App crashes. A clicked button to nowhere. Awkward pauses between screens. Funky text overlap. We’ve all endured a less-than-stellar mobile app experience. These app pain points may leave us frustrated, annoyed, and ready to switch to the next app that’ll give us what we need.
And the data confirms it. According to a Google survey, 29 percent of smartphone users will immediately switch to another site or app if their needs aren’t satisfied–for example, if they don’t find the content they’re looking for, or if the app is too slow.
Whether your call-to-action is a checkout, a subscription, or something else entirely, the effect of these pain points isn’t great news.
Solving customer pain points starts with clarity
So, what’s an app-owning company do? The answer lies within the concept of clarity. Finding the what, when, how, and why is critical to reducing churn and optimizing conversions. Resolving app friction requires answering questions like:
- What are the exact customer pain points?
- When are customers experiencing them?
- Where are they encountering them, and at what stage of the customer journey?
- Why are they encountering these issues in the first place?
This might seem like a black box of unanswerable questions, but with FullStory, uncovering insights–and acting upon those insights–is simple and seamless. Below are three ways to better understand customer pain points–and how to fix them.
#1: Frustration signals for the win
You may be familiar with interaction events, such as clicks or page visits, which are commonly monitored on web. They’re also critical for analyzing mobile app experience basics, but they provide only surface-level intelligence. These are the foundation for more complex signals that surface user frustration and engagement.
For example, you may find there’s a tap spike on a button within your app. This is exciting until you dig a little deeper and find those taps came from a small set of users within a short time period–the results of frustration with a broken button. To efficiently spot those trends and improve the app, patterns in user interactions must be packaged into deeper engagement signals.
Enter frustration signals, stage right. Signals that surface friction in the user experience will better help you improve your app. Here are a few signals to “click” into:
- Rage Clicks: Rage Clicks are generated by users who repeatedly click on an element, possibly in frustration, signaling a misalignment of user expectation and app action. For example, a broken “Check Out” button could spark users to rapidly and repeatedly click the button with hopes of scoring their newest material possession. Watching for this type of activity can uncover quick wins for improving app pain points, and thus, optimize conversions.
- Error Clicks: Error Clicks surfaces sessions with a click right before a client-side Javascript error or console error occurs. As you can imagine, these errors can create frustrating experiences for the end-user. Keeping an eye on Error Clicks can help you quickly resolve bugs and maintain a positive app experience for customers.
- Dead Clicks: Dead Clicks are another way to find bugs or barriers within your app. For example, app copy may contain bold, blue text, indicating a link to another page. If a user clicks that text, and it results in no action or change, this would register as a Dead Click. This signal allows you to keep the app intuitive and user-friendly, reveal opportunities for iteration, and optimize conversions. There is nuance to Dead Clicks that can also be helpful. An example of this is when users click the “background” of a page in order to escape an overlay or ensure focus stays on the page. Teasing out these behaviors can result in discovering opportunities that may increase user sentiment.
PRO TIP: Digital experience intelligence solutions like FullStory provide you with a list of the most Rage-Clicked, Error-Clicked, and Dead-Clicked elements, allowing you to focus your efforts on fixing the most widespread click issues first.
#2: Be a fly on the wall (finally) with session replay
Session Replay captures and reproduces a user’s interactions on an app exactly how the user experienced it. You may have heard this more commonly be referred to as session playback, user experience replay, or mouse tracking. It captures logged user events, like clicks, page visits, scrolls, taps, etc. into a reproduction of what they actually did on the app. It’s a powerful form of qualitative research, enabling you to see and learn from the behaviors of your users with a combination of quantitative and qualitative data.
Session Replay allows you to go beyond the limitations of traditional analytics tools by showing a complete picture of the user’s app experience. It provides all the individual data points you get with a typical analytics tool, but it illustrates how those data points combine to create an experience. In other words, session replay helps you definitively answer, “What’s really happening in my app?” From the fintech and banking industries to the SaaS and eCommerce industries, session replay is critical to understanding and optimizing the user experience.
No session replay is created the same, however. You’ll want to steer clear of session replay that records the screen or captures screenshots. This not only has less-than-favorable privacy principles (forcing you to redact or remove sensitive information), but it takes up more bandwidth and memory, potentially impacting the user experience.
When looking for the right session replay providers, look for those who exclude sensitive information (like passwords and credit card info) from capture. It’s also helpful if your digital experience software requires customers to agree to an Acceptable Use Policy. In addition, the ability to mask additional user inputs from view is another stop-gap in upholding user privacy.
Okay, but how does it help reveal customer pain points?
Session replay delivers those fly-on-the-wall insights for teams like:
- Product and engineering: Session Replay enables product managers, developers, and engineers to identify and address common bugs that negatively impact the user. It helps them understand what works, what doesn’t, and what areas of improvement are possible within the app.
- UX: User experience designers can discover confusing design elements, design errors, and opportunities for iteration.
- Customer support and success: For support teams, Session Replay assists with a very specific customer pain point—the support process. Instead of requiring the user to recreate the experience or describe the error in detail, support members can play back the session for immediate troubleshooting.
- Marketing: Marketers can use Session Replay to measure the ROI of in-app CTAs and assess the quality of a given marketing tactic.
#3: Session Replay (again): Search, segment, filter
Having thousands of user sessions at your fingertips is a serious win when it comes to using quantitative and qualitative data to surface issues and opportunities, but that comes with a lot of sifting. Finding specific sessions or sets of sessions under certain criteria is necessary to get to the “why.”
With the ability to search, segment, and filter user sessions within the app, teams can develop highly-specific segmentation based on user behavior. This allows you to reveal trends and patterns in the experiences of the user base, and it’s quite comprehensive. Tools like FullStory index all user sessions and can be searched for events, users, date and time constraints, clicked elements, location, and countless other mobile elements. This granularity gives you the clarity you need to identify, diagnose, and address common customer pain points within your app.
Session replay can help you reproduce and solve bugs more quickly, it can uncover why users aren’t converting, and it can offer more context when supporting customers–all because you’re able to view what actually happened when that particular customer experienced an issue.
Using clarity to tackle mobile app pain points
According to an eMarketer survey, 88 percent of the time we spend on our smartphones is via mobile applications. With this information, it is paramount to ensure your app is delivering the best user experience that will keep them loyal customers.
Finding the exact app pain points that users are experiencing, understanding when and how they’re experiencing them, and uncovering the why behind it all is critical to retaining users and increasing conversions. We’ve covered a small sample of pain points FullStory can help identify and address, and there is more value to be discovered.
Learn more about FullStory for Mobile Apps and receive a demo here.
Yodel Mobile is an official FullStory Partner.
