How to defend your UX design decisions using Beusable Analytics
Defending your design decisions can be challenging, especially when you’re dealing with non-designers. Here is how data analytics can help.
Disclaimer: this article is affiliated with Beusable, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.*
Whether you are a new designer or you have 10 years of experience, communicating your design decisions to stakeholders can be daunting. Personal opinions and biases are always brought into the mix, and non-designers rarely seem to understand what user experience design actually is.
This is particularly true when it comes to freelance work for small businesses. Stakeholders are skeptical of your design recommendations because they feel that you do not know their business or the industry.
Which may be true, fair enough. But as a designer, you may not necessarily need to understand the business or industry. What is more valuable is understanding how users are currently interacting with the business’ product (for the purpose of this article, I will be using a website as an example), and having the data to back it up.
Now I know that when I bring up data analytics, your mind may go straight to Google Analytics. It’s information overload and can be difficult to filter, decipher, and most importantly, explain.
That’s exactly why I recommend using Beusable Analytics.
Their interface is so easy to navigate and the information that they display is digestible and clear. You will have no trouble understanding how users move through your site, and you will be able to explain it to stakeholders with ease.
Getting started
1. Make your account
First thing’s first, you need to make an account with Beusable if you don’t already have one.
2. Choose your domain
Next, you’ll need to enter the domain of the website that you plan on monitoring as well as give it a name.
3. Get code
Click ‘copy’ and the tracking code will be copied to your clipboard.
4. Apply to pages you want to track
Go into your website builder or code editor and apply the code to the pages that you want to track.
5. Inspect to make sure they’re applied properly
This is a bit of a bonus step, but you can use Beusable’s ‘inspect’ tool to make sure that all of the code that you applied was successful.
6. Wait
And finally…. You wait! Make the most of your time by conducting user research, competitor research, and maybe even testing while you’re waiting for your data to compile.
Analyzing the data for decision making
Once you get into your dashboard, you’ll understand how easy it is to start identifying issues and making design decisions. Your dashboard will give you a high-level overview of how your users interact with your site (page views, drop offs, refreshes, rollbacks, etc.), you can also see how your pages are ranked.
After getting a general overview, I recommend you move into the ‘journeys’ tab. Here, you will find the different paths that users take through your site. With this, you can determine:
- The most common paths that users take through your site.
- Which point in their journey are most users dropping off.
- Which pages are most important to users.
- The order in which users consume information.
- Where elements may be broken, take too long to load, or are otherwise undesirable to users.
And so much more!
Another important feature is that you can filter this data by device, referrer, and new vs returning users.
To go even further than this, you can apply ‘groups’ to your journeys. This is when you apply tags to certain pages based on your own criteria (this can be the type of page, perhaps certain pages are for certain users, pages that are in certain languages, etc.), and it is visually applied to your user journey screens.
Grouping is such a useful feature, because you can see if users are navigating through your intended flow at a glance. It’s easy to understand what’s going on with your journeys in seconds, and will take minimal explaining for others to understand as well.
Defending your design decisions
It is difficult to defend your design decisions to non-designers, plain and simple. Your stakeholders may feel that they know their customers better than you and that they know what the business needs. They will often give you design ‘recommendations’ (read: demands) based on what they think they know.
Well, with a tool that keeps things simple and visually appealing, you can give design recommendations based on what you know you know. When the data is there in front of them, it will be difficult to argue (though they may still find a way).
Once you actually apply your design changes, you can then track the data of the new version of the site and compare. This will prove or disprove your hypotheses of why your design decisions would improve the site’s performance.
Final thoughts
Even if I wasn’t affiliated with Beusable, I would still be recommending Beusable to everyone that could use it. I have not seen a simpler way to understand user journeys, and best of all, it’s free. Try Beusable here.
