Making informed and data driven decisions is crucial for creating UX that wins audience. By data analytics, entrepreneurs and UX professionals can access information that can guide them in developing more efficient user experience for apps.
For some time, developers, designers and entrepreneurs are increasingly showing interest in contextual use of UX elements. The location, user preference, situation, user behavior, pattern of interaction, all these attributes make individual contexts. So, analytics exposed to big chunks of user data corresponding to these elements is necessary for powering UX design with contextual analytics.
The volume, velocity and variety of data producing pettabyte and Exabyte of data every day, we are no longer surprised with the volume and speed of data. What matters most is how we can make sense of this huge volume of data. Whether boosting accuracy in decision making or in predictions with valuable insights garnered from chunks of digital data, context is going to be the key. Mobile devices produce the highest volume of data and just because of their intrinsic character as a personal device present in all circumstances, context plays a bigger role in driving decisions.
How Big Data can help mobile experience?
How such gigantic volume of data has any relevance to businesses of today? There are many ways that make big data crucial for developing better user experience. In respect of mobile UX design a data centric approach can have make things better for the users in the below mentioned ways.
- Big data helps developers gain in-depth knowledge of the customer and develop UX optimized for the target audience.
- Big data provides a deeper understanding into customer behavior, allowing more meaningful interactions.
- Big data allows a data driven marketing approach by facilitating customer behavior and contextual analytics corresponding to location, preference, interest, etc.
Making sense of Big Data by predicting user needs
User experience serves as the bridge between end user and big data analytics. The potential of big data for drawing insights concerning user behavior is huge and this treasure trove of information can make positive difference in user experience design. UX designers thanks to the insights gathered from enormous data sets can create solutions for users that address their individual situations and need.
While UX design makes sense of Big Data by contextualizing it in respect of mobile experience, the data analytics on the other hand offer crucial prediction as where and when a service is required and how the user would like to make interaction with it. This is particularly true in case of mobile commerce. Specifically in mobile e-commerce apps, UX design is based on prediction to help customers access their “desired” products and services in the preferred way, location and time they need them.
Exposure to rich shopping data across the retail niches opens the door for UX designers to gain granular level insights regarding the users purchasing behavior and patterns. This opens the scope for UX designers to work with analysts in a close collaboration. In mobile UX this will not only help offering personalized shopping experience in m-commerce apps but will also help contextualizing the push messages.
The role of Big Data visualization in UX design
Data visualization is where Big Data and UX meet head on to deliver a more intuitive and creative way of presenting information. Data visualization is nothing but the form of visual presentation of data in pictorial or graphical format. These days mobile users are reluctant to go through a large body of text and they increasingly favor quickly viewable data. As the device screen is smaller and mobile residing on an on-the-go device, users dislike attentive reading most. This is why presenting complex data in visually appealing way is so popular in mobile apps and mobile friendly websites.
User experience design helps with putting the data into vivid graphics or images and can even introduce interaction features in them. This is an intuitive way to distill data into useful graphic patterns that can be quickly glanced. Often by putting complex information into graphic presentation the treasure of the data is revealed and offered meaningfully to the user.
Contextual data – putting Big Data analytics into user contexts
Users behave on apps often in unexpected ways and there are times when we have no clue for explaining a hefty rate of quitting the app. Unlike web apps, mobile apps are dropped often once and for all and a majority of these dropouts happen precisely because of certain UX elements. Certain form fields taking too much time and making the user do too many things can contribute to such dropouts. Similarly, push notifications that are utterly out of place and meaningless to users can also incite users to consider the app unnecessarily distracting.
If a form field takes too much time to fill up and makes the user go through the trouble of finding out certain information, then the user may consider skipping it altogether. This is a pure example of the role of context in UX design. The UX has to take into consideration this pain in finding information and the time taken in filling the form. The individual location and use pattern also has to be considered as different users may react differently according to these factors. Now user data from diverse sources can provide useful insights regarding the variety of user contexts and these insights will guide in personalizing UX design.
There is no doubt that the decision making process in the Big Data environment is driven by accurate models and patterns to a great extent. Contextual analytics provide insights regarding how people actually behave when using a mobile app and these contextual insights help build great predictive models. This feedback of contexts in predictive data analytics finally helps guiding UX design to make it more user-optimized.
Contributed by: Juned Ghanchi, an inbound marketing specialist and founder of IndianAppDevelopers, leading mobile application development company. Juned is passionate about writing for mobile app technology which changing the whole world.
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Yes,You are right Big data provides a deeper understanding into customer behavior, allowing more meaningful interactions.