User experience is typically thought of as being an emotional and visual field, yet traditional UX principles don't provide designers with the agility that developers have with rapid development methods.
Unfortunately, these methods often put design on the backburner because believe that "an imperfect something is better than a perfect nothing." When it comes to prototyping, there needs to be some focus on design. Fortunately, you can improve your efficiency by using data to hack your UX research.
At a recent Stanford Igniters meetup Laura Klien, author of UX for Lean Startups, discussed how better data equals better products when applied to user experience research.
Although there are plenty of experiments you can use to leverage this information, you don't need to be a hardcore statistician to understand the basics. You don't even need to create special scenarios specifically for testing. There're plenty of insights you can gather just from your existing prototypes or finished products.
The customer funnel
Whether you're trying to have users sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, or browse certain sections of your site, the journey from beginning to your user objective is like a funnel. You'll start with a large base, but only a fraction of the base will actually go through to the end. If you're offering SaaS products for example, your checkout funnel would consist of:
- Create an account
- Select a plan
- Enter payment information
- Enter billing information
- Confirm the information
- Show a thank you message and offer an upsell
Reducing lost conversions
The funnel concept is simple, yet just like a sieve, users are going to leave at each level. To reduce the drop-off, you'll need to find the friction points and come up with the solutions by using your data.
Sure, it's a bit dry at times, but analyzing the qualitative (what causes the action) and quantitative data (why the action occurs) is how you'll stand out from the competition. It's simply a matter of creating a guess of what you think would happen if you tried fixing a problem a certain way.
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When you're figuring out how to begin troubleshooting, you need to speak with your users to pinpoint their frustrations. From there you'll have immediate direction on improving your offering.
Of course user interviews only work in small batches. If you're rapidly building the solution, you'll have to iterate, measure, analyze, and repeat the process for an accurate overview of what's going on.
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