Don’t Let Your UX Crash: Why You Need Proactive ‘Black Box’ Tech
Hindsight is 20/20.
Looking back on any event, it’s easy to see what you could have done differently to achieve a better outcome.
A retrospective analysis lets you connect the dots, understand cause and effect, and better plan for the future. But it doesn’t empower you to make real-time changes and avoid problems from occurring in the first place.
Consider flight recorders, commonly called airplane “black boxes.” A black box contains two parts: 1) the flight data recorder, which saves the entire flight history by recording dozens of predefined parameters each second, and 2) the cockpit voice recorder, which records the sounds and conversations that take place in the cockpit.
By preserving the most essential data points of a flight’s history, investigators can take a more informed approach to understanding what happened in the event of an aviation accident.
The airplane black box is impressively durable, built to withstand the force of a crash and temperatures of more than 1,000°C. But it has one major shortcoming: It only provides value after a disaster.
What does your user journey really look like?
Digitally savvy businesses have already begun adopting their own journey tracking software.
Dive deeper: 9 UX Best Practices to Boost Conversions
Whether it’s analyzing your employees’ behavior and trends on enterprise software or tracking how potential customers interact with your website, digital tools that provide a look into the user journey are invaluable.
For employees
By recording levels of user engagement and the overall journey on workplace software, you’ll get insight into where employees experience friction, which processes take the longest, where they make mistakes, and where drop-off is most common.
With a black box for your enterprise software, you can get a precise look at exactly where your employees struggle, which processes slow down productivity, and where they “give up.”
For customers
Understanding where customers encounter difficulties on your platforms is integral to improving revenue and preventing churn. Imagine you can track and replay a customer’s entire user journey on your website or app. You can see what they searched for, how many clicks it took to find it, where they struggled to complete a process, and at what point they closed the tab.
If you could pinpoint exactly where in the user journey your customers were leaving your site before making a purchase, wouldn’t you want to know?
Of course you would.
In the digital era, being reactive means finishing last
Like I said, hindsight is 20/20.
Identifying where your employees get frustrated and give up on your enterprise software can show you where you need to implement more targeted training in the future. Finding the point in your user journey where your potential customers drop off can inform important tweaks to your UX and help you boost conversions.
But meanwhile, user engagement is low, employee productivity on your enterprise software is suffering, and you’re losing potential customers. These are the consequences of being merely reactive, and they have a material effect on your bottom line.
Reacting to these insights is not enough.
Especially in the wake of a software implementation, it doesn’t take much friction to raise skepticism of your new digital tool. Even if you offer new training opportunities to address challenging processes, I guarantee your employees have already found new workarounds to avoid those processes altogether.
With your customers, taking a reactive approach to user frictions has more immediate consequences, as you don’t have many opportunities to fix a lousy customer experience. If poor UX is driving your customers away, they could be gone for good by the time you implement fixes.
Boost user engagement and safeguard UX with a proactive ‘black box’
Digital tools that enable you to record and analyze the user journey are helpful, but they’re not adequate for a competitive digital business landscape.
Instead of tools that merely enable you to react — to make changes for the future — true value will come from tools that enable you to be proactive. You need a solution that not only highlights problem areas, but provides the tools to deploy preventive solutions.
Imagine you’re tracking a potential customer’s journey on your website in real time. Every aspect of his engagement gets recorded and analyzed.
Each item he adds to his cart gets logged in your “black box.” But based on other contextual clues — such as the amount of time idling on the page, empty clicks, or the mouse hovering over the button to close the window — a pop-up window appears on the screen and asks the user if he needs help.
Then, he’s able to type what he wants to do or ask a question. Instead of leaving the page and abandoning his cart, your potential customer becomes an actual customer and completes the purchase.
Instantly boost user engagement with a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP). Request a demo today.
Be the pilot your company needs
If airplane pilots had the chance to re-engineer black box technology, I have little doubt they would miss the opportunity to make it more proactive.
Today, businesses face unprecedented levels of competition — for talent and customers alike. Perhaps nothing is more important to fostering loyalty than providing a superior user experience. Engage your employees and customers at every possible moment, and never let them go unsupported.
With the right “black box,” you can take a proactive stance to safeguard the user experience, raise productivity, boost retention, and make users happy.
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WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) transforms the user experience in today’s overwhelming digital world. Using artificial intelligence, engagement, guidance, and automation, WalkMe’s transparent overlay assists users to complete tasks easily within any enterprise software, mobile application or website. Discover how a DAP can revolutionize your business — request a demo today.