Getting ‘Clarity’ Into Effective Web Design – Paramus NJ & Bergen County Web News

March 15, 2019by Christine Becker

Getting ‘Clarity’ Into Effective Web Design – Paramus NJ & Bergen County Web News

Web design is a complex convergence of graphic design, computer programming, artistic aesthetics and analytical study. Clarity, the new web design program recently released by Microsoft, is a program focused on the analytics aspect of web design. Intended to provide “clarity” so you can see how your website is being used and how it is functioning in the real world, Clarity offers a totally transparent look into user behavior. Since Clarity allows you to see exactly what users are doing on your website, you can make data-driven decisions about improvements in order to optimize conversion, engagement and retention.

TNTMAX, a web design company in NJ, uses such user analytics to create powerful and effective web design. Paramus, NJ and Bergen County businesses need look no further than TNTMAX for compelling and competent websites that will attract and retain users.

Why the need for a program like Clarity?

Essentially, a program like Clarity takes out all the guesswork in creating a beautifully functioning, especially effective, data-driven website. Clarity uses targeted insight and detailed analytics on how customers interact with your site, so you understand why your website is performing one way and not another.

Let’s break it down further:

An essential piece of web design is in understanding the way users interact with your website. Having a realistic comprehension of user interaction allows you to adapt your website to create a more satisfactory user interface. A more satisfactory user interface leads to happier users who now want to spend more time on your website, interacting with your content and material. The more engaged users on your website, the higher the chances of those browsers turning into customers—or becoming more loyal advocates for whatever it is you are trying to sell, teach or express through your website.

Microsoft’s new Clarity program is the most advanced program for observing user interface on your website. It provides an astounding amount of detail, giving you a much deeper understanding of user behavior than ever before. It allows you to understand the pain points of your users and better understand what they want, so you can really tweak your webpages to make them as friendly to users (and as effective for you) as possible.

Clarity is the latest in a long line of constantly improving programs designed to improve the effectiveness of your website. The team at TNTMAX makes sure to stay on top of the latest programs and tools to offer their clients the most in-depth analytics for their site. Providing powerful and user-friendly web design for Paramus, NJ, Rockland County and Bergen County, TNTMAX will take your business to the next level of professionalism.

How does Clarity work?

Clarity is an analytics tool that will show webmasters how visitors are interacting with their sites. Similar tools that are currently being used for website analytics include Optimizely, Google Optimize and Visual Web Optimizer. Clarity is still being developed to perfection, but it is already showing great promise.

For one thing, Clarity uses session replays. In other words, Clarity actually lets you play back a user’s experience on your website, showing you every step of their process.  This allows you to fully visualize your users’ behavior patterns on your site.  You can literally watch the screen and see where they moved the mouse, what buttons they clicked on, what they scrolled through quickly and where they paused to read.

Through this process you’ll be able to better empathize with your users. You’ll be able to better understand both their pain points and their attraction points. Where are they engaged? Where are they clicking away from rather too quickly? You’ll be able to spot usability issues and improve them until your website is working as smooth as silk and is a pleasure for your users.

Beyond the playback, another innovation of Clarity is that is utilizes AI and machine learning to group similar behavior sessions on your website. This allows you to see similar sessions lumped together so you can more readily recognize patterns versus single events.

Clarity is an exciting innovation in web design. Paramus, NJ businesses, as well as those in Rockland and Bergen County, can look to TNTMAX to provide clean and compelling web design that utilizes the latest in analytical tools.

Clarity is already proving useful for businesses

One example of how a company utilized Clarity to see great improvements in their website function after using the program is a cooking website called Cook With Manali. After using Clarity, it was discovered that many users were abandoning the webpages after scrolling down halfway—before ever getting the recipe. Apparently these users were dissuaded from getting all the way to the recipe because of the long form content describing the recipe at the top of the page.

Cook with Manali used this information to add a “Skip to Recipe” button at the top of the page, greatly increasing the happy user experience: a decrease in abandonment of pages indicated improved user experience and retention.  More users were now using this new button to skip straight to the recipe, and many even scrolled back up to read the story behind the recipe.

Clarity has even been shown to help protect against computer bugs!

Not only does this beautiful new analytics tool help you understand what your visitors are attracted to and what they ignore, it can even be used to debug errors. For example, when the engineers at Bing (Microsoft’s search engine) used Clarity, they discovered that a big problem for their users was that they were in fact using browsers infected with malware. The engineers were surprised to find that what users were seeing was completely different from what was expected.

This malware, while on the end-users’ computers, was interfering with what they were able to see on the Bing website and thus they were not having a very easy experience or interacting with the content much at all. Bing engineers were able to use the information gleaned from Clarity to tweak their website to be more resistant to these particular bugs. As a result, future users would not have to contend with the annoying ads.  Bing’s business metrics did indeed go up after fixing the problem.

 

Clarity is still in its beta phase

Since Clarity is still in the works, it will likely be adding more features before it can competently compete with other services. The program will be using AI to show abnormal click and scroll behavior, session length and JavaScript errors. Clarity will be able to use this information to organize behavior into the most and least relevant, thus saving time for the web developer.

Clarity will also include other typical functions of this sort of program, such as detailed heatmaps to show you what sections of your website are getting the most action in terms of clicks and touch. It will show the distribution of user interaction across the webpage. Clarity will also include a scroll map, to see where people are scrolling more quickly and more slowly, and how far down they are scrolling on your webpages.

TNTMAX will be following the developments made by Clarity and other programs to stay at the cutting edge of effective web design. Paramus NJ business owners will be thrilled with the attention to detail and high quality of web design provided by NJ’s own web gurus at TNTMAX.

Clarity’s attention to user privacy

While Clarity allows you to see where website users are clicking, scrolling and spending the most time, it respects users’ privacy through use of text masking.  In accordance with Microsoft’s principles, text is masked by default in the instrumentation layer and is not uploaded into the Clarity server. You can rest assured you are not violating anyone’s privacy.

Who can use Clarity?

Microsoft has designed Clarity to work with any HTML webpage, both desktop and mobile, using the most common two and three letter top level domains. Support for other TLDs in on the way!

To use Clarity, you merely add a small bit of JavaScript to your HTML website.  Once the script is added, Clarity will receive your site’s data. The JavaScript will upload and store the data it collects in the Clarity server running on Microsoft Azure.

You can begin to use the program to observe user interface as soon as the JavaScript has approved your website and collected data.

TNTMAX is happy to help you use programs like Clarity to vastly improve the effectiveness of your website. Providing the most compelling web design for Paramus, NJ, Rockland County and Bergen County, TNTMAX will help your business grow through a powerful online presence.