Whether your business has an app or your app is your business, nailing the mobile app user experience is critical to business success. And (surprise, surprise) it isn’t easy.
Creating an experience that delights app users hinges on understanding those users. That’s where mobile analytics comes into play.
However, not just any mobile analytics will do, because you need to understand every aspect of your app users’ experiences—not just the outcomes, but also the ‘how come?’s.
How are users navigating through the app?
Where are they getting stuck, and why?
What’s making them convert—or churn?
To answer questions like these, you need the deep levels of insight into your app users that only comes with using digital experience analytics, courtesy of Contentsquare’s mobile app analytics product: CS Apps.
CS Apps provides app teams with visual understanding into users’ behavior, from higher-level trends to super granular and specific user journeys.
Armed with these insights, you can work on improving user experiences and, as a result, user satisfaction.
But before explaining how CS Apps puts you on the road to building five-star experiences, first let’s look at what you stand to gain here—and what stands in your way.
The big app-ortunity: Why nailing the mobile app user experience matters
According to Statista, the number of apps downloaded worldwide has grown +80% since 2016. Consumer spending on apps is also increasing, reaching 33.7 billion USD in Q1 2023, up two percent from Q1 2022.
The explosion in the popularity of apps is great news for businesses. Apps give them a direct (and portable) line of communication, connection and conversion to their customers, who take this direct line with them everywhere they go.
Not only does this mean that businesses can target app users while they’re on the move, but it also means that (with the right analytics tools) they can uncover tons of insights into how their customers behave while on the move, and continuously improve the app to deliver the experience that app users expect.
However, seeing all these benefits hinges on providing your app users with an engaging, frictionless and reliable user experience.
And that sort of experience can be hard to provide…
Why the mobile app user experience is a tough nut to crack
Apps like TikTok, Instagram and Spotify have set the bar ultra high for first-class user experiences. This, coupled with mobile screens being much smaller than desktop device screens, means there’s a small window of opportunity to impress app users—and provide them with the fast and near-perfect experiences they’ve grown to expect.
Let me explain…
People tend to have less patience, or time, when browsing on their smartphone than when they’re browsing on desktop.
On desktop, users are viewing everything on a big, bright screen and are likely to be sitting in a fixed, stable and relatively quiet environment—whether that’s at a desk or table, or on their couch or bed.
On mobile, by contrast, they’re viewing everything on a small screen, very possibly while on the move. There’s a good chance, therefore, that they’ll be easily distracted by their surroundings (not to mention notifications from other apps).
Plus, mobile app users are often navigating on this small screen using their thumb (one-handed) or thumb and forefinger (two-handed), or maybe even the thumb of each hand—any of which can make it hard to reach certain parts of the screen, and even easier to tap the wrong button.
Under these already precarious conditions, a sub-par (or, worse still, broken) experience will quickly irritate users.
And while it’s disturbingly easy to get a mobile app user experience wrong, it’s equally tricky to make it go really well. And you need it to go really well, because you don’t want passive users—you want active, engaged, loyal (and conversion-prone) customers.
So how do you do that? How do you hook new users from the moment they fire up your app? And furthermore, how do you keep them engaged and active (without irritating them) on an ongoing basis?
It’s simple. Sort of.
You need a constant stream of insights into how your users are using your app, and how they’re feeling at every stage of the user journey, so you can increase engagement and reduce frustration.
Additionally, you need insights into how users are not using your app. Or at least, how they’re not using it in the intended way, and what this suggests about how user-friendly and intrinsic your experience is.
But those insights haven’t always been that easy to get hold of… until now.
To build a next-level app experience, you need next-level analytics
CS Apps brings the power of Contentsquare digital experience analytics (DXA) to the mobile app user experience, turning app data from a black box to a treasure chest.
For the first time, app owners can truly (and quickly) understand their users, and draw on that understanding to optimize every user journey for higher conversions and revenue.
How? Let’s break it down…
1. Understand your users’ behavior and feelings (and spread that understanding around)
To build the mobile app user experience your users want, you first need to understand how they feel about the experience you’re already giving them.
One possible option is to gain direct insight from customer feedback, whether it’s a review on the app store or a conversation with your support team. This feedback can be invaluable, since there’s a good chance an issue raised by one customer will be affecting other customers—perhaps many.
On the other hand, customer feedback isn’t always timely or nuanced, and chances are it only represents a small proportion of users’ experiences, which means issues could be slipping under your radar.
No matter what, there’s a need to dig deeper.
Traditional analytics tools will provide you with insights into outcomes (conversions, bounces, uninstallations), but won’t help you understand what’s causing those outcomes.
These types of analytics also don’t tend to provide visualizations that are comprehensible for all teams, and often wind up being used exclusively by analyst or technical teams—where their impact is limited.
With CS Apps, however, you get deep, nuanced, contextual and visually-impactful insights into the real behavior of your app users—plus tools to investigate the root cause of that behavior, so you can constantly optimize your app experience for user satisfaction and conversion.
CS Apps is packed with features that let you plunge into the delights and dislikes of your users. You can read all about them on the CS Apps page.
For now, let’s focus on just one: Zone-Based Heatmaps, with which you can:
Identify where users are spending their time on each screen and section
See how your users are interacting with each app element—where they’re tapping, pausing, scrolling and swiping
Segment heatmap data to understand the behavior of the segments that matter to you most, and then optimize at scale
Analyze and optimize A/B test performance based on high-intent and low-intent screens
Export and share heatmaps with digital teams and decision makers to showcase the performance of your app impact of your decisions
Crucially, thanks to PII masking, you get all this insight without compromising your users’ information or your brand’s reputation. Contentsquare is committed to offering industry-first privacy and security, and CS Apps is no exception.
2. Fix problems without having to find them first
When big apps go down, everybody hears about it. In fact, we even hear about it if they so much as glitch.
But (unless Elon is reading this) when your business’s app has a technical error or crashes, you might not hear about it until the damage has already been done. Then, in a frenzy, your R&D team will probably have to scour through a mountain of data to find the culprit.
And in the meantime, the one-star reviews will have already started pouring in…
What you don’t know can hurt your app, and with CS App’s Find & Fix module, you don’t have to worry about living in not-so-blissful ignorance.
With digital experience optimization, API errors are immediately brought to your team’s attention. This allows teams to prioritize the most urgent errors based on their predicted impact to conversion and revenue.
With CS Find & Fix for Apps, your team can:
Identify the root cause of errors by surfacing technical and behavioral data and quickly figure out a fix
Investigate why things are going wrong from a users’ perspective by replaying impacted sessions with Session Replay
Pivot and reinvest all that time that would have been spent on monitoring and hunting for errors (which real-time alerts on crashes and errors will save them) and build mobile app user experiences that stand out from the crowd—and stay out of the recycle bin
3. Prioritize fixes and optimizations by business impact
As you can see, CS Apps offers an abundance of insights into your users’ behavior and your app’s performance. So many insights, in fact, that you might be wondering how you’ll be able to decide on the right issues to address first.
Well, wonder no more. CS Apps makes it easy for your team to focus on the most important issues first—and understand how their subsequent decisions affect the performance of your app and the success of your business.
Impact Quantification plays a big role in this process. When you’ve uncovered major issues through journey analysis, you can then quantify the impact of these issues to understand if the impact is a reasonable size, or if it’s actually quite small.
It’s an assessment providing insight into which issues on your app are having the biggest impact on your conversion rate, revenue, app performance and user experience.
With Impact Quantification, you can:
Assess the impact of blockers and design decisions by quantifying the number of users who are affected by an issue or are exhibiting a certain behavior
Separate trends from one-off incidents to see how many other users have experienced the same issue
Quickly understand the prevalence and impact of any issues you’ve identified in Customer Journey Analysis or Zone-Based Heatmaps, and break these analyses down into specific user segments
For example, some interesting segmentation might be to look at the operating system (OS), device type, region, etc.
This doesn’t just help you make better, quicker decisions (although that is a huge benefit). Impact quantification also means you can show decision makers exactly how many conversions and how much ROI your decisions are driving.
Imagine a world where you don’t have to waste time manually tagging app elements, searching through data and digging (and waiting) for answers.
Good news: That world is already here, with CS Apps.
See how amazing your app experience can be with CS Apps
Hopefully, this whistle stop tour of CS Apps has shown you just how powerful an impact it can have on your mobile app user experience.
But we’ve really only scratched the surface. Our solution is absolutely jam-packed with features that make it easy to understand and improve your users’ experiences.
It’s easy to implement, whatever framework you’re using. It’s simple to deploy, and our lightweight SDK won’t interfere with the performance of your app.
Most importantly, with a highly intuitive user interface and easily-grasped visualization, CS Apps is uncomplicated to use, and provides clearly-parsed insights that can be shared across the whole business.
But hey—I’ve said enough.
The fact is, there’s no better way of understanding just how simple (and effective) CS Apps is than by booking a demo with one of our experts today.
Lesley is the Product Marketing Manager for CS Apps. She loves the uniqueness of the mobile apps industry, with all its quick changes and trends. Based in Paris, and previously in Tel Aviv, she’s always on the hunt to discover up-and-coming restaurants and specialty coffee shops, especially with her two dogs in tow.