What are product experience insights? (and why every product team needs them)

Have you ever wished you could put yourself in your user’s mind and know exactly what they’re thinking as they interact with your product? With product experience (PX) insights, you can not only take a peek into the customer journey, but make the necessary product changes that elevate the user experience and increase conversion. 

This article guides you through what product experience insights are, how to collect them from your qualitative data, and what you can achieve by doing so—with real-life success stories for inspiration. 

What are product experience insights?

Product experience insights are data that help product management teams understand exactly how customers are experiencing a product. By investigating PX insights, you enhance the user experience, boost customer satisfaction levels, and increase retention rates.

PX insights are invaluable for teams who want to understand how people experience a product, figure out the most impactful changes to make, and quickly get buy-in for their ideas.

Gain PX insights using tools like heatmaps, session replays, and surveys. These tools allow you to see what’s working, where people are getting stuck, and collect feedback to learn what they’re thinking.

Product experience vs. user experience vs. customer experience: what’s the difference?

• Customer experience (CX) covers how customers interact with a brand throughout the entire customer journey, including the first touchpoint (for example, visiting a product landing page, talking to support, and using a feature.)  

• User experience (UX) is a subcategory of CX that covers how users interact with a specific entity, which could be a website, product, or service. UX often focuses on optimizing a user interface (UI) to improve metrics such as conversion rate.

• Product experience (PX) specifically examines how users interact with a digital product and is often—but not exclusively—the focus of product teams in the SaaS (software-as-a-service) space. PX can have product-specific goals, like reducing churn and increasing engagement. 

The good news is that whether you’re using the terms CX, UX, or PX, you’re driven to understand the same thing: how people behave when using your product.

What product teams can achieve with PX insights

If you’re not sure where to get started, here are 4 ways any product manager can use PX insights to solve product challenges and turn them into opportunities:

1. Increase customer retention

Unless you’re in the business of making butter, high churn—aka low customer retention—is a major problem. PX insights help teams understand how to deliver an experience that keeps users coming back for more. 

See it in action: British residential property site, Zoopla, understands the importance of using PX insights to improve retention. They used Journey Analysis—a tool that turns customer journey data into a sunburst-shaped visualization—to understand how users move through Zoopla’s site from entry to conversion. 

The tool revealed that users typically take multiple sessions across several devices to make a buying decision on a property (over several months). 

Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis tool—a valuable source of product experience insights 

They decided to personalize users’ experiences so that the site recognizes users whether they’re viewing houses on desktop or mobile. This turned out to be a winning strategy for retaining customers. 

2. Prioritize the product roadmap

Understanding user needs is important when deciding what product features to prioritize. Once you find the most common problems affecting product usage (e.g. by using Contentsquare’s Error Analysis tool, watching session replays, or surveying users about where they’re getting stuck), you can quantify which features aren’t giving users what they need. 

With these insights, it becomes much easier to prioritize the product backlog using data instead of guesswork.

3. Improve the user experience  

PX insights aren’t just about finding issues to fix; you can also use them to understand what users value and double down on it. Instead of settling for merely satisfying users, focus on exceeding expectations and prioritizing customer needs, wants, and interests above everything else.

Delighted customers are good for business since they’re more likely to stay loyal, provide valuable feedback, and spread the word about your product to their circle. 

4. Improve cross-functional communication

Having shareable, visual data helps different teams—marketing, tech, product, and management—communicate internally and achieve cross-functional collaboration across the business. If you have evidence-based insights to back up your suggestions and product ideas, it’s also a lot easier to explain why, for instance, you need the dev team to prioritize a new feature. 

How to get product experience insights from qualitative data

Quantitative data (measurable, numerical data) gives you an overview of what’s happening in a product: how many users you have, what features they use, and how long they’ve been customers. But numbers alone won't tell you about an individual user’s experience—you need to combine numbers with visual and intuitive data.

Qualitative data, such as insights from surveys, session replays, and user tests, is the opposite. Instead of numbers, you’ll get actionable insights into what real users think, need, or do in the product, providing you with solutions you need to improve the product experience.

Watch session replays to stop guesswork and validate product decisions

Your customers probably don’t use your product the way you imagine. Instead of guessing what’s going on, start capturing session replays to see exactly how individual users click, scroll, and navigate inside a product. Taking an over-the-shoulder look at customer interactions with your product will give you a new perspective on analyzing the customer experience you currently offer.

Being qualitative, replays give you insight into product usage even if you only have a handful of users. And if you work on a product with many users, replays can be filtered by quantitative metrics like country, visited page, device, or the presence of rage clicks to save time.

Conduct user tests to understand navigation issues in your product experience  

While session replays are a great way to see how users behave while engaging with your product, you’ll still need to make a few assumptions about what’s happening in your users’ minds when you watch them. 

There’s no need for any guesswork with user testing. With a tool like Contentsquare’s User Tests, you can set tasks for users to complete on your site (e.g. “Book an appointment with a piano teacher") and see how they complete them, unmoderated. You’ll quickly be able to see where users struggle to undertake goals, and identify any changes you need to make to smooth out their journeys. 

PX insights: the secret to continuous improvement 

Whether you’re watching session replays, analyzing survey responses, or conducting user tests, delving into PX insights is a winning tactic to build a product that resonates with its audience. 

It’s a virtuous circle: understand how users experience your site, then you can improve that experience and keep them coming back for more—so you can, in turn, gather more insights into how they experience your site, and improve it even further. 

FAQs about product experience insights