Signs Your User Experience Needs Work

Innovation can be spurred by trends in your market, competitor moves, or by simply looking inward and evaluating your user’s experience with your product. In our recent blog post, “the "secret" to profitability - understanding your user” - we discussed the link between profitability and the user experience. Today, we will be taking a step back and discussing how to evaluate that your user experience needs work.

We understand that there is not enough time in the day to focus on completing all the tasks at hand when running a business. In one regard, you are focused on user acquisition and company growth. Then, you are additionally needed to manage your team and ensure operations are running smoothly. It is no easy feat! But, something dangerous can happen in the midst of the chaos. The current base of your product’s users can be left behind and have a user experience that seems to be dwindling.

Typically, a company realizes that their user experience needs work after the fact. Meaning, users feedback or insights from data was not being fully analyzed due to the other business priorities that were occurring at that moment. Don’t worry, this does not need to be you. There is a way to see the warning signs and make changes before you spend  unnecessary time, as well as capital, into product development. Being proactive is a huge competitive advantage for companies in any industry. This allows them to stay ahead of the curve and provide the best user experience possible in the meantime.

The Warning Signs

Before we dive into examining some of the warning signs that can show when part of a negative user experience. It is important to note how businesses find these insights.

The timeline to analyze insights differs based on company and industry, as well as other internal factors; some companies prefer to do this based on a weekly cadence, while others see success doing this monthly or quarterly.

These insights can be easily gathered by creating a dashboard to pull in select KPI’s. This can help analyze the data that matters and not get distracted by the mound of data you have on your current users.

Now, let’s look at some warning signs that tend to occur with a negative user experience.

Churn can be described as the rate in which users stop using your service within a certain period of time. If churn is increasing, it can point to flaws in the user experience. To dig in further, you can analyze your user journey and see the exact point where users are heavily dropping off. For example, there could be significant drop off when users break through their free trial and are directed to convert to a paid customer.

Next, let’s talk about bounce rate. This can be defined as the percentage of people who land on your application and leave. The user does not click around the product or view any other information; the exact opposite of what you want them to do. An increasing bounce rate can occur if the user is not clear of where to go next when they are on your application. This can be due to overload of features or lack of direction for the user on their journey. It also can occur if functionalities on the application are broken. For example, if a button is not working properly to take the user to the next step. Another factor that can fuel users to bounce is slow site speed. In fact. a two second delay can increase bounce rates by 103%. Lastly, insufficient pop-ups can frustrate users and cause them to quickly abandon the application.

It is becoming more and more crucial to provide a seamless mobile experience for your users, the exact same as your web application, as adoption consistently increases. Segmenting users based on mobile or desktop usage can help drive insights into whether the mobile experience is optimal for your users. In viewing this, you may see that users on your mobile application are fleeing more than the users that are adopting your product via desktop.

Feedback, positive and negative, is vital for business growth. The more consistent flow of feedback that you receive from your community of users, the better. What if the stream of feedback slows down? Some assume that this is a good sign, “my users are happy so there is no room for feedback or reviews at this time”. But, it is important to look deeper into this by analyzing the metrics that we discussed above. This could help in discovering signs of slowing adoption and allow you to make product fixes as you see fit.

No User Left Behind

Great! Now we know how and when to see if our product’s user experience needs help. Every product goes through a lifecycle and throughout it innovation is needed to continually make users pleased. In evaluating data from your users, the next step will be to test your hypothesis. Check out our article, “17 user testing methods”, to find the best method for you and your users.

Still need to look into user-testing more? No problem! Our post introducing user-testing covers everything you need to know!

Codelitt is obsessed with the end-user experience in our building process. Check out our Dribbble profile to see some of our design work or contact us if you have an idea or project in mind! We would love to help in understanding your user to create the best possible digital product experience 🚀