5 steps to creating a stellar product experience

Think of a time when your product experience (PX) wasn't so great. Maybe the sign-up was fast and simple, but canceling required sitting on the phone with customer support. Getting a representative to respond took weeks, and your card was charged before they could cancel your subscription.

If you sell a product, enhancing your customers’ experience with it is key to building loyalty. Good product experiences delight customers, build user trust, boost retention, and earn you referrals. 

So, how do you improve your product experience? This page of our PX insights guide examines strategies and tips for creating a product experience that sweeps users off their feet.

What makes a good product experience?

A good product experience leaves the customer satisfied with their purchase and increases the odds they’ll stick around. To offer this, you must build a product that does all of the following:

• Solves customer problems

• Addresses customers' needs

• Offers a delightful experience 

Though the principles of good product experience are simple to understand, they’re deceptively difficult to execute. Despite this, any product team worth their salt cares deeply about delivering a great PX. 

Why product teams should care about product experience

Simply put, teams that pay attention to the quality of the product experience create successful products. If customers have a bad PX, they’ll tell others, discourage sales, and maybe even churn themselves.

On the other hand, when customers have a great product experience, it could mean

• More referrals from word-of-mouth marketing or customer advocacy. 74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions, according to a report by Ogilvy.

• A product that stands out from competitors. Recent research shows that customers don’t just buy products—they buy the experience.

• Brand loyalty, which can ensure success for future product and feature launches. The Australian Journal of Basic and Applied Sciences says that one of the top reasons customers stay loyal to a brand is perceived product and service quality.

Here’s a simple step-by-step guide to spot the weak areas in your PX, so you can optimize them and deliver a digital environment your customers adore. 

How to deliver a great product experience to users in 5 steps

To deliver a great product experience, you need to understand the user journey, then leverage behavior data to understand how users feel about it—so you can improve those feelings. Use this information to bridge the gap between what users need and what your product currently offers.

Here are 5 steps to design a better product experience for users:

1. Outline the user journey with a customer journey map

Plot your users’ product journey on a customer journey map. A customer journey map lists all the touchpoints your users go through while accomplishing key tasks in your product—like signing up and learning how to use each feature. They also mention how users experience each touchpoint.

The customer journey map helps you visualize the user journey within your product, so you know which key touchpoints to investigate as you try to improve the user and product experience.

To keep your customer journey map simple, narrow down the scope of the user journey you want to outline. For example:

• The journey from a free trial to a paid sign-up

• The journey from your product description page to your checkout page

• The journey from your login page to completing a major task in your product

Let’s say you’re mapping the journey from free trial to paid sign-up. The touchpoints on this user journey might include the different product pages and features available to free trial users, pop-ups within your product prompting users to buy a paid plan, and the checkout page for a paid subscription.

For each of these touchpoints, you’ll want to know: is the touchpoint easily accessible to users? Do they find it simple or complex to complete tasks at specific touchpoints? Is it easy for users to figure out what to do at each touchpoint?

2. Identify points of the user journey with the biggest issues (the what and where)

After mapping out the user journey, identify common points of friction, so you know which touchpoints in your product may be ruining the user and product experience. Points of friction could be indicated by

• Pages with high bounce rates and exit rates

• Low-converting pages

• Pages with high error rates 

• Pages with low session duration or time on page

• Features with low adoption

Use a product analytics solution like Contentsquare to track and analyze user experience metrics like bounce rates, error rates, and exit rates.

Analytics tools like Pendo and Mixpanel can also help you identify your most and least popular product features, allowing you to see which ones are providing the least value or causing friction in the user journey.

Once you’ve identified problem areas, investigate why users are experiencing problems with specific pages or product features.

3. Dig into experience analytics to understand the how and why

Product analytics data shows you where issues occur, but they still leave some questions unanswered:

• What happens in the moments before the user exits a page?

• Why did the user exit before converting or completing a task?

• Which parts of a page did the user view before they left it? Did they miss out on important elements?

Product experience (PX) insights—-otherwise known as experience analytics—help you understand user behavior and empathize with your customers, showing you how and why friction happens so you can learn how to improve your product.

For example, on a page with high exit rates, experience analytics might show that users repeatedly click on a non-clickable element immediately before they exit. This could indicate that you need to place clear navigation markers so users know what to click on. 

To get those insights, use a platform with experience analytics tools like Contentsquare to view Heatmaps and Session Replays and dive deeper into user behavior. 

• Heatmaps are a color-coded visualization of the most and least popular areas of a webpage. With a heatmap, you can find out if users interact with the most important elements of your product, or if they're not seeing essential features.

• Session replays are video-style recordings of user sessions within your product. They show you the exact path users follow when completing an action, helping you gauge if users can easily complete tasks in your product, or if there’s friction along the way.

How diamond company De Beers used experience analytics to improve their PX—and conversion rate  

The team at De Beers viewed the heatmap for one of their key product pages on mobile and noticed something unusual. A large percentage of customers would scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, even though the ‘Add to Bag’ CTA was at the top.

They hypothesized that customers scrolled past the button to look at product details, and then simply couldn’t see the CTA to click on. When they tested a sticky CTA instead, they saw a 10% increase in conversion.

4. Supplement your learnings with customer feedback

Voice of the customer (VoC) feedback captures customer’s experiences in their own words, via tools like surveys and interviews. VoC feedback makes experience analytics more valuable.

For example, if you observe users rage clicking (repeatedly clicking the same element within a short period), VoC feedback from an on-page survey can help you understand why it's happening. It could be that the specific button isn’t hyperlinked, or users are frustrated because your site is too slow.

Contentsquare’s onsite and off-site surveys let you ask specific customer feedback questions—like: “If you could change anything on this page, what would it be?”—to reveal more opportunities to improve the product experience.

Once your responses are in, use AI to analyze the data and identify trends: Contentsquare’s tool sorts responses into key themes with automatic tagging, turns your open-text responses into a revealing word cloud, and even generates a summary report. Use your learnings to inspire PX improvements.

5. Iterate based on what you learn

Quantitative and qualitative product experience analytics show you which features you could change or improve—like your product design, fonts, navigation, copy, or the function of a feature itself—to create a better product experience.

For example, let’s say you launch a new product feature, but product analytics data shows you that customers aren't using it very often. After digging deeper with a tool like Contentsquare, you find that most users click on the new feature but don’t complete the process it's actually built for. You then survey customers and learn that they don’t find the feature very useful, while others provide suggestions for improvement.

You can use these insights to make necessary changes—like improving the feature's user interface (UI) or reducing the number of steps—to improve the overall product experience.

Repeat the process for different customer journeys within your product: find points of friction, use experience analytics to understand them, collect VoC feedback, and iterate.

3 product experience best practices 

The most effective ways to improve PX will always be contextual and unique to your business. However, there are also best practices that work for many companies, and these are worth exploring.  

For example, you can

• Use engaging layouts that encourage users to scroll. Unexpected layouts can entice users to explore a page rather than dropping off, especially when they provide a different experience from the rest of the website. Z-patterned layouts draw the eye from left to right (or right to left, if your users’ native language reads in the opposite direction) and can help lead the user further down the page.

• Highlight product features using rich media and interactive UI. Short, looping video clips or scrollable carousels can help fill the gap between static images and in-store experiences where the user can see the product in action. 

Intersperse shoppable functionality throughout content. If you run an ecommerce site, try adding shoppable functionality throughout a page, so that users have multiple starting points to begin the conversion process. Make images click-through to a pop-over that allows users to shop without disrupting their browsing experience.

Product experience insights help you empathize with your users

Improving your PX isn’t just about fixing bloopers and moments of frustration. It’s also about understanding what your users love about your digital spaces and delivering more of that—so they can have the best experience possible, and you can improve retention, and brand loyalty and get the kind of word-of-mouth recommendations money can’t buy. 

Contentsquare offers product analytics to tell you what your users are doing, and experience analytics to help you understand why they’re doing it. If you’d like to improve your PX, signing up for a holistic experience intelligence platform like this one is a great place to start.

FAQs on how to improve product experience