Data-driven UX: the keys to success

Track, measure, analyze, predict using Big Data and Digital Analytics; follow your KPIs and metrics via dashboards, make a prediction via algorithms… 
Do you feel like you're lost? It's normal. We will help you better understand how data can help you optimize the User Experience.

The key steps for a successful UX & Digital Analytics alliance

Find the right tool

choose a way
There are many webanalytics solutions.
Asking yourself a few key questions before any data approach is essential. Here are the important things to check:

  • Technical aspects : tool deployment load and SDK security. It is also necessary to check the correct interfacing of the solution with your other marketing tools (AB testing, CRM, sending push notifications, etc.).
  • Data availability: raw data recovery and real-time accessibility as needed
  • Marketing sizes : the user-centric approach of the tool and the dashboarding features offered
  • Availability of support teams : during implementation and on a daily basis according to the expertise of your internal teams
  • Considered cost : it varies according to the tool and the company's long-term vision (prediction, personalization, etc.)

The 4 tools that dominate the market


Google Analytics, AT Internet, Adobe Analytics et MixPanel dominate the French webanalytics market. 
If their main functionalities are similar, they all have technical specificities, approaches, data restitution. Asking yourself the right questions will help you find the tool that best suits your business.
Define your need and restrict yourself to a defined list of KPIs
Once the tool has been chosen and before writing the tagging plan and the implementation, it is essential to think about the needs of each team in terms of analytics. Some companies make the webanalytics tool their main means of management and monitor their turnover or performance of marketing campaigns thanks to it. Others will choose to use it only for UX optimization purposes.
Personalized workshops. with end users will allow you to refine the needs to restrict the number of indicators monitored and limit the implementation work.
Some typical questions to ask yourself in this upstream phase:

  • For an e-commerce site, is it necessary to have the details of all the products purchased with their references or is it possible to limit oneself to a single general conversion indicator?
  • For a media site, is the categorization of articles something to follow or is it possible to have a similar markup for all article pages?
  • Generally, do all the pages of my interface have to be marked or some will not need to be analyzed at all (legal notices, CGV, etc, …)? In the same way, defining a restricted list of clicks to mark will simplify your work of marking, implementation and analysis.

Why?

This scoping phase should also make it possible to define who will use the tool internally and how. Direct use by business users requires quick access to easily understandable and directly actionable metrics and KPIs.
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Set up automated product reporting: monitor
Whether you are in an Agile organization or not, automated reporting by product will be a valuable tool for managing and optimizing UX.
Monitor the performance of your interface on a daily basis, the impacts of your redesigns or new features will allow you to truly integrate data into your thinking. More and more companies are installing monitoring screens in their workspaces. Making data accessible allows all profiles (developers, product-owners, UX-designers, project managers, etc.) to acquire data reflexes and appropriate success indicators.
To be effective, these reports must include a maximum of ten indicators and combine real time and evolution curves to measure the long-term impacts of optimizations.
More and more webanalytics solutions offer the possibility of building advanced dashboards that update automatically.
Otherwise, it is possible to work directly on the raw data and integrate it into dashboards via dedicated solutions such as Qlikview/Tableau.
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Integrating data into daily product thinking

Once your data is reliable and your reports are in place, you can integrate the data into your UX reflections. Either via exploration to build new optimization hypotheses, or via a posteriori analysis to measure the performance gain generated by your new features.

In this phase, the joint work of the UX-Designers and the Digital Analyst is essential. The data provides insights to guide the user tests which then confirm or not the initial hypotheses.

The data often does not explain the reason for a behavior. Here are a few examples to show you how the 2 expertises are necessary and complementary in the design of digital interfaces:

  • On an e-commerce site, the data highlights an abandonment rate on the delivery page of more than 70%. The marketing teams immediately underline the need to lower shipping costs and are working on a CRM strategy around the issue. By supplementing the figures with user tests, the UX-Designers have succeeded in showing that the need to scroll to reach the Change of address button is also an important point.
  • Let's take the example of two sites of the same company, with two different registration forms. The first has only four fields to fill in while the second has nine. The first displays an account creation rate of 15% while the second displays only 4%.
    The Product-owner immediately raises the need to reduce the number of fields in the first form to optimize the registration rate. The user tests carried out to confirm the hypothesis will in fact highlight that the first site has a much simpler password logic than the second where five different rules must be respected.

To conclude

As you will have understood, data has become essential in the interface design process. At UX-Republic, we believe that it is complementary to the work of UX-Designer and that the optimization of digital interfaces is based on the alliance of complementary expertise. We therefore now offer to support you in the implementation of your data strategy with our super UX-Analytics experts! Tracking, reporting, analyzes hold no secrets for them 🙂

Take Away: The essentials of data-driven UX

  • Find the right tool : Take the time to benchmark, to test market solutions
  • Clearly define your analysis needs before writing the tagging plan and implementing the tool
  • Set up automated product reporting and focused on a shortlist of KPIs
  • Make quantitative data a complement to user testing and integrate it throughout your optimization thoughts. Using data must become a reflex for all the profiles of your teams.

Wanda Saint-Paul, Digital Analytics Team Manager, @WandaSaintPaul