Take your product usability to the next level

After building a product that quickly gains traction, you may have the feeling that something is still missing because your adoption rates do not correspond to the number of users that have signed up. Upon discussing with your customers, you find that they are having trouble finding some features or are getting confused by some steps which can only mean one thing. Your product usability is poor.

When you understand the metrics on your product usability, you can make the most of your conversions, decreases churn risk and reduce users’ frustrations. You’ll be able to foresee problems, get a sense of what needs to be tackled and establish metrics that help you track user’s success with end to end tasks.

Do users like your product?

Start by seeing if users are happy with your product or not using Standardized User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire (SUPR-Q) and NPS which shows you if a person would be likely to recommend your products to their friends. SUPR-Q gives you a deeper view on some usability components in the app. It measures:

Loyalty
Credibility/trust
Usability
Appearance

A SUPR-Q survey gives you access to large areas of focus to improve on your product. Using this survey helps you get a sense of the big picture but it doesn’t really show you what the specific problems with your products are. If you want a more detailed report, you’d have to contact the customers themselves.

There will always be customers who are passionate about your product and are excited to use it and they will contact you when they have challenges using it so you can show them how it’s done. These customers rely on your product and love it so they are willing to work with you to make it better. The ones you should be worried about are those that are silent about their challenges and do not reach out to you to solve these problems. They were initially excited for your product but now they are facing too many challenges using it. One way to understand potential problems your customer may face with your products is to conduct interviews with them. You can visit them in person or use tools, your app or website to invite them for interviews that help you understand your products usability.

Measuring your impact

Having qualitative insight gives you a closer view of what your customer problems are and show you how you can tackle some of them but when you focus too much on this, it’s easy to get lost in it and forget about the bigger picture and discovering if the solutions you put in place do work. Your product usability stack should have you examining both quantitative and qualitative data. Below is the journey you should take when defining and monetizing your product usability data.

Define the aha! moment for your product

This is the first moment where your users start to understand the value your product brings. It varies for different products so defining and understanding the aha moment foe your product helps ground in your team a shared goal and vision on what the first task users need to accomplish to understand the value of your product should be. You can measure these tasks first quantitatively to see if your users find value in your product or not and how fast it is for them to arrive at that moment.

Define the habit moment of your product

The next step is to find the habit moment which is when users go from solely implementing your products to fully relying on it. You can find this moment by finding a retained user and working backwards on their user journey. Based on what your product is and the actions you drive users to take, your retained user will be different from other businesses. To get a more granular view of this, you can break it into subtasks so they are easier to track and give you a better understanding of the steps users take before reaching the ultimate goal.

Stitching it all together

While collecting qualitative and quantitative feedback on the way users use your product and which areas need more work, you will learn more about your user journey and customer usage. When you understand your customer journey, you can make informed decisions about which parts of the product journey your customers find challenging so you can use the aha moment to drive activation and the habit moment to drive retention.

Combining both qualitative and quantitative data helps you see the bigger picture of your products usability so you can create reports that give your team a view of how to activate, delight and retain your customers.