Product experience matters. If your user is frustrated with your product, they will find another tool to use - and that’s when product leaders have to answer questions around high churn rates.
Below are five ways to improve your product experience and prevent costly churn or low adoption.
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What Is Product Experience (PX)?
Product experience is a measure of your platform’s usability, design, functionality, and value. A strong product experience means:
- The platform is easy to use.
- The platform’s user interface is uncluttered and simple to navigate.
- The design is visually appealing, sleek, and modern.
- The platform offers all the features and tools the customer needs.
While it might seem straightforward to build a strong PX, product leaders know that this is not true.
Bugs and edge cases can make your product difficult to use. A poor onboarding experience can mean that users churn out of the product before they even start to really use it.
That’s why there’s hundreds of analytics tools to tell you if your users are dropping out of the experience, but only Sprig tells you exactly what your users think about the experience. (Keep reading to learn how Sprig can help you build a better experience.)
Product Experience vs. Customer Experience
Product experience is only about what’s in your platform. Customer experience includes this and your brand’s reputation, your social media presence, and how your customer success team interacts with users. An excellent product experience is the core of a great customer experience.
4 Ways to Improve Product Experience
- User Feedback
There are dozens of ways to get user feedback - including feedback surveys, analytics, and in-person interviews. Below we cover just a few of these methods and how they can improve the product experience.
- Feedback surveys: Send these surveys when you want to learn what your users like about your app and what you could do better. You can survey users who spend lots of time on your app, people who are about to churn, or any other segment.
- In-product surveys: Use Sprig’s In-product Surveys and expert-built, customizable templates to get insights as people use your product and boost response rates to more than 30%. From there, Sprig AI Analysis turns your survey data into actionable insights for improving your product.
- Replays: Try recording your users’ sessions — you might see where they fall off while they navigate your platform. With Sprig’s Replays, you can catch bugs, hidden CTAs, and tricky navigation you’d otherwise miss. You can also watch new users try your product for the first time and figure out where to optimize their journey.
- Experimentation: Through product experimentation frameworks, you can try out changes to your app and see how they affect your PX. To start, you’ll set a goal for your platform based on how it helps users succeed. You’ll then build a hypothesis — something like “we believe [solution X] will [achieve Y] because [reason Z].” Choose key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring your experiment, set a large-enough sample size, run your experiment, review the results, and make changes.
- Product analytics: Analytics tools help product managers track and analyze usage and behavioral data about their products, customers, and market. This data helps them make informed decisions about product development, pricing, marketing, and user experience.
- Personalization and Customization
In the realm of product design, personalization can involve as little as addressing your customer by name on the home screen. A simple “Hi, John!” when the user logs in might help them feel much more at home.
Customization encompasses more — it gives people the power to alter their experience however they’d like. This flexibility, combined with a product already boasting excellent usability, design, and functionality, wins over the average users. After all, people might be more likely to engage with your app if it matches their needs. They might also keep buying into your higher-priced services if you provide them with a customizable experience each time.
- Improving the Onboarding Experience
Sometimes, you might see a drop-off in usage at the very outset. This discovery is especially worth acting upon — premature drop-offs prevent high product adoption rates. A great way to address this problem is to focus on providing the best possible onboarding experience.
The best product teams elevate their onboarding experience through free trials, product demos, and self-guided product walkthroughs. Dedicated account management, one-on-one training, streamlined customer support access, and in-product knowledge centers also improve onboarding.
- Maximize Speed and Performance
Users want to navigate through your platform as quickly and easily as possible. Achieving this outcome requires all your tools and interfaces to load rapidly and function fully. Each click should bring someone to their desired page in just a second or two, with no bugs on the loaded page. These steps can help maximize speed and performance:
- Use CSS sprites and merge multiple files into one to lessen your product’s number of HTTPS requests.
- Implement a content delivery network so your platform’s contents download faster.
- Include cache headers so that the user’s web browsers store certain product assets locally, further reducing load time.
- Compress images within your product to improve load times.
- Set a framework for maximum performance such as Vue.js or React.
- Create database queries efficient enough to ensure the retrieval of only necessary data.
- Load your product on several devices and browsers to find additional issues.
- Identify potential improvement areas via product analytics platforms such as Google Analytics.
These steps should be taken regularly to maintain speed and performance. This will minimize customer frustrations and maximize satisfaction and retention.
A Real-World Example of an Excellent Product Experience
In 2018, leading small business commerce platform Square acquired Weebly, a website-building app. Square’s goal was to build strong website-building features into its platform so that brick-and-mortar small businesses could more easily branch into online selling. This presented two challenges for Square: adjusting Weebly to its sellers’ needs, and moving its sellers from its previous website builder to Weebly.
As Jewel Seperson, Square eCommerce’s Head of Research, told Sprig, reshaping Weebly to fit Square’s users was a huge undertaking. To really get to know users’ needs throughout the journey, Seperson said, “We needed to fill in the gaps and increase our impact without burning out. It was also important to free up time for the research team to invest in forward-looking projects while continuing to meet the needs of our stakeholders executing the current roadmap.”
Square eCommerce’s research team used Sprig’s In-product Surveys to quickly get hands-on insights. In just days, Square eCommerce’s product managers, marketers, and designers had plenty of meaningful in-product insights to build from. The results included more successful onboarding, stronger global go-to-market strategies, a superior mobile app experience, and quicker ways to evaluate user satisfaction with new features. Ultimately, within six months, Square identified and acted on hundreds of insights across five product areas through Sprig.
Get Started with Sprig
User feedback is core to creating a high-quality product experience, but it takes time and effort. Sprig AI can cut that time in half. Sprig’s GPT-powered AI Analysis summarizes open-text survey responses into themes and recommendations, and customers love using this best-in-class text analysis to help them spend less manually analyzing and grouping responses and better understand survey results.
Get started today and build a better product experience with Sprig.