UX analytics play a significant role in successful web and app design. The failure to understand user behavior and account for current and changing user expectations and needs leads to poor design. Luckily for businesses and UX designers, web and mobile app designs can be updated relatively quickly if you clearly understand what you want and need to do.
Without UX analytics, designers and businesses would have nothing to rely on but their intuition and direct user feedback regarding the overall impact and success of their design efforts. Creating a seamless and engaging User Experience (UX) is crucial when every business has a website and app, and user expectations are at an all-time high. Therefore, design thinking should be at the forefront of every digital product you develop if you want to succeed.
This post will explain UX analytics, why it is crucial, and what UX tools are commonly used to improve the design process.
What Is UX Analytics?
UX analytics is the measurement of user behavior on a mobile app or website in regards to how the overall design of the product affects how users interact with it. UX analytics provide designers with actionable insights into how a digital product’s design can be improved to meet user needs.
UX data comes in two different forms, quantitative and qualitative data. Quantitative data is the measurement of what users do. Examples of quantitative data include clicks, session length, pages opened, bounce rate, etc. On the other hand, qualitative data is the measurement of why users take a particular action. Qualitative data is usually collected via user feedback or survey responses.
While there are several different tools available to help designers capture quantitative data, qualitative data is harder to gather, but it can provide more precise insights into the way users interact with and view your website, app, and brand. To get a clear picture of behavior, perform an in-depth analysis of your product’s User Experience, and make UX design improvements, quantitative and qualitative data will be equally important.
The Importance of UX Analytics
UX analytics is an essential tool for designers to use in addition to their intuition, experience, and usability testing. Analytics help designers quantify user behavior, test hypotheses, and back up their design decisions with data. Even though intuition and good design sense play a significant role in UX design, data is being used to drive and account for critical design decisions.
With UX analytics, your designers and stakeholders can:
- Discover which parts of your website or app users leave from the most often. Use this quantitative data to analyze your design for user engagement issues and gather user feedback on why they left where they did.
- Reimagine the visual design of your product to aid usability and include accessibility features.
- Learn which parts of your digital product annoy, anger, or discourage users from taking further action.
- Understand and optimize the user journey, which will help reduce the exit rate, increase the conversion rate, and boost sales.
- Tailor a digital product to match user intention and behavior.
App development consumes a lot of resources. Your business doesn’t want to waste time and money building and maintaining a product that users don’t want to use. UX analytics can help your business create a digital product that delights your users.
There are a lot of businesses, apps, entertainers, and more vying for the attention of your target audience. If your product fails to capture your user’s attention, or even worse, displeases them, your app or website will quickly be abandoned. Regaining users and rebuilding your brand image is far more costly and time-consuming than investing resources in creating and maintaining a great UX design.
UX Tools You Should Know
Designers use several tools such as Google Analytics, Quantum Metric, Contentsquare, Screaming Frog, and more. There are several good tools for UX designers to use. Some are free to use, and others you will have to pay for. Instead of reviewing all of the analytics tools we think are valuable, let’s cover key features you should be looking for when choosing which UX analytics tools your business will use.
Key features to look for include:
- Heatmaps
- Flow maps
- Web and mobile metrics
- Session replay
Heatmaps
Heatmaps help designers visualize how users spend time while using their products. The areas that get the most traffic and clicks are hotter, and those with low traffic and user interaction are cooler. The information provided from heatmaps can give you a clear sense of where your users go and what they do. For example, if you notice that users tend to click on a particular banner or spot that is static, your UX designers will likely want to add a button or link there to keep users engaged.
Flow Maps
Flow maps are similar to heatmaps, but instead of depicting the customer journey in hot and cold colors, flow maps diagram a user’s step-by-step journey through your app or website. The insights provided by flow maps help UX designers identify user motivations, pain points, and the logic behind their behavior.
Web and Mobile Metrics
UX analytics tools used for websites are typically not great for mobile apps. However, web and mobile metric tools offer the same type of data. The most famous web metric tool is Google Analytics which is free to use for any website owner. Metrics tools give UX designers insights into the demographics of their users, page views, bounce rates, conversion rates, average session times, and more.
Metrics tools generally allow users to set their own custom conversion events so you can track specific user actions that are critical to your product’s ongoing optimization and your business’s overall success.
Session Replay
The session replay feature is very similar to a flow map. However, where flow maps are static diagrams, session replay allows UX designers to replay a user’s session in its entirety. Having the ability to watch real user interactions with your digital product is perhaps the most valuable UX tool available.
Session replay gives businesses a complete picture of user interactions. With session replay, UX designers can watch how users navigate between pages, what they click on, where they scroll, and where they get hung up and exit the app or website. The insights provided by session replay tools can help UX designers quickly identify and fix issues with User Interface elements before they drive users away and damage your brand image.
Final Thoughts
Excellent product design will always require skill, intuition, and usability testing. However, UX analytics tools are helping businesses improve their digital offerings and ensure that their products deliver the User Experience they desire. Reach out to an app development partner to learn more about the importance of UX analytics and design.
