You’ve worked hard to create a product, and you want to see users enjoying it. But as your product makes its way to market, it’s inevitable that undetected UX friction points will pop up. These pain points prevent users from enjoying a seamless experience and may discourage them from using your product altogether.
Addressing these issues quickly is the name of the game — it’s how you keep users coming back. Here, you’ll learn how to solve a UX friction point and maximize engagement with your product.
1. Identify UX Friction Points
Get User Feedback
Although analytics tools can pinpoint where users are encountering issues, user feedback provides the "why.” Going through online reviews, social media comments, and especially survey responses provides you with deeper insights into your users’ biggest pain points and frustrations.
With Sprig's in-product surveys, you capture insights directly from users as they navigate your product. These in-app surveys give you a seamless way to collect data and feedback in real-time. You’ll understand users' journeys and identify friction points as they occur. And when people see surveys while using the app, they’re less likely to skip questions like they might if a survey appears in their inbox.
Run Heuristic Evaluations and Expert Reviews
In heuristic evaluations, you’ll look at user experience through a set of predefined design principles. These principles act as general guidelines for identifying flaws, inconsistencies, or other issues that affect how users interact with your product.
This is a bit different from expert reviews. When you go that route instead, UX designers and experts combine their years of expertise with their knowledge of heuristic guidelines. Both options have similar benefits — they provide thorough product inspections and clear recommendations for how to make your product more intuitive and user-friendly.
2. Analyze the Root Cause
Understand User Behavior
Understanding users’ preferences and actions gives you a good idea of where to start when improving the user experience. Journey maps are key tools here. These visuals give you a complete view of a user’s interactions with your product over time. They highlight the emotions and pain points users experience along the way.
To create a thorough and accurate journey map, you need a deep understanding of the people who engage with your product. User personas — fictional characters representing different user types or segments — give you these insights. By conducting interviews with real users and stakeholders, you gather information to build these personas. They’ll help you better visualize who your product is designed for and how its features should cater to their needs.
Run a Technical Analysis
Slow load times or broken links can frustrate users and deter them from using your product. By conducting a technical analysis, you can pinpoint these and other similar issues.
Technical analysis involves diving into your product’s backend to assess its page speed and other performance areas. During a technical analysis, you’ll also look for different types of friction points such as bugs, errors, or complex features that could complicate your UX.
Sprig’s Replays provides recorded clips of users’ interactions with your product. Review these recordings to see exactly what’s tripping up users, then make targeted changes to improve UX. It’s the fastest way to find these types of product issues.
3. Develop Solution to UX Friction Points
Make Design Improvements
Once you’ve identified user experience friction points, it’s time to address them and improve the overall user experience. Try simplifying interfaces, simplifying navigation, and adding images and videos that explain how to use the more complex parts of your product. Make changes based on the data you gather through Sprig’s In-Product Surveys and AI Analysis (more on this soon).
Enhance Content Quality
People need to fully understand your product to use it effectively. Review your product and look for any language, instructions, or other wording that might be confusing or unclear to users.
Condense lengthy sections into more digestible bits of information. Make sure the information you offer is relevant to the part of your product that appears on the screen. Avoid unnecessary clutter that could overwhelm or distract users.
Streamline User Flows
A streamlined experience reduces or fully eliminates user frustrations and encourages them to keep using your product. It starts with simplifying checkouts, sign-ups, and other interactions to make them as intuitive and straightforward as possible.
Minimize the number of steps required to complete a task. Use simple instructions to guide users from one stage to the next. Instead of overwhelming users with options at the outset, gradually reveal them as users progress through these steps. These strategies will enhance your product’s usability and your customer satisfaction.
4. Implement UX Changes
Prioritize Changes Based on Impact
Create a list of UX changes to make, and set criteria to prioritize these changes. Sprig’s AI Analysis collects and sorts user responses into digestible summaries so you can easily determine which fixes need your attention the most. This way, you base your decisions on what’s most important to users.
Consider starting with the changes that most overtly impact users and contribute to a more positive experience with your product.
Iterate Your Design
Develop, test, review, adjust, repeat: That’s the course of the iterative design process. This process involves implementing changes to your product over time instead of all at once. After coming up with a prototype, testing it, and getting feedback about it, you’ll go back to the drawing board and make more changes. You’ll then do the whole thing again for your next prototype.
This process continues until you’ve arrived at the perfect product to bring to the market. Taking this approach helps you figure out what works best for your product and its users without a major overhaul of changes after launch.
5. Measure Success
Check Your Key Performance Indicators
Key performance indicators (KPIs) show your progress toward a target or objective. Using KPIs for improving UX starts with choosing metrics that align with your project’s goals and desired user experience. Some possible KPIs include user satisfaction scores, task completion time, completion rates, and conversion rates.
Once you’ve defined your KPIs, you can set targets to measure progress. For example, you might set a goal to have a 65% completion rate for your product’s email newsletter form. With this benchmark, you can see how close you are to 65% of users successfully navigating your product to sign up for the newsletter.
Get User Feedback After Implementation
Gathering user feedback doesn’t stop once you’ve made UI changes. If anything, this is the time to go back to your users to learn how those changes are working for them.
Sprig’s AI Analysis again comes in handy here. 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. You can use these insights to find new UI features you should add or enhancements you can make to further improve the user experience.
Make Continuous Improvement a Must
You should always look for ways to make things better for the people using your product. Collecting ongoing feedback allows you to stay in the loop with what’s important to users. Sprig’s In-Product Surveys directly into your app are the easiest way to do that. Plus, with Sprig’s survey templates, you can put together meaningful, quick-answer questions in just minutes.
Putting insights to work
User feedback is at the core of figuring out how your product is tripping up customers and changing that for good. While this process is important, it shouldn't overwhelm your team or take up an excessive amount of time. Sprig’s In-Product Surveys, Replays, and GPT-powered AI Analysis can be the solution. Sprig rapidly speeds up this process while giving you thorough and valuable insights.
Get started today.