When the first Apple iPhone came out 12 years ago, the most impressive feature was its touch screen we thought was large at the time. Now here we are with cellphones so large they no longer fit in pockets but can unlock and log us into apps using facial recognition. We live in a digital world that is progressing at a rapid rate every day with no downward spiral in sight.
For companies offering digital products, like Apple or Adobe, this is an amazing opportunity. Such rapid growth forces companies to stay on top of technological trends and make continuous improvements to their products.
While trends are one way of knowing when you should upgrade your products, how do you know what changes to implement? One of the most trusted ways to know how to update your products is to hear it from your customers.
Noted in the link above, a user’s product experience refers to their complete interaction with your product. It includes their thoughts and feelings but also their behaviors. Thoughts and feelings are gathered through customer surveys, while behaviors are tracked through analytics. Combined, both can drive product-related decisions.
First, Do You Have a Great Product?
For starters, if you do not have a high-quality product, you’re already headed toward failure. A good product is a strong foundation for a positive, enjoyable product experience.
So, ask yourself,
- Does my product make an unenjoyable task easier or at least bearable?
- Is my product easy to use?
- Is my product helpful?
- Is my product efficient?
- Will my product resonate with anyone?
- Can my product go out of style?
Now have your product testers answer the questions. If the combined answers seem to be in your favor for most, you’re in luck as you most likely have a decent product.
What Can Be Improved with Your Product Experience?
As a business owner, your main objective should be to keep customers happy and returning. You can achieve this by improving your users’ product experiences. You’ll find the customers’ product experience breaks down into smaller parts that can be worked on individually to ensure your upgrading process is doable and manageable.
- Onboarding – Arguably the most critical stage in a user’s journey; this is where the user is introduced and begins using a product.
Your goal with improving onboarding should involve creating the smoothest transition for new users. By evaluating past users’ onboarding experiences, you can add or remove items they mentioned.
For example, maybe there was a common complaint that said your onboarding phase is too long and dragged out. You can improve the experience for the next user by condensing onboarding messages and shortening the overall time spent.
- Product adoption and retention – Following onboarding, users choose to either continue with product adoption and retention or drop the product altogether.
Based on how your users interact with your product, you can make changes specifically to the product adoption and retention stages to ensure happy customers. You can either look at the usage data as a whole, segment, or individual. When you analyze at an individual level, you can pinpoint users that need attention based on their engagement levels. Knowing this, you can work with the user to improve their experience and prevent abandonment.
- The Product – With customer usage data and feedback, there is no limit on what you can do to improve your product.
You’re likely to uncover many small upgrades that would benefit your users, such as background colors, fonts, typos, and graphics. You might also find more significant ways to advance your product. For example, your users might be getting hung up at the same spot using your product. This can tell you that click flows need streamlining or the text and visuals they’re reading are misleading.
Addressing the common issues that you find within your product usage data can help you create a better product that actually solves users’ problems. In turn, you will improve the user’s product experience.
What Should You Use to Help You with This Task?
Are you ready to get to work? Well, before you can do that you need to know what tools to use. The best way to get your hands on the product usage data is with product experience software. PX software tracks users’ entire product experience with analytical data allowing you to compare your products usage from a baseline.
While it varies by the software program, product experience software can provide insights on:
- Clicks
- Session Duration
- Customer Feedback
- Customer Satisfaction Levels
- Retention Rates
- Churn Rates
- Page Depth
- Feature Usage
- And More!
Once you have access to full product experience data, you can create impressive upgrades to ensure customer approval. Using a tool like PX software to manage the data will help you grow at scale.
As many companies have found out, if you don’t work to better your product and product experience, it can become obsolete, or easily taken over by a competitor. Utilizing product experience software is your opportunity to understand your customers’ behaviors and thoughts. Seize this opportunity and push your business into the future.
