Are your critical user journeys working?

Any action that a customer takes on your website can be defined as a user journey. The most common use case for user journeys is for testing multi-step forms.

Let’s say you have a five stage form, and each stage contains a couple of fields. When you fill in these fields and submit, the next part of the form loads.

This is very common on a lot of websites, from checkouts on ecommerce sites, to application forms on banking sites, to contact request forms on government websites.

Most website evaluation tools can only load the first step of the form. They can’t fill it in and they can’t test the content or functionality of subsequent steps.

This causes a problem in a couple of ways.

Firstly, you can’t be sure your forms are always working, unless you manually fill them in periodically to test them.

Secondly, you can’t check for accessibility or content failures in any form step other than the first one.

So this actually leaves you at risk of failing accessibility compliance regulations, and can also damage your brand or harm your conversions and revenue if there are spelling mistakes or the form is broken.

Silktide is unique because you can train it to fill in your forms for you. It’s able to test each step of the process for accessibility, content and user experience problems, and also check the forms are working correctly.

Let’s take a look at an example

You can see here a user journey we’ve set up on a fictional website. There are five steps in this form, and each step is listed.

The first thing to notice are these scores over to the right. You can see that we’re able to test and score each individual part of your forms, for content, accessibility, user experience and more.

As with all Silktide checks, you just click on the magnifying glass here to get more details. We can actually see the second step of this form in the Inspector here.

And over to the left we can see a list of issues we’ve identified, and how to fix them.

For example, here’s a spelling mistake – we’ve spelt ‘name’ incorrectly. There’s also a bunch or accessibility problems with this stage of the form as well.

Okay so this is pretty powerful, but why is it important?

Well, you obviously want to make sure that your forms are working, and this can help with that.

But if you’re testing the rest of your website for problems and overlooking these important user journeys, which are probably the primary calls to action across your site, then you’re being left open to accessibility lawsuits or losses in revenue.

Other website evaluation platforms can’t check these important details because they can’t see your website with all the functionality in place.

If you’re not currently checking these parts of your site then you should consider re-evaluating that, because these are likely to be the critical paths you want your users to take.