5 Tips to improve your user experience analysis

Whatever kind of business you're in, having intelligence about user experience of your customer base is very valuable. Let's say you’re building your designs around actual user research, but you need more information. You need to know how your competitors stack up to your user experience. Where do you stand? Are you missing out on opportunities in your industry? If you’re doing competitive analysis you’re already on the right track. Here are 5 tips to give you a little boost.

Always go back to your user research

You spent all this time (and resources!) putting together journey maps and user personas, why would you just toss it out the window because you found a feature that you like? Remember: at the end of the day, user experience is about solving problems and improving quality for the user. What’s right for some users and businesses might not be right for you.

Don’t be afraid to analyze other industries

To that point, what is right for another might also be right for you. That’s why we do competitive analysis and benchmarking. We want to see how we measure up to other companies in terms of usability. With that said, don’t forget that a user = a user = a user. Of course different industries will have different needs, you could find an inspiring solution to a problem in your industry be looking at how someone else has solved it. Is your B2B tech software highly customizable? Could you find solutions from a B2C automotive site? Why not?

Categorize your findings with standards

When analyzing user experience for websites for instance, it’s easy to measure things like cost per lead or click through rate, but how do you measure the things that you like about other sites? The Nielsen Norman Group has some great suggestions on quality metrics including success rate, time to complete the task, and error rate. But don’t shy away from more qualitative metrics. Your team can get a lot out of in-house evaluation on a 1-7 scale. Just be sure that you’re measuring using the same yardstick.

Know/explore your limits

In comparing the usability of your product to other products, you have to be clear about the data that you can actually glean from a user experience competitive analysis. There is some information that is simply not available. This kind of information would include everything from the why of your competitor (Why did they include this/that feature?) to the specific information about traffic (to evaluate if a specific call-to-action is getting the desired conversion for example). Offering a product that works for your user is important. You have to keep testing. And while you won’t necessarily know what is working for your competitor, you can deduce that if it’s been in place for a while, it’s working.

Dedicate sufficient time

Competitive analysis can be super time consuming. Especially if you don’t have tools that will automate parts of the process for you. Taking screenshots and compiling them into a collection of meaning observations for your team could take anywhere from a few days to a few months. It just depends on how thorough the audit is.

If you're looking for an expert analysis on user experience for your brand or product executed by a specialized Market Intelligence company, contact Hammer Market Intelligence to gain access to your customer base via their international platform.

Source: Kompyte

Forrester: Insights to help prepare your organization for 5G

5G Presents immense innovation potential

5G promises to usher in not just new use cases in every industry but also new business models.

Some of the most relevant use cases across industries, such as those enabled by AR/VR and massive IoT, fit right into improving customer experience and digital transformation. As a change agent, 5G is among the most important technological enablers in this decade and the next. Therefore, investing and taking a deep look at 5G is critical at this time.

5G Will develop rapidly through 2020 but is still developing nonetheless

The 5G wireless arms race is fueled by the immense potential, so technology development is intense. Almost all current 5G announcements are regional siloed pilots and enhancements upon 4G LTA rather than actual 'at-scale' 5G standalone deployments. Manufacturers and operators have been aggressively pushing their 5G strategies. However, many challenges and uncertainties are still open: cost of network, monetization of use cases, regulatory challenges and, most importantly, the lack of mature standards.

2018-19 Was a major leap in 5G standards, but beware the hype

Through the 3GPP standards body, the industry had agreed to complete the non-standalone (NSA) implementation of 5G New Radio by December 2017, and this facilitated large-scale trials based on the specifications.

Various sources cite numerous estimates about 5G. According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), commercial 5G networks are expected to start deployment after 2020. By 2025, the GSM Association (GSMA) expects 5G connections to reach 1.1 billion, which is estimated to be about 12 percent of total mobile connections. One Ericsson study estimates that 5G-enabled industry digitalization revenues for ICT players will be US$1.3 trillion in 2026. Still, current 5G reality is far from the profound expectations established by its proponents.

Structuring your 5G thinking

At Forrester, we have a deep bench of experts who are closely monitoring the developments and hype around 5G.

Here is a simple framework:

1. First, understand the background, technology, and the physical and business challenges behind practical implementations of 5G to cut through the hype. 

2. There is a lot of talk about coverage in rural areas. In fact, bridging the digital divide is often touted to be a big plus of 5G. However, every early investment and the motivation behind it seem to suggest that at least until 5G achieves deployment scale, the digital divide may get worse. 

3. Further, thoroughly assess your own 5G needs. Many current use cases probably do not need 5G. Hence, clearly understanding and nailing your use cases is an important vision to have. 

4. Understand how 5G will transform your network operations, impact apps, and customer experience. 

5. Finally, ask the right questions to your service provider on 5G timelines, cost, strategy, coverage, and implementation to understand what you can expect and to plan your investments in the coming months.

Author: Abhijit Sunil

Source: Forrester

How AI is influencing web design

Artificial intelligence in web design is making a major impact. This is what to know about how it works and how effective it can be.

When Alan Turing invented the first intelligent machine, few could have predicted that the advanced technology would become as widespread and ubiquitous as it is today.

Since then, companies have adopted AI (artificial intelligence) for pretty much everything, from self-driving cars to medical technology to banking. We live in the age of big data, an age in which we use machines to collect and analyze massive amounts of data in a way that humans couldn’t do on their own. In many respects, the cognition of machines is already surpassing that of humans.

With the explosion of the internet, AI has also become a critical element of web design. Artificial intelligence has helped with everything from the building and customization of websites and brands to the way users experience those websites themselves.

Here are some of the ways AI is making web design increasingly sophisticated:

AI designs websites

Artificial design intelligence (ADI) tools are the building blocks of many of today’s websites. These days, ADI systems have evolved into effective tools with functional and attractive results. Wix and Bookmark, for example, offer popular automated website building tools with customizable options. Designers, developers, and everyday entrepreneurs no longer have to build websites from the ground up, nor do they need to spend hours choosing the perfect template. Instead, both Wix and Bookmark claim that websites can intelligently design themselves, using nothing more than the site’s name and the answers to a few quick questions.

Not only does AI help engineer the web building process, but it’s also become the designer behind the brand names and logos that dominate a website’s home page. Companies are turning to artificial intelligence to automate their branding process, using AI tools like Tailor Brands to design their own customized logos in seconds. In this way, AI has made good web design more accessible and affordable for big companies and small-scale entrepreneurs alike.

AI enhances user experience

AI isn’t just changing web design on the developer end, it’s changing the way users experience websites, too. AI is the force behind the chatbots that offer conversation or assistance on many companies’ websites. While conversations with chatbots once felt frustrating, repetitive, and a little too robotic, more sophisticated AI-powered chatbots use natural language processing (NLP) to have more natural, authentic conversations and to genuinely “understand” their customers’ needs. Sephora’s chatbot Kik is one example of a powerful NLP chatbot that understands customers’ beauty needs and provides them with recommendations based on these needs.

In addition to the practical value of chatbots, the prevalence of chatbots indicates an increasing shift towards customer-focused websites, ones that prioritize drawing customers in over getting their message out. With the emergence of AI chatbots, websites have transformed into customer engagement platforms, where customers can offer their feedback, ask for help, or find products or services suited to their preferences.

AI analyzes results

We’ve seen how AI has benefitted both website building and user experience. A third way AI is affecting web design is by making possible analytics tools that help companies analyze their results and refine their websites accordingly.

By crunching down big data into analyzable numbers and patterns, predictive analytics tools like TensorFlow and Infosys Nia reveal real-time insights about what does and doesn’t work for website visitors and prospective customers. This enables businesses to understand which types of customers are drawn to their site, and to accommodate those visitors with a seamless user experience. Using results from AI-powered analytics platforms, web developers and designers are able to tweak and refine their site and make it increasingly user-friendly.

AI in web design: where is it heading next?

AI is already being used in web design to make site building and design easier and more accessible, to enhance UX and further user engagement, and to drive site improvement through big data analytics. As artificial intelligence becomes even more advanced, affordable, and widespread, it will continue to affect web design in ways we can only imagine. Will improved natural language processing make chatbots indistinguishable from human representatives? Will websites readily adapt, real-time, to users’ preferences and needs? Whatever happens, AI is already the new normal.

Author: Diana Hope

Source: SmartDataCollective

The benefits of analyzing the customer journey of your users

Skills related to User Experience (UX) design are high in demand. They are among the top 10 most demanded skills in 2019. ranked by a recent LinkedIn study. Finding qualified UX designers is tied with finding software engineers in terms of hiring priorities, according to a recent Adobe study. Within that UX bucket, designers who have skills related to data analytics and research are particularly sought after, with those qualities being named as a must-have.

But the ability to analyze the user journey to create delightful experiences for end-users isn’t just a skill that is exclusive to (nor required only by) UX professionals. For stakeholders across the spectrum of software development and delivery, access to interactive data visualizations on how the user is moving through a task can help each group more successfully deliver on their own goals. From engineering, to product management, to marketing. And while access to this data may be expected in a cloud-based application, it’s equally (if not more) important for on-premise software publishers to enable this type of analysis in their products.

By looking at data related to user flow (also known as ´path analytics´), product stakeholders begin to identify the series of steps it takes users to reach their goals. With a deep view into the steps surrounding a key task, several helpful pieces of information that may have been difficult or impossible to visualize now become readily apparent. Things like unanticipated actions, broken workflows, or shortcuts that power users have discovered that could be promoted or productized. 

Having this knowledge has benefits that extend beyond streamlining and optimizing the user interface. This insight can help better determine training requirements and guide users, and also provide points for comparison between old and new user interfaces that inform product development.

How does user flow analysis work?

It starts with choosing a ´hotspot´ event to analyze. This can range from launching the application, to launching any event within it such as using a wizard, opening a menu, or accessing a particular feature. Next, pick a path direction within the hotspot to drill further into. This can be the start, the end, or somewhere in between. This is where it is crucial to understand the question you’re trying to answer. For instance, the hotspot would be the starting point if the goal is to understand where users go from a particular point, the steps taken, and whether that meets expectations. The hotspot would be the endpoint if you’re trying to answer a broader question about the value of the experience, such as the steps leading up to the user clicking on a link to explore upgraded functionality.

Choose the number of steps to analyze, and the number of events within each step, as well as any paths that you don’t want to look at. As you audit the events you have tagged, there are a couple of best practices you can follow.

First, make sure to have a naming convention for events that makes interpreting them easier in user flow reports and visualizations. Secondly, make sure that all of the high value events are tagged, to get data on them as soon as possible or before a specific marketing campaign or product roadmap decision.

Having a window into these user flows has several key benefits, as it enables the organization to:

Validate design: Confirm that users are taking the path designed for them or identify if different workflows may produce a better result.

Visualize the journey: Quickly navigate through path reports to see traffic patterns through events and relative popularity of next/previous steps with a single click. This includes the ability to filter reports to view paths of specific sets of users based on their properties, and exclude noise events such as system generated events that are not user-initiated for clean user paths. The best tools will enable chart-based analysis, and provide the ability to export the data to CSV for offline analysis.

Verify campaign effectiveness: User flow analysis can also be applied to measuring the effectiveness of marketing campaigns being pushed out through in-application messaging, with the ability to see the path a user took after seeing that message. User flow analysis lends the ability not only to see click-throughs, but also drill down within that to see the exact path users took.

Author: Victor DeMarines

Source: Dataversity