Finding out how users interact with your product requires a thorough understanding of user behaviour. Specifically, how long do they use it for? What do they most frequently click on? When do users decide to bounce? Where in the user journey? You can find the answers to these questions and continue to improve your product by analysing the behaviour of your users.
Understanding user behaviour is actually the cornerstone of creating a fantastic product and a sign of a well-run business. Additionally, in addition to giving you a competitive edge, raising customer retention rates, ensuring that you meet customer needs, and eliminating the element of guesswork in UX design, it offers insightful information about your product.
Let us learn about the psychology of web design and how it interacts with the user.
User Behaviour: What Is It?
User behaviour, put simply, is how customers behave when interacting with a specific product. You must set up various user metrics to gauge usability and intuitive design in order to analyse user behaviour. You can track and examine a plethora of UX metrics, including clicks, navigation, session duration, and conversion rates in order to understand the psychology of web design.
Let’s say, for illustration purposes, that your conversion rate this month is 30% higher than it was the month before. How can the cause of such a marked improvement be determined?
These are your two choices:
1) You could venture a wild guess.
2) You can assess the past two months’ worth of user activity and compare how users have interacted with your product during that time.
Determine the design elements that might have impacted the shifts in user behaviour. Have you, for example, added new colours, experimented with button positioning, or started using a new CTA?
Learning the reasons behind user behaviour is the ultimate goal of gathering data on user behaviour. What precipitates their behaviour, and why? Or why are they acting in this way? These questions and others can be answered by looking at and comprehending user behaviour.
Understanding User Behaviour
- Look for intentional, purposeful behaviour.
People love to believe that their decisions are intentional. They make a plan and carry it out. Why is it that so frequently in practice, you can’t predict user behaviour with up to 100% accuracy, despite the fact that the majority of customers’ life and product engagement decisions are consciously driven?
It turns out that things are not as straightforward as that. The way people behave has evolutionary roots. In the past, they were mainly driven by urgent cues to survive in a dangerous environment.
The actions of today are much more consciously thought out. There are numerous examples showing how repetitive actions can be used to change behaviour and bring conscious processes into the subconscious, from Pavlovian dogs to top-performing athletes.
- Recognise recurring patterns.
It’s possible that some of your clients’ reptilian brains have survived. They are sparked by underlying emotions. They are not, however, helpless victims of instinct. They do make deliberate, planned, and careful decisions. When they interact with your products, they do so on purpose.
Finding a way to thoroughly map their journey, analysing interaction insights, and using them to predict user behaviour are your top priorities in this meaningful interaction because doing so will help you direct your users towards mutually beneficial decisions.
- Overlay insights on the user experience
Users are often unaware of the reasons behind their fascination with a product, but they are aware of their reactions when they do.
They may not always be aware of the reasons behind their feelings, but they are typically aware of them thanks to their responses and reactions to your product.
Put the interactions on a user journey map to convert the unconscious processes into actions.
- Adjust the user’s advantages
Users won’t care about your product unless it offers them one of these three major advantages:
- Fix a dilemma.
- Fulfil a need.
- Make an effort to lift their spirits.
When creating customer journey maps, it’s important to consider what customers really want—even if your product is already ready, on the market, or about to arrive in stores.
How do you meet those fundamental needs?
Make a user journey map with many touchpoints. Maintain it throughout the entire design process, from the beginning to the development of finer functionalities.
There are countless inquiries you can make about the experiences of your users while they are travelling. By connecting each query to a user need, you can gain the knowledge you can use to further your business objectives.
Of course, you are limited in how much you can learn and inquire about. When it’s time to take action, you must have organised records and insights that you can transform into a smooth product flow and useful features. You need technology for that.
- Use tools for automation.
The “whys” behind user behaviour are brought on by unconscious, instinctive processes. The “hows” presented as external actions and events on your user journey map might pique your interest more. Leave the work to the UX tools.
Software for behaviour analytics uses sophisticated algorithms to look at intricate relationships between touchpoints. It generates metrics that, if you had relied solely on looking into those relationships yourself, you might not have known about. Although it is worthwhile, using pen and paper or Excel to complete the process manually will always be less effective or “intelligent” than using the software.
Make your software tools the beginning and end of the analytical process to stay on top of all that overwhelming customer behaviour.
- Refine
Never undervalue the importance of feedback. For example, feedback from software platforms or from in-app interactions contains a wealth of information that can be used to cut through the “hows” and get to the “whys.”
Use these resource banks to improve your products, rethink your business objectives, and adjust your journey maps.
7. Don’t assume; verify.
Never forget that your user’s perception counts more than your own. Always examine KPIs and observations that are motivated by emotions. However, you must pay attention to how the user sees the product you believe you have delivered and determine whether your perceptions are accurate.
A portion of the solution involves gaining profound insights into the connections between unconscious and intentional behaviour and performing surgically precise user journey mapping. You won’t need to spend as much time focusing on the “whys” of user behaviour when such deeper insights into the product design process are supported by effective analytics software. These seven steps can assist you in sorting through user data to find the valuable information you need to increase conversion rates.
User Behaviour Influence
After discussing how to understand user behaviour, we can move on to the next step. Understanding by itself is certainly fascinating, but as product designers, our main objective is to persuade users to get the most out of your product.
How can one accomplish that? Let’s begin by determining what drives users to take any action at all in the first place.
How do I modify user behaviour?
How can you affect — and ultimately change — user behaviour now that you know there is an entire science devoted to the study of motivation?
There are countless ways to influence user behaviour, some of which are more popular than others. You’ve probably experienced a few firsthand.
- Put consistency first.
To influence how users interact with your product, your design must be consistent. The very DNA of good UX design contains it. Users can use your product intuitively and without hesitation with the help of a consistent design. It encourages familiarity and helps establish trust.
Concentrate on standardising various elements in order to achieve a cohesive design. Users should, for instance, be able to infer from the appearance of various design elements how they will behave. Therefore, identical-looking buttons ought to have identical behaviour.
- Experiment with scarcity
Our brain values things more highly that will soon be out of reach for us and less highly than things that are more readily available and in greater abundance.
You can change user behaviour by fiddling with the ideas of scarcity and urgency.
Additionally, in addition to serving as a trigger, this feeling of urgency and scarcity increases the user’s motivation to take action. For instance, if you inform a user that an offer expires in 12 hours, they will be more motivated to act quickly than if they were given unlimited time to act. This is due to the fact that users are encouraged to behave in such circumstances.
- Use social proof.
Have you ever been in a position where you had to base your choice on the opinions of others? You probably have, whether you’re aware of it or not.
Consider the scenario where you are looking for a nice restaurant for dinner. Two restaurants are visible. While the other is empty, the first has a long queue of people waiting to enter. Which eatery do you frequent? The option with the most people is the one you should pick.
Why? The first restaurant must have really great food if there is a queue of patrons patiently waiting for a table. Similar to this, if the other restaurant is empty, the food muslineely be poor. Of course you’d choose the former, even though your assumptions may be incorrect.
- Follow the Peak-End Rule
Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize, created the peak-end rule as a psychological heuristic. Every person, in Kahneman’s opinion, has two selves:
a) The experiencing self is a quick, instinctive, unconscious way of thinking and being that is concentrated on moments as they are happening right now. Rarely does the experiencer turn experiences into memories.
b) Intense moments become memories thanks to the slow, logical, conscious thinking of the remembering self. The decision-making process is then influenced by these memories.
The peak-end rule is a psychological heuristic that examines how people remember an experience, to put it simply. According to this theory, people tend to remember an experience’s “peaks” and “ends” rather than the experience as a whole. The end refers to the closing seconds of an experience, whereas the peaks of an experience are typically the most emotionally intense points of an experience, whether positive or negative.
- Attempt giving
a) Improve brand recognition: Giving away something for free to your users, like a free trial or e-book, actually helps you market your business and create buzz.
b) Encourage customers to try out new products. Giving away free samples of your new product will encourage users to try it. Users can test out an approach before committing. If they enjoy the free item, they are more likely to investigate your other offerings.
c) Improve relationships with customers: Giving gifts to your users is a good way to establish a connection with them because it builds trust and loyalty. Additionally, customers who receive freebies are more inclined to pay for your products or spread the word about them.
The conclusion
User information is crucial. No matter how we promote our websites, we all need it.
Nothing is worse than realising that you missed out on sales or profits because a form wasn’t optimised or customers weren’t successfully led through the buying process.
Understanding and influencing user behaviour is no easy task. It necessitates careful consideration and well-considered decisions. However, we hope that by providing you with this article, we have at least somewhat simplified your task.