Leveraging UX Analysis to Enhance User Flow: Part 4
We’ve steadily built up this series to the point where we tested the user flow from the user’s perspective. Now’s the cool ending: we tear down the user flow to take a closer look at each segment. This article is all about questioning everything in the user flow.
Review User Expectations
When reworking digital product user flows, there’s a need to reconsider the user’s perceptions and expectations as we highlighted in Part 1. Here’s our first set of questions:
Does each step and screen tell the user what it should?
Is the onboarding experience positive (helpful)?
Is it clear to the user what to do to accomplish their goal?
Bear in mind that user satisfaction should really be a positive difference between user expectations and product reality. So, a product team member might consider a feature to be obvious whereas a user thinks otherwise or finds it confusing. That’s why it’s recommended to use common visual cues that users are familiar with for maximum usability. This applies to buttons, icons, and menus. Also, to ascertain UI clarity, screen elements should be positioned where the data suggests.
Evaluate Usability Heuristics
A heuristic evaluation evaluates and improves digital product usability by ensuring adherence to intuitive, efficient, and error-resistant UI design principles. In UX analysis, focus only on basic usability heuristics. The objectives should include minimizing the probability of users making mistakes, for instance.
How Many Steps Does the User Flow Contain?
This stage involves counting the number of interaction steps it takes to achieve each of the previously defined goals for each segment. Interaction steps include every click, hover, keystroke, scroll, swipe, or tap. How many steps and how does the complexity of the task impact the user? Besides, are each of those interaction steps really necessary to fulfill the task at hand?
Evaluate the Structure of the Digital Product
Consider the location of features in the app and the ease of switching between them. This is especially important for certain user segments and their goals. One example is that something users interact with in a product may be available in more than one location.
Another critical consideration is the handling of data objects like cart items, notifications, and system preferences across the app. One possible question here is, “are users spending too much time in one app segment that they miss important messages from another?” How about, “Are users losing cart items when they return to shop for more items by hitting the ‘Back’ button?”
The customer journey map may be helpful in aligning data analytics insights across multiple touchpoints within a product.
As you expand in practical terms, your ability to use UX analysis to achieve user-centric user flows, do well to check out UILand’s curated app screens, themes, and user flows. They come from the 150K+ of the best smartphone apps ever built.
