Approaching UX with Analytics

They say that knowledge is power. And when it comes to app design, knowledge is everything.

In a highly competitive app industry, you need to know how users might interact with your apps and use what you learn to refine your product.

App analytics can help you here. As a developer, you can use any type of user analytics software to improve user experience and increase conversions for your application. Here are some ways analytics data can help you enhance UX for your app.

Improve Onboarding

The primary purpose of onboarding, or walkthroughs, is to introduce an app and demonstrate what it does. Onboarding is a user’s first experience with your app and can also cause users to abandon it if it is not well thought out.

Your app’s onboarding process will be the user’s first interaction with your app. It must wow them and mustn’t be too confusing to ensure seamless adoption. However, most developers would agree that this is easier said than done. A lot of users tend to taper off during onboarding. Your ad campaigns might get all of them to sign up for your app, but they might not necessarily hang out long enough to hit download. There can be several reasons for this. By monitoring the onboarding process, you can identify issues which might be causing a high drop-off rate in certain areas and come up with solutions that solve them.

For example, let’s say that analytics reports shows dwindling users on your signup page. Your vacation planning app is perfect, so maybe a welcome message that actually shows them the value they will receive while using your app instead of a simple “Hi! Sign up here.” would work in getting more users onboard. An interesting message like “Find the best attractions anywhere you go” can work much better. Similarly, if you suspect the cause of the dropoff to be an unskippable video tutorial, you can add a skip option to this onboarding event. While video tutorials are a great way to teach people how to use your app, most users believe the design would be intuitive enough to start using the app themselves first.

Improving App Retention

After you successfully launch your app, user experience will determine how many people will come back after using it for the first time. Your app’s retention rate will determine this. It takes several resources and significant effort to get people to download your app. You want people to continue using your app well beyond the first use. If your app has low retention rate it could signify a problem with UX.

Stats show that a lot of people tend to abandon apps after the first use which is why app retention monitoring is a crucial part of the development process. Your app’s retention reports can show when loyal users stopped coming back after you introduced new features or a new model. After that, it is just a matter of identifying functionalities that might be putting users off and taking necessary steps to improve them.

For example, let’s assume that you introduced a new shopping cart feature in your app. By the second week, your app retention reports show a sharp decline in users. Everything was going fine before you introduced the new feature. So what happened? By analysing user recordings, you deduce that users abandon their shopping carts after they are asked to enter the username and password which they entered when they signed up. Barely anyone remembers this information and any user who is forced to recall it is bound to get annoyed. So, to ensure that this doesn’t happen with returning users, you get in touch with your developers to pick up the IDs of the logged in users at the system’s backend and skip this step for them on the front end.

Improving Conversions

Simplifying the onboarding experience and eliminating steps from the checkout process is only half of the battle. If you want them to become paying customers, they must convert.

Analysing analytics data for user conversions can help you here. For example, the data can show you how many users completed the checkout funnel to payment and which abandoned it. By identifying where users refuse or hesitate to take the next step, you can figure out solutions that might get them to engage and convert more.

For example, privacy is a major concern for people who use shopping apps. Users want to know that their information (e.g email addresses) isn’t being sold off to third parties and therefore only rely on applications that can give them that assurance. So, even simply changing how you convey this message might increase conversions. For instance, changing the message “We will not spam you” to “We care about your privacy” on your app’s checkout page can encourage users to convert.

Wrapping Up

The right analytics data can help you improve user experience for your app by providing valuable insights about your users and their expectations.

Did you like reading the article? Learn more about enhancing your app strategy with our picks for emerging mobile app development trends for 2016.