Many people view UX and design as a very linear pathway. You design your product, it gets tested, you tweak it a little and then off to development it goes.
Done.
But that will only get you so far.
The next - and arguably most crucial step in your UX journey - is following up on your launch with an embedded user-centric process for understanding how your product is being used, and how it could be improved.
Thankfully for you, a large portion of this can be automated, working in the background to help you deliver incredible experiences.
Firstly, you should be collecting UX analytics. HotJar is an excellent option for this. It offers a generous free tier, and supports many different types of user behaviour tracking and analysis:
- Heatmaps to indicate where people are navigating, clicking and generally interacting (there’s an example below).
- Recordings to see how individual users are interacting with your product in real-time.
- Statistics on metrics like rage-clicks to understand where your users are getting stuck or where your product is bugging out.
Additionally, you can use HotJar’s feedback and survey options to easily get insights directly from your users about how they’re feeling about your product. A good place to start would be running an NPS survey with your users.
You should also check in with your superusers regularly. Find the most engaged 20% of your users, and schedule interviews with them to understand what they like, and what they think could be improved.
You may be thinking ‘how do I find our most engaged users?’ You have a few options:
- Review your usage stats (assuming you track basic usage in a database) and create a query for sorting your users by how active they are on your platform.
- Send out a survey asking your users how they’d feel if they could never use your product again. Everyone who responds that they’d be disappointed or worse should be considered.
Confused about how to find your most engaged users? Consider the actions that they’d take in standard usage of your product. For example, if your product lets users read book summaries, the metric to differentiate your most engaged users is how many summaries they’ve read, or how long they’ve spent reading.
I’d recommend automating as much of this scheduling as possible to save you time. Combining a tool like Calendly with some custom logic aimed at your power users can easily let them book time in your calendar.
If your product is already developed, incorporating an automatic bug-tracking tool like Sentry is a great idea.
If you’re building an app or SaaS product, there will inevitably be bugs lurking, waiting for your users to find them.
Sentry can automatically capture error reports as they happen and report them in real-time. They are measured by how often they occur and they’re categorised in a way that’s easy for you to understand and therefore resolve.
From experience, it’s much nicer to fix a bug impacting a handful of users rather than waiting for it to hit thousands of people and you having to deal with complaints.
Actionable Steps
- Integrate HotJar with your website or product.
- After a few days, review your first recordings and heatmaps.
- Devise a plan on how to identify your most engaged users.
- Create a list of your most engaged users.
- Invite those users to book some time in your calendar (potentially using Calendly) to provide their feedback.
