Using Data to Build a Better UX

The software developing industry has come a long way since its early days of command-line interfaces and lack of Graphical User Interface(GUI). Just fire up your phone and look through an application store, you’ll see hundreds of apps and games with breathtaking UI and fluid UX everywhere you look. That’s mainly due to developers being able to collect users’ data through UX user research, analyze it, and turn the data into information you can use to improve the user experience. This has become possible largely due to the rise of data science.

This article will touch on key areas you can use data in to substantially make your apps and websites better.

Layouts

Choosing how to design your layouts can be extremely difficult? Where to put a button? What will attract your customers better? These are all pressing issues that face the owner of every website and app. Before extensive data collection was simple and effective, you’d have to go through a lot of trials and errors before you’d randomly stumble on a design combination that would work. Companies who had a lot of resources and a high stake in their design would invite people over and conduct a bunch of polls just to see what people thought of the designs.

Thankfully, these wasteful and expensive methods are all part of the past. Now, you can easily conduct effective tests on your layout and test a plethora of different design element combinations without most of your customers even being aware of it.

One such prominent way to test a layout is A/B testing:

• In A/B testing, you choose two (or more) designs, and you randomly pick customers visiting your website/using your app and show them one of the designs.
• You collect extensive data on the user’s behaviour – how much they stayed on the page? Did they leave the website immediately? Did they buy any products?
• After collecting data from hundreds of users, you’ll discern a clear pattern in the behaviour, and you’ll immediately find out what your clients like best.
• Repeat step 1 through 3 as much as you want if you’re not satisfied with your website’s performance. This method makes it really easy to iteratively fix issues with the design.

Content

The content of the website isn’t secondary to the design – good copywriting, calls to action, and inconspicuous sales pitches are key to designing content that sells and helps your company grow. The problem is, how can you measure pieces of content? Unless you have a very sharp editorial eye, you’ll run into problems when you try to assess the quality of a piece. So, what’s the alternative? Well, you can let the piece talk for itself.

You can integrate basic code into your website that tracks how much time a user spends on a piece of content, whether they interact with it at all, and if it generates any sales.

This tells you all the information you need to know about the effectiveness of a piece of content. Be careful, however, not all content is aimed at selling a product to a customer, so when measuring the effectiveness of a piece of content, you should use relevant metrics.

User Segmentation

Sometimes, randomly targeting users for your tests isn’t the best approach, and you should come up with more delicate targeting methods. This is where user segmentation comes in – after collecting data about your users, their location, age, sex, and their behaviour on your website, you can use the data to create a state-of-the-art marketing campaign.

When you know all the relevant information about the user browsing your side, you’ll learn what type of content appeals to a certain gender, you’ll learn how different age groups respond to your designs, and you’ll learn the different buying patterns of people from different locations. This is all invaluable information that you can use to create ads and offer discounts that effectively targets a certain subsection of your clients and drives your sales up.

Long Term Planning

The data you collect isn’t only useful for immediate design choices and short-term content creation. Judicial use of the data will help you create an informed long-term business plan that tackles UX related issues before they even cause you any problems. For example, if you constantly see the market of a certain item is growing, you can immediately start creating appealing content and sales pitches for the item and capitalize on trends.

Conclusion

Collecting data from your users is easier than ever, and you can use it to make every aspect of your website better and significantly improve the UX. Collecting data and analyzing will keep you informed and helps you stay competitive, and you shouldn’t hesitate to do it.