By Shraddha Srivastava in User Experience — Jun 15, 2020

Subscribe to a Segment to Improve the User Experience

A Problem Well-stated is Half-solved. - Charles Kettering

Improving User Experience involves a deep understanding of your users in terms of their abilities and limitations and also around your product in terms of what do they like about the product, where they are facing an issue, where they are spending time on, etc.

Any development in the product should be centered and focussed on one person - USER. We will only be able to retain our users and gain more users if they have a positive experience while using our product.

Why should I know about the User Experience problems?

It is easy to get stuck in the build loop where teams push for new features overlooking the impact of the new feature on the overall experience. This also happens as it is not easy to get feedback on the experience.

It is hard to get feedback from your users and study shows typically less than 5-10% of users leave you feedback!

Now, how do you stay ahead of your user problems and solve them if you do not know what is the problem?

If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 days to define it — Albert Einstein.

There lies your solution. Identifying the problems in product and experience is the hard part. Once you know the problems, it may not take long to solve them. If you overlook them, all your hard work will go in vain.

Know Your Problems (Image Source - Pinterest)

You would like to know

Is my feature easy to use
What are the problems faced by the users while using the feature
What is the satisfaction level for my feature

... and many more. You are curious, you are looking for answers and you are excited to see how people are adopting the new feature.

Sometimes, the questions could be more serious and grave like

Why a visitor came to a landing page, spent some time, did some research yet did not sign up
Why a user did not make the payment after going to the checkout page
Why a user stopped paying for the subscription

... and such. We want to know quickly about what could you have done differently in the product or in the transactional flows to achieve better conversions or retention.

We all have stumbled upon such questions and we look for answers but some times the answers can not be found within.

What do we do when we don't get conversions or retention? We try A/B testing for different pages and flows. But, it will not help you in understanding the root cause.

It isn’t that they cannot find the solution. It is that they cannot see the problem. – G.K Chesterton

You need to look at users, understand if something is hurting their experience, and build a theory or an experiment based on the facts.

How to Identify the UX Problems?

The best way to know the problems in your product and to build intuition is to watch your users live by sitting right next or behind them. But, that could be intimidating. No?

Asking for feedback may help you but the rate at which customer gives feedback is low and you would not be able to quickly iterate your features at the desired speed.

Thanks to technology, you can just install a Session Recording tool on your website like Browsee to see how users are using your new feature and iterate quickly based on the learnings.

Watch interesting sessions

Watch your users visually to understand how they are using your product or a new feature. You can

Signup for Browsee
Install the JS code on your website
Go to Dashboard to watch sessions

However, this will leave with you too many sessions to watch. If you are planning to watch all the sessions on one fine day, it will be too much effort which would make it harder to draw any insights!

However, at a particular time, the weightage of some sessions are much higher than the others. It will depend on your focus area for that time. Whether you are developing something new or you are focussing on a specific flow in the product like the cart to payment, etc.

There could be two approaches to follow the sessions of your interest -

Reactive - You actively go to the dashboard, filter the sessions of your interest and watch them
Proactive or Subscription-Based - You just go to Browsee, tell us what is interesting for you in a week or month or in general. We will then alert you via an email whenever we will discover a session of your interest. You can set a limit on the number of daily alerts.

Session subscription is something new that we discovered for ourselves while developing new features. What happens when you are continuously developing and adding new features to your product? Yes, shit happens!

When you have real users, there is not much to hide and it is better to know anything as soon as it happens. So, we set up a few alerts using Browsee for ourselves and we got to know a lot of problems that our users were facing before anyone complained about it. That helped us in improving the product beforehand.

When we subscribed for new features or important flows like signup, homepage visit, etc. This helped us in watching the session with more vigor as it was near realtime. It also helped us in calming our anxiety for any new feature release as we would immediately know in case of any bugs, experience issues or slowness.

Trust me, when it comes to user experience, you need to look at your product from your user's eye to build an epiphany. Browsee proactively intimates you when a session of your interest happens and you can come to see it or mark it to watch for later. This will make sure that you do not miss any important sessions affecting your important flows or analysis of a new feature.

How could a Session Subscription Help Me?

Proactively looking for problems helps you in faster iterations and improvements as you know the problems as soon as they occur. Session subscription helps you in achieving a faster iteration rate.

Session subscription adds a great value for a business who is actively developing or has an important flow to keep a check like a signup, login, or have a transaction happening from the website. Based on the nature of your business, the use case could be different.

Session subscription for SaaS

A SaaS business can set up alerts for -

When a user signed up to ensure the onboarding was smooth
When a visitor is checking out the pricing page
When a visitor is on home or landing page and spent more than 1 or 2 minutes
When a user is searching for something (in-built tag in Browsee)

Session subscription for E-commerce

An E-commerce business can set up alerts f0r -

A user going to checkout and spent more the 2 minutes
User adding items to cart and spent more than 2 minutes on the cart
User spending more than 2 minutes on the checkout page

Session subscription for Education

An education business can set up alerts for

User with high engagement (in-built tag in Browsee)
User who is searching for something (in-built tag in Browsee)

It is really simple and can be done in a few clicks.

Go to Session Listing page
Search for the session based on your query. For example, I want to watch a session whenever someone comes to the login page so I will search for "Visited URL /#/" in my case:

You can also save a segment via Events or multiple queries like "Visited URL : /#/" and "Actions Count > 5"
Save the segment or circle by clicking on the "Save as Circle" or the green button. Learn more about Circles or Segments.

Go to Circle Listing page
Click on the bell icon to subscribe to a particular segment. It means we will send you an email whenever a session falls in this category