3 UX Methods to Help You Better Understand Your Customers

By better understanding your customers, you can provide a better service and build an all-around better product. Yet only 55% of companies currently conduct UX research – it’s a massively untapped business opportunity. Plus, customer experience insights can help guide strategies to retain customers and appeal to new ones.

This article will guide you through three user experience methods you can use to understand your customers better and help your product and business succeed.

Let’s get into it.

3 User Experience Methods You Need to Try in 2021

User experience is exactly what it says on the tin; it’s how someone feels about their interactions with your product or service.

It’s commonly spoken about alongside user interface (UI), but the two differ. User Interface refers to how someone interacts with your product; it’s the practical side of things and helps determine if your product is learnable and usable.

User experience is how your product makes someone feel— towards your brand and product. If you’re not pleasing someone, the chances are that person is doing a 180 and going straight for your competition. 88% of online shoppers say they won’t return to a site after having a bad user experience.

In short, good UX equals better products, customers that hang around, and organic word-of-mouth growth that’s sustainable.

1. Run Remote Usability Tests

Usability tests are the number one way for you to gather feedback on your product. However, it’s not always easy to run them. Usability tests can come in many forms, from moderated to unmoderated tests, quantitative or qualitative; there’s a lot to be learned.

Given the way the world now operates, it can prove tricky to get users in a physical room to test out your product. This has lead to a huge surge in remote usability tests, which enable you to conduct critical user research without needing to be in the same space as your testers.

There are more benefits to remote usability tests, too. Whereas traditional usability testing would often limit your test audience to a radius near your office or test space, taking this UX research remote enables you to reach a wealth of diverse people.

In turn, you’ll be able to test your product across diverse factors like geographical locations, languages, cultures, religions, and more. By doing so, you’ll be able to build a more inclusive product that’s aware of different people’s needs.

Remote usability tests to consider

Below are five remote usability tests that you can try with your customers. Of course, there are a lot more of usability tests that you can do remotely, providing you have the tools to do so.

Guerilla testing: Involves a small questionnaire and showcasing your product, or a low-fidelity mock-up of your product, to the ‘general’ public to get feedback.

Card sorting: Helps you understand how customers categorize or group information. You can provide the categories for customers or let them create their own—either way, you’ll be able to understand a customer’s thought process better.

5-second tests: A quick test to see whether your product’s page accurately communicates what you want it to. This test can also run for a longer period. The idea, in this case, is to see if you’re generating the feelings you want to from your customers.

Focus groups: A small group of customers, or ideal customers, to ask quick questions and gauge their feedback on ideas, product features, and more.

Preference testing: A fantastic way to split test two ideas, concepts, or designs and get your customer’s preference. You’ll begin to understand what they like, what they don’t, and build a better product because of it.

Each of these tests can drastically help you to understand your customers better. They can also save you a lot of time if you’re in the early stages of building a product. By doing your research up front, you’ll need to do fewer tweaks further down the line.

2. NPS Surveys

NPS surveys are a fantastic opportunity to understand your customers better, what makes them happy, and what doesn’t. A net promoter score gives your business an idea of the amount of ‘Detractors,’ ‘Passives,’ and ‘Promoters’ you have in your customer base.

The essential question to ask is: “How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?” 

Participants respond via a Likert scale from 1-10.

0-6 Detractors: Represents those that are a potential threat to your business. They’re not happy (enough) with your product or service and need some serious attention to change their opinion.

7-8 Passives: These are the people that are simply impartial to your product, meaning they don’t dislike it, but at the same time, they don’t really like it either. In their eyes, your product does the job, and that’s about it. These people aren’t likely to recommend your product, but they’re also not likely to leave a negative review about it either.

9-10 Promoters: These are your brand ambassadors, loyal customers, and those likely pushing your customer lifetime value (CLTV) average up.

Your results will give you a fantastic overview of your current user base and their experience so far with your business and product. However, it doesn’t end there. A good idea to lift your NPS survey value is to segment your responders: detractors, passives, and promoters.

You can do a lot with these segmented lists:

• running engagement campaigns
• upselling, referral campaigns
• re-firing incomplete onboarding journeys

For this article, we’ll focus on UX testing. All of these audiences can provide a fantastic insight into your product, how they use it and why they’ve fallen into a particular segment.

Brands tend to go wrong by only listening to one segment, like the detractors or the promotors. However, quiz all segments on why they’ve responded how they have. How does each segment feel about your product, and how can you improve their experience by making positive change.

An NPS survey is best delivered via an email campaign with an incentive to complete the survey if you’re asking more than one question—which you should! If you’re not able to send this out by email, consider an in-app pop-up. This brings us nicely to our final method.

3. In-app Customer Feedback

The best way to gather user experience feedback once your product is live is in your app. Providing you have an active user base, it’s a fantastic way to understand how your customers feel about your product and the changes you can make in the customer journey to lift their overall experience.

There are a few ways you can integrate feedback opportunities into your product flow, and Chameleon is a great tool to help you do this without needing a lick of code.

Quantitative cutomer feedback

Much like the NPS survey, these types of questions also rely on a Likert scale and give respondents limited options to tell you how they feel. For example, “on a scale of 1-5, how happy are you with the signup process.” Or, “on a scale of 1-10, how easy was building your profile?”

Quantitative customer feedback questions are great to scatter throughout your entire product flow. They can highlight areas of your product that are working well and those that need more attention. Once you’ve highlighted an area for whatever reason, you can back it up with the next step.

Qualitative customer feedback

Qualitative customer feedback will give you written responses to your questions, so your questions are best off being open-ended. Questions like: “Can you tell us why you didn’t like the sign-up process?” Or, “what features did you particularly like about building your profile, and why?” 

Qualitative customer feedback surveys are the perfect opportunity to gather customer feedback in one place and on specific features within your product. If you have the time to go through all of the answers, you’ll learn a lot about improvements to make, successes to replicate, and even understand the voice of the customer (VoC). You can later use this for keyword PPC campaigns and product messaging.

Wrapping up three user experience methods to better understand customers

That’s a wrap for UX methods to give you greater insights into your customers. Hopefully, you’ve found this article practical and useful and are inspired to try some of these user experience tests in your own time. 

Remember, if we build customer-centric products, we need to build customer-centric experiences to match. It can be all too easy to give people an experience that revolves around your product, but when you give someone an experience that revolves around them – that’s when you create customers that stay with you for the long run.