How to Conduct User Analysis and Get Quality Insights
How can user analysis help you drive product growth and reduce churn? With user analysis, you can derive invaluable insights into user behavior and identify:
- Roadblocks that impair customer retention
- Unmet customers’ needs to inform your product roadmap
- Hiccups in user experience
Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty and learn how to perform user analysis.
TL;DR
- User analysis shows how users experience the product, what they like, and why they churn. To get the data, you have to combine four analyses: task analysis, user feedback analysis, user behavior analysis, and user experience analysis.
- Learn which features customers use the most and what features they might need.
- You’ll also identify new product design and development perspectives with task analysis.
- Lastly, you can carry out user journey analysis based on the data collected to identify drop-offs for different user personas and reduce churn.
- You want to conduct customer analysis when designing new features, updating UI, and deploying or refining existing customer experiences.
- Customer feedback analysis, in turn, will enable you to understand user sentiment and customers’ needs to boost customer satisfaction and improve retention.
- Customer analysis involves six steps:
1. Segmenting your users by shared characteristics. This will help you compare user experiences and behaviors in different segments.
2. Creating specific goals for each user segment to reach and map out their journey.
3. Tracking product usage and engagement for different user segments.
4. Creating hypotheses based on the insights received from user data and putting them into action.
5. Running A/B-testing to test out different hypotheses within one segment and see which improvement drives your goals up.
6. Repeat the analysis and update your product roadmap. - The best tools for user experience analysis:
- Userpilot — to track in-app user interactions and trigger contextual in-app communication based on data.
- Google Analytics — to monitor key acquisition and behavioral metrics.
- Hotjar — for screen recordings and heatmaps that enable you to observe in-app user interactions.
What is user analysis?
User analysis is the process of collecting and interpreting data to understand how users experience the product, what they like, and why they churn. User analysis methods include task analysis, user feedback analysis, user behavior analysis, and user experience analysis.
All of that highlights areas for improvement across the product.
Companies that cherish human-centered design cherish the user analysis process. Because the insights provided by user analysis are valuable in creating a customer-centric approach.
Why is user experience analysis important?
Besides collecting data to guide design and development decisions, user experience analysis has the following benefits.
It helps you better understand your users’ needs
You get insights into how users engage with your product, which features they use the most, and what features they might need to complete their goals. In other words, you obtain customer insights.
Identifies a new perspective for product design and development with task analysis
Task analysis helps identify friction points in the user experience. For example, you might detect flaws in the UX design that compromise the user journey, customer engagement, and customer satisfaction.
Ultimately, it helps UX designers and product managers understand user behavior and eliminate unnecessary steps in the user path.
With Userpilot, you can analyze how different customer segments move down the user journey by tracking and grouping events occurrence.
It helps to perform user journey analysis for your user personas
User analysis gives enough data to perform user journey analysis to identify drop-off points for different user personas.
It can be done by setting goals across multiple stages in the user journey. Thus, you can monitor how different user segments adopt your product, spot roadblocks, and improve accordingly.
When to perform user analysis
There are three primary situations where teams conduct a user analysis:
- When designing a new product – User analysis will help you create a human-centric product design and a seamless user journey.
- When designing a new feature – Track how your users interact with this feature in beta and find insights on how you can make it better. This way you can measure new feature success.
- When working on an update for an existing product – Detect friction points in the user experience and product drawbacks, and then solve them with a new update.
With that, let’s get familiar with different types of user analysis and what’s in each.
Types of user analysis
Here we’ll break down four types of user analysis that inform product roadmaps and drive product growth from different perspectives.
Task analysis
Task analysis helps you grasp user actions and motives. You’ll learn what motivates users to begin a task, how long it takes to perform a task, and where/if the friction occurs.
You’ll also learn how much effort is required to reach the desired outcome when using your product.
Altogether, it prevents you from making false assumptions about how users see your product and what value they derive from it. This knowledge, in turn, helps you enhance product design, in-app experiences, customer onboarding, etc.
User behavior analysis
User behavior analysis gives you a deeper understanding of your target audience, speaking from a product standpoint.
For example, you can track product usage and see when users reach certain milestones in their journey. Or you can see the sequence of activities users perform to complete a task in real-time.
Such insights let you build a market advantage by responding directly to the needs of your target group.
User feedback analysis
Customer feedback analysis is the process of understanding user sentiment and users’ needs, to boost customer satisfaction and decrease churn.
To understand user sentiment, you have to analyze both qualitative data and quantitative data. Common feedback sources for qualitative data are:
- Onboarding surveys—paint your customer personas and the goals they are trying to achieve.
- User interviews—give a comprehensive understanding of specific user behavior and preferences.
- NPS surveys—uncover promoters and detractors and how they feel about your company.
- CSAT surveys—show the overall customer satisfaction.
Every item on the list will spread light on user experiences, unmet needs, and desires and unveil qualitative data.
One way to perform user feedback analysis is by tagging NPS responses to get qualitative data in Userpilot.
Don’t forget to close the feedback loop. In order for the loop to be completed, you need to act on feedback and make changes based on user feedback.
Even if you don’t make changes, still acknowledge that you received the feedback.
User experience analysis
To improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, product teams analyze customer experience gaps and user engagement levels.
User experience analysis includes usability testing, focus groups, heatmaps, session recordings, and prototype testing.
By applying these methods, you want to observe user activities in the app to understand their logic and detect UX friction points.
How do you conduct user analysis?
This chapter will guide you through the step-by-step process and best practices for user analysis. Let’s dive right in!
Segment your users before your user analysis process
Your first step in the user analysis is to group customers by different criteria or shared characteristics. This will help you compare user experiences and behaviors in different segments to tailor product experiences.
In essence, user segmentation refers to grouping customers by specific criteria such as uncompleted goals in the user journey, the NPS score, in-app engagement, company data, etc.
Pro Tip: Segment users based on in-app activity and trigger contextual messages. This way, you’ll deliver super-relevant user experiences and improve conversions and customer engagement.
Map out the path to reaching specific goals
After segmentation, create specific goals for each user segment to reach and map out their journey. Let’s learn from an example.
Say you noticed that the user segment of new signups exhibits high churn. So you aim to eliminate churn and increase retention.
You can do so with a tailored onboarding flow and track what percentage of users have completed the steps in it. This way, you’ll see what causes a drop-off and how you can eliminate this friction point.
Specify goals and map out all interactions a user will have with your product to reach those goals.
Choose an effective goal-setting framework, like SMART. And incorporate the SMART system into in-app goal tracking.
Track product usage and engagement for different user segments
Product engagement is crucial to any SaaS product, as it can communicate the difference between retention and churn. Keep track of product usage and engagement to see if users reach the goals you assigned and where drop-offs occur.
Trigger specific in-app flows when certain in-app events happen to keep them on the path and prompt them to adopt more features.
Use different types of analytics tools for actionable insights
Combine different analytics tools for accessing product and website data to deepen the understanding of user behaviors.
- Userpilot — a brilliant in-app user analytics solution that allows you to track user interactions inside the product with a no-code Chrome extension builder.
- Google Analytics (GA) — a must-have app for tracking key acquisition and behavioral metrics. Use GA to find out what marketing channels bring in lucrative prospects. Tie this data with Userpilot’s analytics to replicate successful user experiences to other user segments.
- Hotjar — the leading tool for screen recordings and heatmaps that enables you to observe user interactions in the app in real-time. With Hotjar, you’ll understand users’ behavioral patterns and spot any bugs and UX issues.
Improve, test, and repeat
Once you complete the initial steps of user analysis—user segmentation, goal setting, and product usage tracking—create hypotheses based on the insights and put them into action.
Continue observing the metrics, and see if the changes affect the conversions, reduce churn or drive engagement.
Run A/B-testing to test out different hypotheses within one segment and see which in-app engagement flow drives your goals up.
User analysis is an ongoing process that requires a lot of testing. So repeat the analyses and make the appropriate changes to your product roadmap.
How to get the most out of your user analysis with Userpilot
Let’s be honest, it is impossible and inefficient to track in-app engagement, product usage, or user sentiment without proper product analytics tools.
Here’s what you can achieve with Userpilot.
- Customer segmentation — group your user base by behavioral and firmographic data and user sentiment. Create segments with a particular NPS score and web session duration, last seen date, in-app events, revenue, etc.
- In-app experience analytics — create and track combinations of in-app events like clicks, hovers, and form fills, and then analyze all these interactions under your own custom events.
- User sentiment qualitative and quantifiable analytics — create different user experience surveys to collect user feedback and gauge customer satisfaction.
- Trends overview — a powerful report to filter in-app events and feature tags’ usage by segments, time period, and even company. Tracking usage trends for custom events allows you to show the right in-app experience to individual users (or companies) who engage with those events.
- Analytics for in-app flows — Have you built a new in-app experience or onboarding flow? Let’s see if it moves the needle. Analyze how users engage with your checklists, modals, and other experiences and identify trends.
- A/B-testing — test out different in-app experiences to discover successful patterns and improve engagement.
Conclusion
User analysis highlights your wins and failures in product development and customer satisfaction. Gather the customer data and identify and remove your weaknesses.
Want to get started with collecting customer insights to fuel product growth? Get a Userpilot Demo and dive into product analytics!
