Learn five key data-driven UX strategies to elevate your product's user experience.
In the world of UX design, simple decisions can make the difference between a lackluster or leading-edge product. Choices on aesthetics can be subjective, and functionality preferences can differ across users—but don’t let that make you think that good UX is born from guesswork!
While the art of UX can include subjective aspects, the science of it prevents designers from flying blind. By making design decisions informed by data, you can have more confidence that your finished product will result in a great experience for end users.
It’s not as complex as you might think, either. As long as you’re willing to develop a systematic way of looking at product usage and user behavior, you can start leveraging those to inform design. And as you’ll read below, it’s no accident that data-driven design is behind some of today’s top-performing products.
Here are five ways to start making data-driven product design decisions today:
1. Survey your users
Why not go straight to the source? There’s no better way to hear directly from actual users than survey research, and it’s unique compared to the other approaches in this article for two reasons:
First, it can be used at the earliest stages of any project to generate ideas, illuminate pain points, and indicate user preferences. You can ask people about current tools and practices they use to better understand your end user, even before prototyping.
Another unique aspect of survey research is that it can generate qualitative and quantitative data. You can ask open-ended response questions that gather users' honest opinions or add rating scales requiring users to rate how they feel about highly specific design aspects—or combine both. Most other data-gathering methods only create numeric or visual data points.
You can ask questions about why they chose your product, how they use it, and how they use competitors’ products. There’s no limit to what you can ask, but we recommend keeping surveys short for a frustration-free respondent experience.
In some cases, quick one-off surveys make sense, or you can run them longitudinally to see if improvements and redesigns made an impact over time. Regardless of how long you run a survey, it’s important to use careful demographic targeting to ensure you’re polling relevant people.
2. Utilize heatmaps
A heatmap is a data visualization tool that shows how users browse and scroll through a page. By collecting data from multiple users and splitting the output from hot (more activity) to cold (less activity), they provide a visual indicator of where users are spending time and where they aren’t. Once you have this data, you can optimize even further to increase engagement.
There are plenty of service providers that specialize in heatmap software. Some focus more on websites, some on apps, and some do both. Many charge with a monthly subscription model and are surprisingly affordable, but there’s a broad spectrum of features and capabilities. For example, Smartlook is a heatmap provider that can detect “rage clicks,” which you’re probably familiar with if you’ve ever clicked repeatedly on a broken feature of a site or app. Some tools can give you real-time visualizations, and some do better at replaying previously logged sessions. Think carefully about what you’ll really need before diving in, but with so many options on the market, you’re bound to find one that’s right for you.
3. Think like a user
Thinking like a user is as much a state of mind as a technique for making rational design decisions. Inhabiting the psychology of your typical end user is critical to optimizing it. In fact, we think it’s a necessary step to make sense of all the other data points you’ll glean from research.
In practice, synthesizing survey findings with observational data is a great concrete first step to adopting this practice. For example, let’s say you’re trying to interpret survey data revealing that consumers have a negative perception of your app’s login experience. By testing your own product in real-life situations or watching users interact with it, you generate hypotheses about what’s contributing to customers' challenges.
4. Conduct A/B testing
Are you facing an internal battle over how to structure a feature or design asset? Running an A/B test is the most objective way to unpack which option is better when you have a couple of different directions.
Depending on the nature of the test, you could show two (or more) different versions of a webpage, menu, graphic, feature, tooltip—really, whatever you can imagine. And the way you measure the success of an A/B test can be just as creative. You can look passively at data, like conversion or click-through rates, or follow up your A/B test with a survey to explicitly ask users' opinions.
Netflix famously did this when trying to better match users with the entertainment they were searching for. Users browsing through Netflix’s library often make fairly quick decisions about their interest in content based on image thumbnails. Unsurprisingly, these images aren’t chosen haphazardly. Netflix uses A/B tests to compare levels of engagement across multiple possible cover images for films and TV shows before settling on a final graphic.
5. Investigate drop off rates
Sometimes, the most telling form of engagement is none at all. If there’s one critical metric to examine in this regard, it’s drop-off rates. There is a moment during every user experience where the user has to decide—should I stay or go?
If you can discover these moments, usually ones of frustration or confusion, you’ve found something critical. If you notice that users dip after a certain level in the funnel, there may be something more to uncover.
For example, let’s say your user cannot find the information they are looking for, or complete their desired task. Click after click after click, they still haven’t achieved their intent, and now they’re frustrated. If you put on your think-like-a-user hat, you can interpret that usage data over time to remove barriers and help them get where they need to. This is a great way to use data to inform product design decisions.
Enhance your UX with expert data-driven insights
Utilizing the techniques explained here will generate quality data points, but that’s only half the battle. To turn data into actionable insights, you must adopt a user mindset and engage in creative thinking to connect the dots.
At Neuron, we’re skilled at using heatmaps, A/B tests, and survey research data to inform UX breakthroughs. Whether you need help collecting data or using it to make the app of your dreams, our team of experts is just a click away.
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