How to Create a Successful Digital Product Part 3: Using Data to Improve the UX

by Josefina Ruiz

The purpose of this set of posts is for you to gather tips and insights on how to create a successful digital product. We consider that the main topics are: validating the product, understanding the user, acquiring new users ( using SEO, and growth hacking strategies), and improving user experience (UX) and functionality with a data driven approach.Throughout the posts, we’ll be explaining these key concepts you certainly need to cover in order to succeed. We’ll be using as an example a project we had, called Agrotrabajo, so it’s easier for you to understand the concepts. This is a summed up recipe about a long process, we're sure it’s useful for your project!

User Experience

In every project, it's important to create a personalized user experience, for your specific users. The way people interact with a platform varies a lot depending on their personal characteristics.

Agrotrabajo's project didn't have simple users (if you have read posts 0, 1 and 2, you already know that, in case you haven't read them, I strongly recommend you to read it to gather some tips on validation, understanding the users and growth hacking.) However, let's brush it up:

  • Our users are people looking for jobs in the Uruguayan countryside.
  • 66% of our users have a hard time reading and writing.
  • They aren't good with technology, and are not used to looking for jobs online.
  • They almost uniquely use internet for Facebook
  • Those in the deep countryside have quite low speeded internet.
  • 90% of them don't have access to a computer, so they use their phones.
  • 90% of their phones are Android, usually old models with small screens.

Because of this information we knew that the platform had to be truly basic for them to understand and correctly interact with it. The whole platform was developed keeping this insight in mind: we sought for a simple web, intuitive, graphic, and with basic texts.

Design

We had to pay special attention to design: the project's head designer decided that the best road to take was implementing a neat, clean and basic design, that looked good but didn't mess with the final user's attention.

We also created friendly custom pages for the 404 errors. Take a peek:

It's All About Data

However, there's always room for improvement. As we integrated Agrotrabajo with Mixpanel, we can track events happening in the front-end, analyze them, and identify improvement opportunities for next iterations, this is called data-driven development.

Let's take as an example the registration process, a four step procedure were people create their personal CV. Thanks to Mixpanel, we could improve our user experience by identifying when and why people were quitting the registration. For example, Mixpanel made us we discover that many of the workers where quitting at part 3. We knew they were quitting there, but we didn't know why. That's why we also used Inspectlet, that gives us access to the recording of the users screen. When a user quitted the registration, we went to Inspectlet and tried to understand why. Thats how we found out what the problem in part 3. Turns out many of the workers didn't know their couples social security number, so they got stuck at this point of the registration. We made this optional and the amount of conversions grew 15%.

We Love Data

Agrotrabajo’s main objective was connecting workers and employers. However, our client had a second objective: collecting data about the sector. This is why in the administrator panel, our client can keep track of key performance indicators (KPI), different relevant metrics for Agrotrabajo and for the whole industry. For example, our client can identify the average number of applications for each job and then analyze why some jobs have better or worse performance. At the same time, Agrotrabajo collects relevant information about unemployment, demographic data, etc.

Conclusion

Agrotrabajo was a very satisfying project to work. It was a challenge to face this entire project from scratch, it required time of research and data analysis to then propose important new features and improvements. We're very happy about the results in terms of user experience, SEO and data recollection. It's one of those projects that makes you understand one more time how research and data are fundamental to achieve the best possible product. The efforts were completely worth it!