How user data with design can help in improving your Website or app conversions

When you first set up your website, it was probably to put your content out to the world and get more traffic, views, and conversions. Although ambitious, you would’ve soon realized how difficult it can be to understand your visitors, when you can’t see or meet them in person. The ambiguous site ‘user’ is a difficult person to define, hard to understand, and even harder to keep engaged.

This is where UX designers step in, with the motive of improving the visitor’s experience, fulfilling their needs on the site, and ensuring their journeys are simple, comfortable, and intuitive.

But the question remains:

How do we know the user?

Does the UX designer just know from experience?

What many seem to misunderstand about the UX designer’s job is that their work is not based solely on intuition and creativity. More often than not, their decisions need strong research and data analysis. In fact, research is an integral part of the process at every stage of design, beginning with qualitative data — interviews, diary studies, observations — and leading up to quantitative data — site visitors, feedback ratings, bounce rates, and more.

In recent years, we have seen huge leaps and bounds in the way that data is collected, especially with the growing roles of data scientists. UX designers and data scientists do different jobs with different roles, but they have now begun to collaborate frequently!

While data scientists work extensively with crunching numbers, the same numbers can help UX designers make decisions that improve user journeys and a product’s functionality. In an iterative design model, where changes are regular, data becomes even more important since it draws up clear pictures of how your site or product is performing, how users are interacting with it, and exactly where changes need to be made.

For example, you might set up an e-commerce site and soon notice very few purchases. With proper data analysis, your UX designer would be able to compare exactly when and where users are entering your site, what actions they perform, and which page or process seems to stop them from making their purchase. Armed with this knowledge, they would now be able to decide what to change, what to retain, and how to get your conversion rates up. With the increasing number of data collection tools like Google Analytics that are available at your fingertips, data is a potential goldmine!

Let’s look at a few potential uses -

1. User demographics

As a site owner, you’re probably always curious about where users are coming from, who they are, and why or how they made it to your site. User data allows you to figure out these answers, by telling you what time of day, which sources, which products, and which regions are drawing the most users, and which ones are falling short. Knowing your users allows you to understand their requirements and make changes to broaden your user base, or improve your content to retain the current ones.

2. User journeys and navigation

From our initial example, you’ve probably picked up that user data will allow you to see how users are making their way through your site. You can see where they landed, which page they exited from, where they fumbled or clicked a wrong button, and which pages took them the longest to understand.

Analyzing user data will also give UX designers a clear picture of which pages have the highest bounce rates, and what needs immediate design changes. Designers can also see what part of the user’s journey towards their goal was too complicated for them to complete, and begin making those crucial changes. This information is key when initiating a new version release, a redesign, or trying to find the root cause of poor conversions.

3. New Leads

Often, simply improving your product and keeping current users satisfied is not enough. You’ll want to expand your user base, and reach out to more people. When you set new marketing or lead generation plans in place, it can get hard to track what is working, what isn’t, and which plans are bringing in the most visitors and conversions.

Data collection also helps out here, by showing you which of your marketing campaigns, and which social media sources are leading users to your site, and which ones look the most promising! Leveraging the right channels is crucial to building your audience, and data collection and interpretation provide these much-needed facts.

4. Personalization

Tailoring site or app content to meet individual users’ behaviors and needs ensures that users will keep coming back. Many products leverage the beauty of machine learning to ensure that every user does not see the same templates and one-size-fits-all experiences throughout the product’s lifetime.

Uniqueness and personalization go a long way towards building user loyalty and improving their satisfaction with your product.

Personalization can be spotted across recommendations, predictions, history-based suggestions, and defining interests that are based on the user’s own choices, and previous actions. Not only do users feel more in control of their own content (Think of food apps asking you for your favorite cuisines), users can also get to what they need much faster, with less scrolling, less searching, and much less effort.

Experiences that are powered by machine learning are much more complicated than just linear decisions. They adapt constantly, change as the user’s preferences change, and evolve to fit the user’s needs — almost like a personal store attendant helping them navigate the aisles and find your product!

These are just the basics of everything that data can do for a site’s conversions. Deep diving into each point opens up endless lists of possibilities, and deductions that can add value to a site’s updates, revamps marketing plans, and overall design. This is just the first step of a really long, well-informed product journey to more conversions!

Kustard design team focuses on giving accurate and precise reports with suggestions to rectify the smallest of the usability issues which in turn will help your business grow and result in greater conversions.