Digital Product Experience: What Is It & How to Optimize It
Looking to deliver a better digital product experience?
Creating outstanding product experiences is essential for boosting user engagement, enhancing core feature adoption, and improving overall retention. This article provides a step-by-step process to elevate your product experience from “good enough” to “superb”.
TL;DR
- Digital product experience encompasses all customer touchpoints and interactions with a digital product across its lifecycle.
- It’s also not the same as user experience. User experience focuses mainly on the specific interactions users have with your product, while product experience is the customer’s overall perception of your product throughout their relationship with it.
Product experience management helps to:
- Enhance the entire customer journey and deliver personalized experiences.
- Improve customer retention by delivering exceptional experiences.
- Increase customer lifetime value by adding more value.
- Improve customer acquisition with positive word-of-mouth.
- The product management team is primarily responsible for owning the product experience but is supported by the engineering, marketing, and customer success departments.
- In most SaaS companies, the product management team includes product managers, product marketers, and UX designers.
How to create a great product experience for your digital products:
- Define your user persona and their needs.
- Define clear goals and metrics based on the data you collected.
- Develop and implement your digital experience strategy.
- Collect feedback, track product usage data, and iterate.
Userpilot can help you build digital experiences and monitor user behavior to make iterative changes. Book a demo to find out more.
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What is the digital product experience (DPX)?
Digital product experience (DPX) refers to all the touchpoints and interactions a customer has with a digital product across its lifecycle. This includes anything from the initial discovery phase to post-purchase usage and support.
For software products, DPX extends beyond the traditional website and marketing materials, with a heavy focus on the actual in-app experience—the emotions and pain users experience as they interact with different product features.
Product experience vs. user experience
User experience focuses mainly on the specific interactions users have with a product. It considers aspects such as usability, accessibility, information architecture, navigation, and visual design.
On the other hand, product experience is the customer’s overall perception of a product throughout their relationship with it. This includes their journey within the product itself, as well as factors such as marketing, customer support interactions, and the lasting emotional connection they form with the product.
Why is product experience management important?
Product experience management (PXM) plays a pivotal role in how companies deliver value to their customers. Here’s why PXM is crucial for business success:
- Enhance the entire customer journey: Map and optimize every touchpoint of the customer journey, from initial awareness to purchase usage and even advocacy. This results in smoother interactions, increased user activity, and greater user satisfaction.
- Improve customer retention: Consistently positive experiences lead to reduced frustration and increased customer retention. This fosters a sense of trust and satisfaction, making it less tempting for customers to switch to competitors.
- Increase customer lifetime value: Happy, loyal customers are more likely to make repeat renewals, upgrade to higher-priced plans, or try out your other products. All these contribute to a higher customer lifetime value and better revenue for your business.
- Improve customer acquisition: Delighted users become advocates for your brand. Their testimonials act as powerful social proof, helping attract new customers and fuel organic growth. This reduces your customer acquisition costs and improves your bottom line over time.
Which team owns product experience in the software industry?
The product management team is primarily responsible for owning the digital product experience. Their role includes defining the product vision, developing the product strategy, and prioritizing features based on customer research and product management best practices.
In most SaaS companies, the product management team includes product managers, product marketers, and UX designers. However, they don’t do it all alone. It’s not uncommon to find product teams collaborating with folks from engineering, marketing, and customer success.
For example, engineers work closely with product managers to execute the product roadmap and overcome challenges that may arise in the product development process. The marketing team helps create awareness and demand for the product through various promotional activities. The customer success team collaborates with product managers to provide feedback and share user complaints.
How to create a great product experience for your digital products
Creating a great product experience involves a strategic approach that centers around understanding users and continually refining the product based on data and feedback. Here are four steps for achieving this:
1. Define your user persona and their needs
Begin by defining your user personas and clearly outlining their pain points, motivations, goals, and what they hope to achieve using your product.
There are many ways to collect customer data for this purpose. Here are a few options to consider:
- User interviews: Conduct one-on-one or group interviews to ask questions and gain deep insights into user needs.
- Feedback surveys: Trigger feedback surveys that ask users about their demographics, challenges, and preferences. Use open-ended questions for richer insights, but also include multiple-choice or scaled questions for easy analysis.
- Analytics data: Use digital analytics tools such as Userpilot to segment users, study their behavioral data, and glean useful insights.
2. Define clear goals and metrics based on the data collected
Once you know who your users are and what they need, the next step is to set clear goals for your user experience. These goals should be directly linked to user satisfaction and business outcomes.
Ensure your goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). Part of making your goals SMART is setting the right KPIs to track progress and measure changes to your digital product experience.
Common metrics include product engagement, user satisfaction, retention, churn, product adoption, and NPS. These metrics will help you quantify how well your product meets user needs and achieves business objectives, providing a clear benchmark for success.
3. Develop and implement your digital experience strategy
With a solid understanding of your users and clear goals set, you can now develop your digital experience strategy.
This strategy should outline how the product will deliver value to users at every touchpoint. It should include a roadmap for new features and enhancements that will boost engagement and satisfaction.
Track progress and note improvement areas. For example, if you notice a persona often leaves your app to read support articles on your website, you might want to consider building an in-app resource center to provide guidance within the app. Once the resource center is ready, trigger in-app notifications to let them know they can easily access help.
4. Collect feedback and iterate
Proactively gather feedback through in-app surveys to understand how users feel about your product enhancements. Analyze this feedback to identify areas for improvement.
Once you find recurring patterns and form a hypothesis about what you think will improve the product experience, it’s time to A/B test and see if your theory is right. For example, you can use a tool like Userpilot to A/B test in-app guides and see what versions best appeal to users.
Conclusion
A great product experience is what keeps customers glued to digital products. You may have the best features in your category, but customers wouldn’t care much if your product isn’t intuitive and constantly adapting to meet their changing needs.
With Userpilot, you can track the customer experience, see ways your product is lacking, and immediately implement changes to increase user satisfaction and boost retention. Ready to optimize your digital product experience? Get a Userpilot Demo to get started.
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