The Importance of Listening: Tips and Tools for Understanding Your Users

Feeling heard is one of the most important things for human beings. We are social beings who need validation and empathy to feel that someone is paying attention to us. A feeling that, as politicians know all too well, if ignored, can have consequences. And the same is true when it comes to understanding your users.

The main consequence of that is disconnection. A direct detachment of the person from the company, institution or individual from whom they expect a certain recognition and understanding. And that disconnection can translate into a higher abstention rate at elections, but also into a very high abandonment rate on your website.

What happens then if you do not listen to your users? But above all, how can you make them feel heard and understood? In this article we will talk precisely about that — the importance of listening to your users to optimise their experience on your website.

You may have already been able to identify that disconnection between your users and your website. But it is also very likely that there is something slipping past your senses. Because, unlike what many believe, users do not always raise their hand to complain. They simply leave. They abandon.

So if you want to stop your users from abandoning you (or at least your website), in this article you will find the keys to kick off a listening strategy that allows you to better understand your users and improve your conversion and retention.

Why it is important to listen to and understand your users

Making your users feel heard is important. But the impact of understanding your users is not just a matter of feelings and personal perceptions. The effects it has on your business are real, measurable and, fortunately, can be addressed.

Having a user-centric perspective (that is, guiding your decisions based entirely on the point of view and real experience of your users) is increasingly common in companies. The most important criterion of this perspective is that, whatever you do, it is something relevant and useful for the user. And part of that means reviewing what is not and making decisions to improve it.

The way to review what contributes to your users' experience involves understanding them. Taking the time to understand how they interact with your website and what affects their experience negatively (and positively) as users. And that has very clear advantages:

• Identifying friction points in the experience – Probably the clearest advantage of taking the time to listen to your users is understanding what is failing. What is it that blocks their experience and prevents them from achieving what they are looking for. These friction points are the starting point for making any decision that helps improve your business.

• Improving key metrics for your business – By listening to your users, you can go very far. Even to the point of improving that metric that has been resisting you for a long time and you could not understand why. By understanding your customers you can also tackle those barriers that were preventing you from achieving your business objectives.

• More satisfaction, more retention – Even without having direct conversations with all your users to make them feel heard, all the decisions you make based on their real experiences and opinions will make them feel valued. Seeing changes in your product, website and experience that follow their needs will make them view you more positively and keep choosing you.

How to analyse and observe the real experience of your users

User, user and more user. It is clear that following a user-centric perspective is essential to ensure their experience is the best possible and they choose to return to your website or service time and time again.

What is less clear is how to approach that experience. To the surprise of many (and very much despite what many Product Managers believe): You are not your user. It has been shown that most of us who work in this field tend to think there is a clear and obvious consensus between what we would do and what users would do. And indeed, this is a mistaken idea.

The best way to escape it? Turn to observing users in reality. Something like an anthropological perspective on your web experience: observing without interrupting or participating in your users' interaction with it.

To take your first steps in observing that experience, here are 3 key perspectives for listening to and understanding your users. Three options or methods that can help you get a little closer to their reality:

Heatmaps and recordings

What better way to understand how your users interact with your website than by observing it live and in real time. Well, it is not necessary (or legal) to go to their house or spy on them while they use their iPad. But what you can do is turn to heatmaps and recordings of their web experiences.

Some tools like Hotjar allow you to access heatmaps (or activity and navigation logs) of your users to understand what their actual way of using your website is really like. Where they click, how they scroll through the website, when they go back… Their 100% real experience.

And as if that were not enough, you also have session recordings at your disposal. That is, the opportunity to take a look at your users' experience live and almost first-hand. Very useful for watching navigation as it happens.

The benefits of analysing their behaviour

Is there anything better than having first-hand data on the genuine experience of your users? Thanks to heatmaps and session recordings of real users, you can identify which elements go unnoticed, problems and navigation patterns you were unaware of, or areas that capture your users' attention.

Key metrics for understanding your users

It is not always necessary to see your user in action to understand them better. In fact, their visit to the website is also a source of highly valuable information (that is never wrong). And as you know, at Boost we are very much about analysing data. Specifically, the behaviour metrics of your users.

Thanks to tools like Google Analytics, you can understand a great deal about your users. Simply looking at key metrics for your business such as your bounce rate, your traffic sources or the time they spend on your website is enough to learn a little more about their real experience.

The advantages of good web analytics

Having solid analytics and being clear about which metrics are key for your business and for better understanding your users can help you (a great deal) to align your website with the real needs of your customers. And best of all: simply reviewing those same metrics will be enough to know whether your initiatives are delivering results.

Direct feedback from your users

What if you ask them directly? Although talking directly with all your users is quite complicated, there are alternatives for improving the experience of your users through their direct feedback.

One of them is SurveyMonkey: a tool for consulting key aspects of your experience with your users and asking for their opinions and comments to improve it. It is a very useful option provided you know how to frame the right questions (no bias allowed!) and keep one thing in mind: the stated opinions of your users may not 100% represent reality.

What now? Steps to translate it into your user experience

Being user-centric does not have to mean your design is too. In fact, the challenge lies in being able to translate everything you have learned from listening to your users into their actual experience.

There are many principles that put the user at the centre of all your UX design, but at Boost we recommend that you definitely put these initiatives into practice to make sure that what you have heard has been put to good use:

• A/B tests → Before completely changing your entire website and your users' experience, why not validate that what you have understood is really what your customers need? Sometimes we do not draw the right conclusions or we do not design the option that solves it correctly.

• Optimise the design → Once your ideas are validated, put them into practice. Do not be afraid to make big changes to your web experience if you know it has a big impact on the user. Change can be daunting, but it is almost always for the better.

• Make it easy for users to give feedback → If you want listening to your users to become a regular part of your UX design, why not make it easy for them to tell you what they think? From forms to pop-ups for feedback, you have endless possibilities for getting closer to your users.

Improve your business with Boost: we help you listen to and understand your users

Good UX design is a great exercise in empathy, in knowing how to listen to what matters and what will make a difference in your business results. Putting the user at the centre of every decision you make is key to ensuring your website, product or service is truly worth it.

Here is an idea to start understanding your users better without feeling overwhelmed by so much information: write to us and we will help you draw the key conclusions so they feel heard and your metrics improve.