Free tools and tips for better website usability

Website usability, UX/UI… a lot of the time these can feel like aspirational concepts rather than guiding principles people actually use when building websites, right? It’s not like credit union marketers have an abundance of time to prototype and collect data.

Well, as it turns out, you have more tools at your disposal than you might think. And thanks to your friendly neighborhood credit union website experts (wow, that does not roll off the tongue at all), your members can have a better website experience without the credit union spending a dime.

Here are two free tools you can use to improve your website’s usability with some tips to get you started:

Get Analytic

Google Analytics is a treasure trove of data that offers you a surprising amount of useful information once you know where to look. Best of all, it’s totally free.

You can get into some really deep dives with Analytics, but for a quick usability boost all we need is to navigate to Engagement > Pages and Screens. This will give you a list of the top ten pages on your website that see the most traffic. We want to keep an eye on Views, Active Users and Engagement Time.

From here you can see where people actually go when they visit your website. What are they looking at and how much time do they spend there? Remember that only a few seconds of engagement time might indicate you’re getting a lot of bots.

In our experience, and remember we think waaay more about credit union websites than most people, your credit union’s homepage and online banking page are going to see the most traffic. While this is usually the case, it’s worth checking which pages are on your website’s list, and prioritize those pages to get the most out of your usability-improvement efforts.

Can we get some Clarity?

Microsoft Clarity is another completely free tool, which allows you to see exactly how visitors interact with your website. You can watch session replays and explore heatmaps to see what people are doing, and the software automatically flags “rage clicks” and “dead clicks,” so you can see what isn’t working.

Like Analytics, Clarity can become a rabbit-hole of information and you’ll need some experience to decide how and how often you use it. This is also why we wanted to recommend these two tools together. Analytics can help you decide which pages to focus on and Clarity helps you see what people do and what isn’t working for them.

More tips from the iDiz webmonsters

We’ve been building credit union websites for a long time, and we’ve built a lot of them. Naturally, we have a lot to say about what should and shouldn’t be on your website. Here are some more blog articles for you to browse.

Sam Dicken
Latest posts by Sam Dicken (see all)

Email this article to a friend or coworker.