Analyzing User Behavior to Create the Best User Experience
Published by Spinutech on October 19, 2020
Understanding your audience is the first step in creating a user-centered web design. At its core, user experience is all about maximizing the impact of your product or website by ensuring you're solving their problems. In order to accurately predict the way a user engages with your site, you need to first understand their needs and desires. What is their intention for visiting your site? What are they looking to take away from your information? User-centered design is an iterative design method that takes into consideration usability, audience needs and characteristics, workflow, and environment. To implement a user centered design, you first need to research your audience to create the desired user experience.
User experience research is the study of individuals within the audiences you are targeting. It is a critical step in understanding the context and intentions of a user’s interactions in order to custom tailor a design and site architecture that speaks to your audience.
User Behavior Analytics
Measuring a user's engagement with a site can be done with a number of metrics. From heat mapping where eyes tend to land on the design of a page to tracking the number of pages someone visits during a single session, user behavior analytics help you get to the bottom of what your audience is seeking on your site. The data you collect and evaluate to inform UX design can include analytics like:
- Conversion analytics - how many people are taking the desired actions you are tracking (could include form fills, contact submissions, or purchase data)
- Visit or session data - session based data can give insight into things like depth of session and length of time for average visits
- Behavior flow - analyzing the click path for user sessions allows you to see which pages are likely to continue a user down the funnel and which are likely to drop off
Understanding Behavior Analytics
Measuring the right things is the first step, but then evaluating and analyzing that data to influence your design, information architecture, and user experience can be a true artform. Here are the steps we recommend to integrate understanding of user behavior into a site design.
- Choose the right success metrics
- Interpret available data to set current benchmarking
- Analyze existing available data
- Integrate creative solutions
- Track and test
Choose the Right Success Metrics
In order to analyze your data you need to first identify the metrics most useful to measure and achieve your goals. Consider a custom mix of both quantitative and qualitative metrics.
Interpret Available Data to Set Current Benchmarking
After identifying the metrics most related to your objectives, you need to decide goals for improvement. Benchmark current metrics and identify your improvements and timelines.
Conduct Qualitative User Testing
While analyzing data can help us pinpoint a problem, it's often useful to dive deeper and gain more insights with qualitative user testing sessions. These sessions help us fill out our understanding of users by answering the questions:
- What is a user thinking or what questions are they hoping to answer?
- What is the users intention and what drives the decisions they're making?
- How can we begin to speak their language and optimize the experience for them?
Analyze Available Data
Look through your current and benchmarked data to seek additional opportunities like user feedback to identify problems, issues, roadblocks, or user drop-off points within the workflow.
Integrate Creative Solutions
After analyzing all of the available data, and identifying UX roadblocks, brainstorm creative solutions to remedy them through design opportunities.
Track and Test
Once identifying and implementing the solutions, measure the impact of your solutions against existing benchmarks then determine further optimization opportunities for improvement.
Data Analysis Takes Time
Analyzing user behavior analytics can be a subjective process. And it can take time to gather and interpret the data before using it to make data-driven decisions. We can help with every step of the process, freeing your internal teams to deliver and communicate positive results.