Research methods to help you refocus your membership website and services
Why is it so important to know how your members view and use your website and services?
To provide members with the best solution that supports them, while achieving the goals of your organisation, you need to understand how they operate and why. Understanding this will identify opportunities where you can add value and align your product or touchpoint into their process and understanding rather than trying to force members to adopt a new way of working. Fitting into established ways of working and understanding of topics will lead to increased adoption of any new solution or process.
With that said, here are some ways you can find those opportunities.
Create focus: Nail down the questions you want to answer
The first question you should ask anyone requesting research is ‘What do you want to know?’ Followed up with ‘Why do you want to know it?’.
As with any research, you want to have the questions you need to answer clear to yourself and the team. This will help direct and focus the research to find the answers when looking at what methods you should use to uncover relevant insights.
Without these questions being clear, the project will lack direction and insights will be missed because they weren’t deemed valuable or answer any specific need from the project owner.
Find the gems: Interview and converse with your members
Nothing really beats talking to your members directly. Taking time to speak with members will give you insights beyond the typical use case of a product or service that you can observe in screen recordings.
Conversation gives opportunities for topics or use cases that you weren’t aware of to come to light. Being face to face when these are mentioned, you can discuss further, uncovering more detail. Details and insights that would be lost in remote based methods.
If you are struggling to get members signed up for interviews, try and incentivise with something relevant or the classic Amazon voucher.
Find the issues small and large: Observe member behaviour on your website and platforms
We find that screen recording tools such as Lucky Orange or Hotjar are particularly good at highlighting usability issues. Your platform and products have been designed with the best intentions but you can always rely on a group of individuals to approach something in an unexpected manner.
Utilising platforms that record these sessions for you to watch back later is probably the most cost and time effective way to see a members point of view.
You can observe:
Where a page doesn’t load as expected causing a bounce
Rage clicks by customers where something feels like a link but has no interaction
Miss clicks by users where a link is potentially too small or a button isn’t built properly
These are just a few, there are many more where this software can really highlight where improvements can be made.
Uncover more insights: Use surveys to utilise a wider audience
There are many different types of surveys you can carry out. Two of the most effective are micro and long form.
Micro surveys
Usually seen in the form of small pop-ups on websites. These surveys need the least amount of time and engagement from those visiting your website, or members logged into a members area. They are a great way to get some quick data from a wide audience around a particular topic and it can be used as a lead in to gather participants for future research.
Some example questions to ask when using micro surveys:
How easy has it been to use our website? Score between 1 to 5
What information are you looking for today?
How easy was it to find the information you are looking for?
Were you able to find what you were looking for today?
How did you hear of our association?
What brings you to our website today?
Longform
We find that longform surveys are best used as a follow up to member interviews to test new insights and findings with a wider audience. These should be sent to members who have shown interest in supporting your research to make sure that completion rates are higher.
If you are sending out to a colder audience though, you may want to incentivise the survey to give them more value and reason for completing.
Save budget and time: Test usability and understanding during the design phase
Usability tests allow you to observe how members complete a series of tasks using your live product or a prototype you have created. They are great to see first hand any unexpected behaviours on a user journey that need to be reconsidered.
They are great for finding the usability issues or testing new potential solutions to put them right. It also saves you a large chunk of development budget by finding them during the design phase.
Running usability tests can be done remotely using platforms like Maze, moderated over webcam or in a test lab. There are varying budgets to do this but they are all great uses of time.
Bonus: Test your choice of language and make sure it matches
Language use is another reason you will want to understand your members point of view. We regularly see a barrier or difference around the choice of language. A prime example would be the naming of what could be a popular product or service based on language used internally. This language is not used by your members and so it goes unfound and unused.
Make sure you are qualifying any new naming conventions or labels before you launch. It could be a campaign, a new resource or the navigation links on your website. They should be tested before you have a lot of confused and frustrated members emailing your team.
Note: If you are testing new navigation labels or structure, try out a Tree test. These can be done remotely to save you time.
Do you need help implementing any of the above research methods?
Book in a FREE 30 minute session with our UX Director, Jason Hancock to talk through how we can help you.
