Explore the Psychological Principles of UX Design

Management decisions are the basis for the effective development of any project, whether it is a newly opened offline business, an online store, or a mobile product.

Any decision, as you know, must be made based on objective data for the receipt and processing of which analytical departments data scientists work.

It can also be a product manager who has set up and controls the project's current state by connecting one or more analytical tools. The company's analytical culture level directly affects the quality of decisions made. Mobile analytics, in general, is the collection of data about user behavior, determining their intentions, and taking measures to attract, retain and interact with them. Therefore, one of the foundations for the growth of your product in a timely manner is a high-quality study of not only traditional mobile app metrics (Retention, Churn, Install, CR, and more) but also an in-depth analysis of the interface, navigation, and user behavior in your app.

Such research belongs to the field of app UX analytics.

UX analytics is crucial for developing your product. It provides necessary business information about how exactly your customers use the released application, allowing you to set the context for classic metrics. This is valuable information when working to improve the experience that users get from interacting with your product. However, it is difficult to say which tool for the development of your project is more suitable. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. Choosing the right one can be compared to choosing a dish for baking: there is no specific dish in which baking would always turn out better. And no one tool will give all the necessary information for the explosive development of the product. Therefore, a combination of tools is often required to conduct high-quality UX analytics. In this article, we will talk about some of the analytics mechanisms that will help analyze and improve user experience throughout the entire life cycle of a product user.

Development of User Characters

Developing user personas is an essential part of creating a user-centric app UX design because only the user expresses the true interests of potential customers, buyers, and others. When developing characters, potential users of the application, four research methods are used to create reliable and realistic representations of the target audience.

1. Creation of a Collective Image of the User of the Application

The emergence of characters in marketing began in the mid-1990s. Since then, they have been an integral part of the research phase in software development. This method consists of creating characters and then collecting data related to the goals and pains of potential users. Usually, there are several types of users interacting with the application, so creating personas helps expand the circle of users, evaluate user behavior, and find out their ultimate goals and needs. Character creation begins with careful research. Psychological and sociological research is used to understand their behavior and motivation. A critical help here will be the information obtained by studying the audience of similar products. User research occurs through task analysis (card sorting, clicks, etc.), feedback (interviewing and feedback), and prototyping (experimenting with different ideas before developing them and implementing them into the application).

2. Description of the User Story

This brief annotation identifies the user, his needs and goals, who he is, what he needs, and why. There is one story per user. The advantage of the method lies in documenting the various actions performed by users in a mobile application, helping the development team evaluate the path from attracting customers to achieving their final goals.

Writing a user story is very simple using the algorithm: "Who is your user" (role) - "What does a user want" (function) - "Why does a user need this" (reason).

3. Use Cases

A description of a situation that captures a user performing specific tasks in an application. The script is the engine used by developers to manage projects. Scenarios describe the user's motives to suggest possible ways to achieve his goals. For example, a method might explain how a user uses a mobile application to purchase a flight ticket while on their way to work. The advantages of the script are to help the selection adoption of the optimal solution to the user's problem.

4. Storyboard Method

A visual representation of the structure of a product based on the basic steps a user must complete in an application. Designers can create different storyboards: sketches, illustrations, screenshots, slideshows, animations, and live demos. The technique was developed by Walt Disney in the 1930s and carried over into software design. The advantage of the method is that storyboarding is a great way to visually communicate any ideas to developers and end-users.

Product Usage Scenarios

Critical scenarios start during the design phase, continue through the testing phase, and even after the application was launched. Use case defines the specific situation in which the user interacts with the system to achieve specific goals. The main task of the Scenario is to describe who, why, and how exactly users interact with your product.

A good use case contains:

• A portrait of the user who launched the application.

• The situation in which the user is located.

• The problem that he is trying to solve with the help of the application.

• A description of how exactly he will solve it and, of course, what is most vital for him in the current situation.

For example, your application is a navigator; the main target audience is taxi drivers. Obviously, in most cases, the user launches the application when driving. He wants to build a route from point A to point B as quickly as possible, but he does not want to be distracted from the road and stop while adjusting the course.

Therefore, internet traffic will play an essential role in using the application. Already from this description, we can highlight several features for our application:

• Voice control.

• Ability to enter an address or indicate a place on the map.

• The application must keep the screen active - do not allow the smartphone to dim the screen or turn on automatic locking at all.

• The app should automatically re-route when you miss a turn.

• It should be possible to download maps to a smartphone in advance.

There can be many more points, and it makes no sense to work out our copy of the Google navigator in too much detail, but the principle should already be clear.

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing is a hypothesis testing method where several variables are changed at once (which means some different changes made to the product interface); after that, several applications for all possible combinations are released. The idea is to help you figure out which screen element has the most impact on a product's conversion rate. The advantage of multivariate testing is the ability to test several elements at once and receive pretty objective results. All combinations resulting from the changes made are checked as part of MVT testing. Before executing, you need to make the traffic sample size required for each option. If the traffic on the screen you want to test is meager, you should consider using A/B instead of MVT testing.

Empathy Maps

An empathy map is a method used by a development team to gain a deeper understanding of their users by immersing themselves in their environment. Empathy maps are a powerful technique that provides a way to visualize the main elements of a UX.

Traditional empathy maps are divided into four parts: say, think, do and feel, with the user at the center:

• The "says" section contains verbatim and direct quotes from research, for example: "I want something reliable".

• The "thinks" section covers what the user thinks about throughout the entire experience of using the product, which he considers crucial.

• The "does" section includes the actions performed by the user in the product and the goals of these actions.

• The "feelings" section implies the user's emotional state: what worries the user when using the application? For example, the user is impatient with the slow page loading.

Users are complex people, so it's beneficial to see the unifying factors between the above sections. You may encounter some inconsistencies; for example, seemingly positive actions may have a negative effect embedded in the user's emotions. Empathy maps become "treasure maps" with hidden nuggets of understanding the user. Exploring the cause of the conflict and quickly resolving it is the primary task of empathy maps.

Research of Actual Behavior and Analytics of Hypotheses

Involving users and target audiences in developing a mobile application will help create a competitive product or service in the digital technology market. As we have already said, there is no single mechanism that will give you a complete answer to the question: "how can I improve my product?" UX tools collect and visualize user experience data in various ways that can be used to optimize the mobile app experience. Tracking the actions of actual users is one of the most effective ways to get more detailed and complete information about the use of your product. To uncover most of the problems with UX, you need to track the actions of several cohorts of users at once. If users are "stuck" somewhere or could not find a function, the application is not finalized and requires fixing mistakes.One of the most famous tools for tracking user interaction with a product - Appsee - will help you understand the UX in detail. By looking at user session recordings and touch heatmaps, you can spot flaws in the UI and see how users interact with the app. The same ability to monitor user actions in a mobile application is provided by the UXcam tool. It automatically records all the events in your application and includes user behavior using touch maps.The Japanese Repro service is a pretty good tool for tracking user actions, also provides good quantitative analytics, and allows you to extract the user's IDFA and AAID, which has become a rather delicate issue lately.These tools integrate well with third-party solutions and provide rich information about the project's current state. However, all of them are extremely expensive and heavily burden the smartphones of the end-users of the application. Of course, each of these projects seeks to reduce the load, taking different approaches. For example, Appsee refused to support several Android smartphones, most likely because the smartphone simply cannot withstand the load of the service's SDK.Another excellent tool for high-quality analytics is UserX. It reproduces crashes and tracks user actions at every step of the project's conversion funnel. This allows you to work effectively with Churn and Retention. You can collect any events and form even the most complex funnels based on events and screens, adjust the number of frames in video recording to reduce the load on the smartphone and the amount of data consumed, enable or disable map rendering for the same purpose, and hide any screen from recording for user data security. In addition, the app allows you to re-design first-time experiences for your users, search for growth areas in your mobile app, and track customer satisfaction with your product.There is no single way to understand user behavior in a mobile app. However, based on the stage of its design and development, you can choose the tools that will help you get the most information you need for the product's success.