Understanding User Behavior: The Key to Effective UX
It’s not uncommon for businesses to spend hours obsessing over what they think is the ‘perfect’ design only for customers to turn around and be unimpressed by their efforts. And then, they’re left wondering where they went wrong. More or less. It’s easy to assume that if you like it, your audience will too.
But without data-driven insights, you’re basically shooting in the dark. Designing a great product experience goes much beyond colours and typography - although those are important too. Understanding user behaviour is crucial to developing a user experience that actually connects with your audience.
There are three ways to go about this - observation, interviews and analytics. While analytics help you understand trends among users at scale, interviews and observations allow you to get direct responses from customers about their first-hand experience. And before collecting feedback on your existing product, you’ll want to have a process in place for analysing the data.
But here’s the catch - there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to researching user behaviour and every business has to define their own methods for finding insights that work best for them. The main thing is sometimes understanding why your users act the way they do and reverse-engineering their thought process to best suit their needs. Some things can’t be measured but there are still some good ways to know if you’ve gotten it right - higher retention rates, lower bounce rates, increased conversions or engagement and positive customer reviews are all very telling signs of a great user experience.
Simplifying Navigation: Creating a Seamless Experience
I think people love to overthink the whole navigation bit. And, sure, it’s easy to add a bit too much when you’re building a site. Sometimes, business owners want to fit all of their offerings in that space because they want the visitor to see how much they have going on. But research indicates that most visitors don’t take the time to read through all of those headings and links.
It’s unfortunate, but true. They probably skim through it and click on whatever seems relevant in that moment. If they don’t find what they’re looking for right off the bat, there’s a good chance they’ll click out in seconds - never to return again.
It happens so often now because new shops are popping up every day and these customers are spoiled for choice. For this reason, I think it’s best to keep things simple and direct. It’s safer for users to access information intuitively rather than having them overthink what could be where. But if that means you end up sacrificing on content - perhaps add a mega menu or drop-downs.
They can be useful when it comes to keeping things within reach yet still out of sight. Maybe provide more information about products under categories by adding filters and different sections for more details. This way customers can easily locate information about products from your main navigation itself, making them feel more secure about their purchase decisions without feeling overwhelmed by excess data at first glance.
Personalization Strategies: Tailoring Interactions for Loyalty
It seems like 'personalisation' is somewhat a word that's thrown around in the fashion eCommerce world without much regard for what it truly means. Many people think that simply slapping your customer's name on an email and sending them random product recommendations counts as personalisation.
But - I suppose - when you put yourself in the customer's shoes, it becomes clear that if you're sending someone with curly hair products meant for straight hair, you're not really personalising anything. The best brands don't treat all their customers the same. Instead, they use data from things like previous purchases, browsing history, customer lifetime value, and customer journey maps to craft personalised shopping experiences.
This sort of approach actually makes people feel cared about and gets them to engage more with your brand. Plus, they're more likely to buy something and keep coming back to you. It seems like the trick is showing them that you value their time enough not to waste it with irrelevant suggestions.
It's a bit tricky though because you want your recommendations to strike a balance between being relevant but also not pigeonholing your customers based on their past behaviour. You want to show them some new things that might just be outside their comfort zone but within the realm of what they're open to exploring.
Once you've found this balance and created a 1-to-1 experience, then the magic begins. Sort of. Brands have been doing this forever too - remember Coca Cola's infamous #ShareACoke campaign. It was genius because suddenly Coke wasn't just Coke anymore, it was Karen's Coke or Jasmine's Coke and there was even some rivalry amongst people when they couldn't find their name at the supermarket but someone else could.
Even today there are brands like Thread. Com that have taken things a step further by creating entire personalised websites filled with clothes that match your preferences. Personalisation isn't new but it's evolved over time and now there's so much you can generally do online as well.
Visual Design Tweaks: Enhancing Aesthetic Appeal
Let’s not mince words, most people get this wrong. Visual design tweaks don’t mean making your website or app look pretty alone. It’s about impact over fleeting interest.
You want to grab attention and provide a positive experience to users, because that means more time spent on your website. And in the end, that should result in conversions. There’s no one-size-fits-all rule here, though. So many businesses and entrepreneurs simply believe if you make it look visually appealing, you’re going to bag loyal buyers.
That’s not how it works. What’s important is understanding your target audience and what appeals to them. If you’re targeting millennials and Gen Zers, using bright colours, digital illustrations, and playful typefaces might appeal to them more than heavy text-based visuals.
However, if you’re targeting Gen X or Boomers, you might want a more serious aesthetic. A thing most people don’t realise is that before changing the aesthetics of your UX design, you need to do some research on your target audience. Understand what they want and cater to that with your visual appeal and brand aesthetic.
Sort of. Don’t overcomplicate things. In fact, keeping things simple often works best especially if you’ve got a new audience browsing through your products or services.
More or less. Now don’t go ahead with making things too simple, either. Some white space is good, but too much can make everything feel incomplete or unprofessional even. Colour plays a huge role here - some colour can rarely make all the difference in getting conversions and click-throughs.
The bottom line is: less can mean more. But sometimes more can be better - if done right.
Feedback Loops: Leveraging Customer Insights for Improvement
Most get feedback loops wrong when they think customer insights are only about sending out a survey after a transaction and being done with it. Seems Like or they see them as tick-box exercises to feel good about including the buyer, without really acting on anything, nor tweaking or following up. It's common to treat customer feedback like a one-off event where you ask once, you receive once, you forget it once.
Then, you repeat the cycle next month. But I think it's more of an ongoing dialogue that continuously shapes and refines the user experience. Establishing mechanisms like interviews, testing sessions, surveys and conversation reviews is important. But what makes customer insights valuable is what happens after collection - how your team processes the data and conversations to inform new decisions for future changes.
I realise this seems quite involved and sometimes confusing because you're told that this process helps create brand loyalty but what does that mean. Brand loyalty is less about features or cool names and more about listening actively (and visibly), personalising responses, collaborating with customers in short timeframes and addressing needs directly in every micro touchpoint. To encourage customers to share honestly with you, display curiosity about their satisfaction often - whether it's reviews, testimonials or feedback requests in product communications - it's refreshing when a brand asks in simple words “Was this helpful.
” That's how they'll know they're valued by your business and sharing what they're thinking at various stages of the buyer journey will make them stay longer.
Mobile Optimization: Ensuring Accessibility Across Devices
Many brands still get fixated on making their sites look decent on a phone, and not much else. Mobile-friendliness is often confused with genuine mobile optimisation. What ends up happening is an endless shuffle of the same basic images or text from a desktop site to its mobile version. Then, no one really understands why engagement drops and people just aren’t converting.
Effective mobile optimisation means thinking about how accessibility differs across devices, especially if you know your audience uses some over others. Real mobile optimisation would mean that the first thing you do before you start designing your site is check which device type your customers tend to use - and tailor your user experience according to that device’s specific needs.
Maybe it’s less text, more images, better navigation, fewer steps to take an action, or a much friendlier interface for new users. There’s always a little debate about what the best approach is - even between experts. The way I see it, that’s because it changes depending on what your brand is about and who it serves.
For instance, let’s say you have a highly visual product and great looking packaging. You’d want to show that off in the best way possible while keeping their focus on your CTA or products page. So you’d need a fairly robust design that works with both mobile and desktop without sacrificing good UX. It’s very rare for brands to be able to get this right without professional help - but if you know where your leads are coming from, that’s where you should invest in getting it perfect.
A good sign of whether your site is potentially truly optimised for mobile is whether a user can easily navigate through it when using one hand. Remember that most users are often on the go when they’re scrolling their phones. An even better test would be whether it’s easy for anyone who doesn’t use both hands or has physical limitations with their hands can seemingly do what they’d like to, easily and comfortably.