When you are into product business, your product is something that can make or break your business. If you want to attain business goals like user satisfaction, loyalty, better customer retention, and business growth; it is essential to focus on Product Experience and provide amazing experiences to your product users.
Building a great Product Experience is as important as developing your product. All your efforts of creating and developing the product go in vain if you are unable to satisfy your product users with the experience you provide them. To build a great PX, you need to focus on your product and its core aspects that create experiences for the users.
In this article, we will learn how you can build great Product Experiences and make your product successful. Let’s start with exploring what Product Experience is all about.
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What is Product Experience all about?
Product Experience constitutes what users or potential users go through when they use or come in contact with a product. It is all about the users’ experiences about the entire journey with a product from the beginning when they first get to know about a product, till their relationship exists with the product, and how they feel about these experiences.
Exploring a product, getting in contact with a marketing or sales rep, taking a free trial, buying a subscription to the product, using it, facing issues, getting them resolved and more - all are parts of Product Experience.
Providing good Product Experiences to the users is vital for the success of a product. Let’s explore what are the core elements and teams you should focus on to build great product Experiences.
Who is Responsible for Providing a Great Product Experience?
Providing and ensuring a great PX is the sole responsibility of Product Managers. However, Product Managers alone cannot carry on this responsibility because great products are not developed in isolation. You have to make this objective company-wide and pay special emphasis on the following areas and teams in order to build a great Product Experience for your product users.
1. Product Development
The Product Development team is responsible for product designing and engineering. This department is also responsible for setting product development strategies and vision. So you should ensure that the vision and strategies are made in accordance with the primary goal of providing a great Product Experience to the users, so that you develop products that customers love.
2. Marketing and Sales
Marketing teams are responsible for creating campaigns and appropriate content about the products so that the audience looking for a good product can be targeted and attracted towards the product. Whereas, the Sales team is responsible to explain and educate the users about the product and motivate them to buy subscriptions to the product.
With these two departments, you should ensure that the users start getting a good experience in the first stage itself when they are researching for a product. Moreover, ensure that proper and true content is posted so that users do not find a difference when they start using a product and do not feel disappointed or cheated.
3. Customer Success and Support
Customer Success teams are responsible for onboarding of the new customers, making them learn how to use the product and engaging with the existing customers to ensure a smooth relationship. Support teams provide the much needed support to the users when they face any issue with the functioning of the product or any product feature.
With these teams, you should ensure a good and smooth Onboarding Experience because onboarding is a major part of Product Experience and it has a lasting impression on the users. Also, the users must get proper and timely support from the Support Teams whenever they are in need of it. Timely and smooth issue resolution is necessary for building great Product Experiences.
Let’s explore how you can provide Great Product Experience to the users.
How to Create Great Product Experiences?
In order to create amazing experiences, you need to focus on some core elements of the product which are a part of Product Experience. Let’s explore them!
Core Elements of a Great Product Experience
- Product Market Fit
- Purpose of the Product
- Product Feedback
- User Control
- Safety
- Intuitiveness
- Sensory Design and Visuals
- Integrations with other tools
- Personalization
Let’s learn about these core elements and Types of Product Experience that constitute the overall Product Experience of the users.
1. Product Market Fit
The product you develop must be fit for the market, meaning, the product and its core features should be able to satisfy the needs of the users. To develop a product that fits perfectly in the market, you must know about your users and user personas.
You should ensure that the product you develop should not be overwhelming your product users with unnecessary features. Rather, the features you offer should be useful for the customers and help them to achieve their goals.
2. Purpose of the Product
Products must be designed in a way that they easily solve the purpose for which the customers have invested in the product. A simple product with core features that the users can comfortably and smoothly use to fulfill their needs are the best part of a purpose-driven product and is able to provide a great Product Experience to the users. Whereas, if a product interface is complex, although loaded with plenty of features, but doesn't solve the core purpose for the users, is worthless for them.
3. Product Feedback
Collecting Product Feedback provides you with valuable information about how your product users feel about the experience with your product, its features, support teams, and the company. Are they satisfied with the Product Experience you provide or not? What is the level of their satisfaction and how would they rate your product on a rating scale? You get answers to all these questions by collecting Product Feedback.
Product Feedback is a way to know how your product users perceive the experience you provide them. It is crucial to collect feedback and get this information so you can work in the right direction to satisfy the users and improve their experience.
4. User Control
User Control is an important element that affects the Product Experience. Users always want such a product that gives them free control on certain things so that they can make their decisions on their own rather than just led by Automation. So it is important to create a balance between Automation and User Control in your product to create great Product Experiences for the users. Users should have features like the Undo feature to control and reverse if they make an error while using the product.
5. Safety
Safety of user data is crucial for providing good Product Experience. Ensure that your product has proper licenses and encryptions so that users feel safe and comfortable in using your product and sharing their data.
6. Intuitiveness
Intuitiveness of a product means to enable the users to easily learn and predict the use of the product. Your product should require minimum learning for the users and they should be able to easily learn using it in an intuitive way with minimum and reversible errors.
7. Sensory Design and Visuals
Sensory Design and visuals also affect the experience of your product users. The product should be visually appealing with attractive colors, themes, images, design, style, and background. Moreover, the interface of your product must be simple and easy to use to give a good Sensory experience to the users.
8. Integrations with Other Tools
A product that can be easily integrated with other tools contributes to enhancing the Product Experience for the users. It should be portable and accessible to the users through multiple platforms and should be integratable with tools like the users’ CRMs, and other tools of daily use like messaging tools and more.
9. Personalization
Personalization is a key element that contributes to providing a great Product Experience to the users. Your product should be able to provide tailored experiences to the users as per their needs and usage of the product. Users love those products that are adaptable to their business needs rather than a product that requires them to adapt as per the product.
75% of the customers prefer to go for the brands that provide personalized digital experiences.
Along with these core elements, let’s learn some more ways to provide your users with exceptionally great Product Experiences.
How to Deliver Exceptionally Great Product Experiences?
So we have explored the responsible departments and the core areas where you should focus on to deliver great Product Experiences. Along with all this, we are providing you some useful tips that you should follow to deliver exceptionally great experiences and truly nail Product Experience. Here they are!
1. Use Data Analytics to Make Product Decisions
Use Analytics of the product usage to make effective decisions regarding your product. Analyze user behavior to know how your product users use the product, what they like, what they dislike, what attracts more users, and what leads to user churn. This will greatly help you to improve Product Experience and make the right product decisions.
2. Ensure a Great User Engagement
User Engagement is necessary to provide amazing experiences to your product users. Make your onboarding process more engaging and enjoyable to make the new users feel comfortable and familiar with the product and the company. Share updates regarding your product and product features to all your existing users so they are well updated and feel engaged with your product.
Be omnipresent and open ways for the users to share their concerns easily and ensure easy and effective resolutions for users’ issues.
3. Provide Good Knowledge Base
Provide a good knowledge base so that the product users are able to help themselves in petty issues related to the product functioning and features. This will not only save their time and effort of raising issues and seeking support from your customer service team, but also reduce your efforts in solving their small problems.
4. Take Action on Product Feedback and Follow User Suggestions
We have earlier discussed that Product Feedback is a core element and how it is necessary to pay emphasis on it. But only collecting feedback will not work. It is essential to act on the feedback that users provide, improve their experience and Close the Product Feedback Loop in an effective way.
Moreover, ask for suggestions from your product users on product features and other aspects to know how the users think of an ideal product. Try, and follow their suggestions (of course which are feasible to follow) and when you do so, inform the particular users that you have made changes as per their suggestions. This helps greatly in delivering exceptionally good Product Experiences.
Moreover, use an effective Product Feedback Tool to collect feedback and take action on it. You can use an effective tool like Zonka Feedback that not only helps you create surveys and collect feedback from your product users, but also provides you real-time alerts and feedback notifications to act on the feedback and close the feedback loop effectively thus preventing churn.
Click here for a Free Trial for 14 days and see how it helps you in delivering exceptionally great Product Experiences.