’re a fullstack engineer, what they usually mean is one of two things: 1) They’re a coding bootcamp grad that has minimal experience with Node.js and an emphasis on the frontend. Or, 2) they’re an experienced backend engineer that knows a little bit of HTML and CSS. A truly fullstack software engineer is a rare find.

Why Ask User Experience Feedback Questions in WordPress?

User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask Website Visitors

User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask WooCommerce Store Customers

User Experience Feedback Questions to Ask Website Visitors on Mobile

How to Add a User Experience Feedback Prompt in WordPress

Bonus: How to Do a UX Audit of Your WordPress Site

Case Study #1

Case Study #2

References

Further Reading

What Are Google Core Web Vitals?

What Is Google INP?

Why Is Google Changing the FID Metric to INP?

How to Measure Google INP Score in WordPress

How to Improve Google INP Score in WordPress

How Website Owners Can Optimize Their Sites for INP

How Developers Can Optimize Their Code for INP

Examples of Good JavaScript Coding Practices for Developers

What Is UX, and Why Is It Important?

How to Perform a UX Audit of Your Website

Step 1: Define User Goals and Objectives

Step 2: Test Your Website for Usability Issues

Step 3: Find the Pages Performing Poorly

Step 4: Ask For User Feedback

Step 5: Optimize Your Website Speed & Performance

Step 6: Evaluate Website Navigation

Step 7: Test Conversion Elements

Step 8: Test User Flows to Find Bottlenecks

Step 9: Evaluate Website Content Quality