3 Quick Tips on User Behavior in Product Development

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3 Quick Tips on User Behavior in Product
Development
"Youre Almost Always Wrong About Your
Users" Gut instincts will only get you so
far! Once youve launched your mobile app,
website or a SaaS product into a new market,
youll need to understand who visits your
website, how they access it and what they do when
there. From Microsofts colossal failures of
Vista and Zune to Coca Colas New Coke or even
choosing the modal popup for email marketing on
your website, product failures and debacles only
emphasizes that studying user behavior matters
and helps to gain you the decision-making
power. Accurate user-behavior insights require
due diligence to understand your customers, their
interests and desires to give you a solid
foundation on which to build great products.
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Fundamental Principles of User Behavior
In todays competitive market, errors of
judgement in product engineering and development
can be fatal and consumers are unforgiving. So
how do you as a startup ISV or SMB make sure that
you play the right strokes and not get bowled
out? Theres no denying that the more you know
about your users, the better equipped youll be
to make smart choices about your website, mobile
app or SaaS application development. Here are 3
overarching aspects in user behavior that hold
relevant for entire spectrum, from mobile apps
to websites to SaaS service or products.
The Product Should Be Useful and Solve an
Existing Problem
Every product must have a purpose! Does it solve
an existing real-world problem than most other
services? It should help user accomplish task
faster, deliver a personalized and relevant
experience and wow them everywhere each time they
interact with the product. People are lazy and
choose the path of least resistance so you must
show the value of your product upfront quickly.
If your product, website or mobile is not able to
solve a pain-point, help people do something
better or even add value to your customers life,
its less likely to succeed. Think Netflix,
Amazon Prime, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger,
Pixlr, Buzzsumo, Basecamp, Asana or Slack, each
helps their user address a pain-point and solve
existing problem better than they were being
solved.
User Interaction, Usability Testing Analytics
Decoding Why They Do What They Do
For users, the product and experience are the
same. Every interaction matters and has the
potential to make the product smarter. Therefore,
understanding user interactions is really helpful
when youre in the initial stages of the product
lifecycle stage, entering a new market or are a
start-up ISV because it reflects the needs and
interests of users. Therefore, usability testing
together with analytics helps you understand your
app/ websites users, identify trends and
patterns of your users to get the big picture.
While analytics gives you information on how
people are using your website, mobile app or SaaS
based product, usability testing teaches you the
experience, that users have while trying to
achieve their goals on your product. Tools like
usabilityhub, MixPanel, Localytics, CleverTap are
a great way to monitor popular usability metrics
that include Load Time, Bounce Rate, Navigation,
Sessions, Session Length, and checkout
abandonments and analyze interactions across the
consumer path.
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Collect User Feedback
No matter what youve planned, youre almost
always wrong about your customers because people
often behave in unexpected ways. People dont
have the patience and if the answers are not
apparent, they will either give up or look
elsewhere. Aggregate customer feedback from
multiple sources whether digital analytics
data, offline data, CRM data, campaign data, or
third- party data for comprehensive feedback
offer a comprehensive view. For instance, Google
noticed that people were quickly running out of
storage on their phones and were unaware that
Google Photos could help them free up space. So,
with customers feedback they moved the Free My
Space feature buried deep in settings to a more
prominent spot on the app, thus increasing the
usage of the app and also driving more
installs. With shorter attention span, the
pursuit to attract and retain attention demands
even more efforts. Especially in the initial
product life cycle stage when you dont have
enough data, a great way to understand the
mindset of customers is to collect user feedback
to get an insight into how theyre using your
app, website or service.
So, how do you get users to do what you want them
to do?
No matter how much effort you put into an amazing
new app or a slick landing page, you may still
face low retention and fewer user engagement just
because you failed to interpret their behavior,
grab their attention, influence decisions, and
gradually make your service/ product a
habit. Successful products require that you know
your audiences user behavior and invest time to
create memorable experiences. So, when people
understand and use your product enough, they
share their positive reviews with others and they
become your brand advocates, thats a huge win.