An app can make or break the customer journey. Get it right and the ease and simplicity of your product will have your customers coming back for more. Get it wrong, and no matter how brilliant your solution, you’ll struggle to grow your user base. Jack Underwood, Founder and CEO of Circuit explains.
With so much on the line, it can be difficult to know where to start but brands have a secret weapon at their disposal. It’s their own end users and the key is getting them involved in product development from the start.
A good customer experience is one of the key elements that sets a product apart. Whilst innovative tech is great, if your features are slow to load, the formatting’s off or your interface isn’t intuitive then user annoyance will quickly mount and override usefulness. We’re eager for new, digital ways to make our lives easier and more efficient – last December analytics firm App Annie reported consumers were on track to spend $112 billion across iOS and Google Play in 2020, representing a year-over-year increase of 25%. But if the software itself isn’t easy to use or efficient then it won’t have a place on a home screen. If brands don’t want to watch customers walk away then they need to be getting their user experience right.
A seamless user experience is important for any digital tool but for some it’s absolutely critical. In products that are designed to be used repetitively, or that must be in use for many hours in order to fulfil their function, any issues are instantly amplified by the sheer amount of time a user will spend with it. And these issues directly lead to wasted time: if a product is used 15 times a day but its user-unfriendliness means a task takes 5 minutes when it should have taken 3, that’s half an hour of time wasted every day. If your product is designed for constant use then you have nowhere to hide and its flaws are directly impacting your customers.
The stakes may be high but the solution couldn’t be more simple. What’s needed to create a great user experience isn’t a shedload of money or a team of Nobel Prize winning scientists – it’s having an in-depth knowledge of the end user and understanding the ways they will interact with your product. The key to building a great product is examining the complexity of their needs, the secondary problems they face and their interaction with competitors so you can create the features and capabilities they really need, even if they don’t know these themselves.
It’s a waste to wait until the product testing stage to get this input: trying to graft on new ideas at a later date is hugely inefficient, ineffectual in terms of integration, and you’ll be tempted to ignore these crucial insights because of the cost of incorporating them. You need to be engaging with your end user from the very start.
There are a multitude of ways app developers can do this. Whether it’s running review sessions, setting up specific focus groups, conducting detailed surveys or physically experiencing a day in the life of the end user, there are countless strategies for getting the insight you need. We’ve found that actually bringing app users onto our team and employing them part-time has been hugely effective in ensuring we’re truly building a product that serves their needs. There’s no one magic method for understanding your user; it’s a process of using a combination of tactics and working out which are most appropriate for you.
But even when your product has launched, the importance of user feedback doesn’t end. App development is a continuous journey and in order to stay competitive, brands need to be alert to developments in the market, new opportunities and arising issues. Proactively seeking user feedback not only allows you to keep ahead of trends and refine the user experience still further, it establishes a unique relationship of trust by demonstrating you value a user’s individual opinion and have their best interests at heart. This leads to greater consumer loyalty and free word-of-mouth marketing, enabling you to attract a larger audience.
A great customer journey relies on a great user experience and this means involving the end user from the very start. Engaging with customers throughout the product development process allows you to anticipate issues before they grow into real problems, address customers’ unspoken needs and build brand loyalty. Reaching out to your customers as you build tools for them isn’t an act of weakness: it’s the smartest business decision you can make.
About the Author
Jack Underwood is Founder and CEO of Circuit. Circuit is the best way to manage your delivery operations. Everything you’ll need to create routes, track packages, manage drivers and delight your customers.
