Product teams are tasked with ambitious, complex product and business challenges. They might need to increase conversion for a signup flow, drive more revenue, increase user engagement for a new product line, or even build new products to expand the business. These complex challenges require sophisticated solutions and a deep understanding of the end user and customer they’re building for.
Over the past decade, there has been an incredible rise in product analytics. This surge has transformed us from a world where we had little understanding of how customers and users interacted with products to one where we know every single click, action, or inaction. This new data set has created an environment where we are inherently driven by quantitative data sets and tasked with goals and KPIs, ultimately pushing us to refine and optimize our products through the lens of numbers, charts, and graphs.
Product analytics tells us the actions and inactions users are taking. It provides valuable data on every click, interaction, and abandonment. However, once an action is taken, a decision has already been made. Analytics only show the aftermath of a customer’s decision, when they have already decided to abandon their cart, end their subscription, or simply not return to your website.
Product analytics leads us to reactive decision-making, building for users who have already churned, instead of preventing them from doing so in the first place. We find ourselves constantly playing catch-up, addressing issues only after they have impacted our users and our business. This reactive approach limits our ability to anticipate and preemptively solve problems, ultimately hindering our capacity to create truly exceptional user experiences.
The next era of building world-class, modern products moves beyond analytics. Product analytics alone is not enough to help us build digital products for the future. We need to move beyond quantifying our users through numbers, charts and graphs, and data science statistics and trends.
The next generation of building world-class products involves understanding the individuals we are building for, as humans. Numbers, graphs, and analytics can only tell us where the problem lies. They create the goal, but they cannot guide us to reach the goals – nor do they reveal the hopes, objectives, and hesitations of the people who use our products every day.
It’s time for a new type of data set to carry us forward and complement the product analytics we use today. To understand the users behind our products and move beyond numbers to humans, we need an experiential data layer. This layer captures users’ frustrations, pain points, optimism, aims, goals, and emotions, helping us understand how our products are impacting people and where they might be falling short.
This is called experience analytics. Experience analytics is a new data type that helps you understand people - just as if you were having a conversation with them. Charts, data and graphs become a clear picture of what your users actually think and feel. It answers the “why” behind the charts, data, and graphs, unlocking business outcomes that are often challenging and messy. These outcomes typically require immense amounts of testing, discussions, conversations, and whiteboarding. However, with experience analytics, we can clearly understand what we need to do to build better user experiences. The complex, messy paths to solutions become clear, crisp, simple, and streamlined.
As we move forward as an industry, it brings us back to why we’re all here. Our role in product development is to build product experiences that customers love. To build for people, we need to understand their sentiment in real time as they experience our products. This will solve the ambiguous business outcomes we are so often tasked with solving. We need to move beyond numbers and graphs and embrace quantifying experiences and people, deeply understanding not just as groups, but as individuals.
Product analytics provide us with valuable insights, but they are just one piece of the puzzle. Understanding the human elements—emotions, motivations, and experiences—completes the picture and guides us toward creating products that truly resonate with users. The future of product development lies in integrating these insights, enabling us to build products that not only meet but exceed the expectations of our customers. By embracing experience analytics, we can create products that are data-driven and human-centered, leading to greater success and satisfaction for both businesses and users alike.
Meet Sprig, the world’s first AI-powered experience insights platform. Sprig empowers product teams to ask the right questions, uncover real-time insights, and generate AI-powered solutions that drive revenue, retention, and user satisfaction. Stay tuned for September 5th when we will unveil the next generation of our platform that bridges the gap between numbers and humans!