Some products just ‘click’ with you, don’t they? This happens because of Product Experience (PX). It’s not only about how easy it is to use or classy the product looks – but it’s also about the journey it provides you.
From the first click to the hundredth, product experience makes it feel like a product was hand-crafted just for you. Let’s look into how you can shape your products to birth the same feeling.
What Is Product Experience?
How you feel when you interact with a product is what Product Experience (PX) is all about. It begins right from the moment you see it to each use after the first impression.
It includes everything such as:
- How easy it is to navigate
- The design
- The emotional response it triggers.
For instance, imagine you’re using an app that is easy to understand, designed aesthetically and to top it off – it works seamlessly. This is known as a positive product experience.
Once you begin focusing on product experience, you thrive to create products which do not only qualify as useful but also delightful to use.
When you think of brands such as Airbnb. Spotify or Apple – they don’t offer products; they offer an immense experience that makes people want more. Such product experience builds customer loyalty and satisfaction at the same time.
Paying attention to the smallest details ranging from design to the feedback system matters a lot to create a good product experience.
Your aim is to understand what users want and work towards improving the product to meet those requirements.
Why Is Product Experience Important?
Product experience is crucial to a business since it’s the bridge connecting customers to your product and brand as well.
If users enjoy the experience and have a smooth time navigating your product, they will definitely return and also bring others with them the next time.
Focusing on immersive and user-friendly experiences has made huge brands like Apple and Spotify a major success in their industries. It makes people valued and feel understood.
Apart from boosting satisfaction; a good product experience builds trust within your customers. If a product does not deliver real value and finds it difficult to use, your customers will switch to competitors.
So take your time and invest properly in product experience – because it’s important for your brand health in the long run.
What Are the Elements of Product Experience?
There are many key elements that matter in product experience. Here’s what truly matters:
Usability: The best products are those which are easy to use without any hassle and meet user requirements perfectly. It promotes smooth navigation and makes sure users find what they’re looking for very easily.
Functionality: Central functionality is important because your users should feel real value through the problem-solving skills of your product. If your customers don’t find this element, they will be very quick to shift to the competitors.
Design: Your product design should be visually appealing. The layout should be clean making sure users feel comfortable using your product.
Nobody likes clutter, the more confusing your design, the greater the probability of your users running away.
Performance: Two crucial elements for performance – speed and reliability. When you use a product, you expect it to load quickly and function smoothly, right? If your product loads slowly or crashes very frequently, it can hamper the product experience.
Support: Users are always on the lookout for help, even in cases of the best products out there. Hence, it’s important to offer responsive and accessible customer support to your users.
How To Improve Product Experience?
After knowing the elements, you might be pondering about improving the product experience too. Here’s how you can do it:
Streamline User Onboarding: Your aim here should be reducing the time it takes for customers to recognize the value in your product.
An onboarding experience should include guidance, easy-to-follow instructions and rationalizing the initial steps. Users feel more comfortable and this increases the retention rate.
Using Product Data to Understand User Behavior: Product data and its analysis can give you valuable insights into user journey navigation. You can easily track user actions to the most-valued features, pattern identification and recognize potential issues.
Sending Relevant In-App Messages: Finding new ways to increase user engagement is important. Use contextual messages while they use your product to improve their experience.
Feature alerts, tips and tricks, reminders help peak user interest.
Prioritizing Key Features: You should be on the constant hunt to decide what features to implement next in your product. This helps keep your product relevant.
Focus on your user requirements and what they value the most. This way you can make informed choices for your roadmap aligning with user needs.
Gathering Customer Feedback Regularly: In any product, collecting regular feedback must be prioritized. You can do this through surveys, reviews and ratings.
It’ll help you understand what’s breaking and you can work on improving the same to enhance product experience.
Listen to your customers and visualize how you can solve their problems. Once you solve them as quickly as possible, it helps gain their trust.
Product Experience (Px) vs User Experience (UX)
Product Experience (PX) and User Experience (UX) focus on different aspects of how users interact with your product. They might be closely related but are still different.
PX looks at the customer journey through a product-lens – its discovery, usage, and support provided to them at the post-purchase level. The relationship built between user and a product over time is what matters here.
UX can be a bit more specific. The focus is solely on user interaction with the product at the interface level – it focuses on navigation and interaction with the product from the users lens.
It can be said that UX is a part of PX. Product experience (PX) is a broader spectrum covering many aspects such as brand perception, support and satisfaction.
Both are important for a brand, UX crunches down usability whereas PX is responsible for the customer journey as a whole.
Conclusion
A user commits to a product when your product experience helps them form a good impression, interaction and a memory.
If you focus well on product experience, it’ll help you build loyalty and satisfaction leading to an increase in customer retention.
Thus, a strong product experience can connect your users to the product and turn them into lifelong fans!
FAQs
The responsibility for product experience is shared by different teams and individuals within an organization. Product managers, designers, developers, user researchers, and customer support teams all play a role in shaping and improving the product experience. Ultimately, the entire organization should be committed to delivering a positive product experience to customers.
There are many ways to measure the success of a product experience. Some common metrics include:
- Customer satisfaction scores
- User engagement metrics (e.g., time spent on the product, frequency of usage)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Conversion rates
- Customer retention rates
Collecting user feedback through surveys, user testing, and monitoring online reviews can also provide valuable insights into the product experience.
A product experience team is responsible for making sure that users have a positive and meaningful experience with a product. The team typically includes roles such as product managers, designers, user researchers, and developers. They work together to design, build, and improve the product’s usability, functionality, and overall user experience.
Here are some of the things that a product experience team does:
- Conduct user research to understand your user needs and pain points.
- Define product requirements based on user research and feedback.
- Prioritize features based on user needs and business goals.
- Design and build the product to meet user needs and requirements.
- Test the product with users to cross-verify that it is user-friendly.
- Collect user feedback and use it to enhance the product.
- Iterate on the product to continuously improve the user experience.