User Engagement

User Engagement is a crucial part of any consumer facing product. It is important for businesses to better their user engagement by utilizing different platforms, interfaces and processes.

Meet Your Users Where They Are

In order to compete in todays market it is necessary for businesses to meet their users where they are. This requires innovative use of multiple platforms and interfaces to expand the reach of your business and the ways your users can engage.

Example Problems:

Desire to Engage Users In Their Homes: Internet of Things and Smart Home devices have seen extreme growth in the past few years. A new avenue for customer engagement growth would be to integrate with these systems using a voice interface.

In-Person Training is Expensive and Online Training Is Not Providing Adequate Training: Training new employees, especially those using interactive machinery can be expensive. Utilizing AR / VR technology to create an interactive training tool can help minimize cost of large batch training and ensure trainee gets low cost hands on experience before starting.

Engage Customers in Low Connectivity Areas: Users will not always have internet access and with low bandwidth we see increased drop off of user engagement. By utilizing new technologies such as native / web workers, caching and offline queues your users can always be engaged with your product and sync actions and data when their device connects to the internet.

Ease User Interaction to Avoid Drop Off

User's want to spend as little time on your site as possible to accomplish their goals. Innovative interfaces can allow your product to engage the user in ways that avoid drop off. Identifying the points of drop off allows the team to better identify strategies for preventing drop off.

Example Problems:

Drop Off During Sign Up: Creating sign up options that utilize common accounts such as facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. Increase the likelihood that users will sign up for your product.

Drop Off Filling Out Forms: Forms and required information from your client can be a major pain point for users. Shortening forms is a simple solution for some organizations, however, for complex situations using natural language algorithms and machine learning you can extract important meta data and additional fields from paragraph responses or other online user information.

Drop Off Due to Complexity: High levels of complexity in UIs leads to high development costs and can lead to less user engagement if they can not identify the right path to accomplish their goals. Using product validation techniques (ex. user research, A/B testing, etc.) the business can identify these complexities and points of confusion and simplify the product to the users goals. If done early and often this can also reduce the cost of developing UIs by reducing complexity.

Meet the Needs of All Customers

Most products focus on a few key demographics as their audience but to build your application to these key demographics at the cost of other minority focus groups is to the detriment of your product. When building products time must be spent on users that don't fall into the ideal mold of our users. Building accessiblilty, onboarding and supportability into your product can increase the types of users that use your products. It should also be noted that many industries are now required to have their products comply with accessibility standards dictated by the American with Disabilities Act and identifying these requirements early eases the incorporation of accessibility into your products.

Example Problems:

Users with Visual Impairments: There are a range of different visual disabilities that can afflict a user and although we can not account for all levels of visual acuity we can do some simple things to address this problem. Being aware and testing our products contrast, text size, line spacing, fonts, interactable element sizing / color are all important to consider when addressing this problem. Good tools for testing accessibility concerns include: Chrome Accessibility Dev Tools

Users with Blindness: Blindness can make many websites unusable. By testing with screen readers you can identify how your product can be used by the more extreme visually impaired users. This also ensures that products have keyboard bindings that even the unimpaired use based on web standards.

Users with Hearing Impairments: Many websites have started using videos and audio to communicate in a more visual and personal way to their users. It is important to remember the importance of providing ways for those with hearing impairments to interact and engage with these areas of our site. The addition of captions is an easy way to allow these users to follow videos and using visual cues tied with sounds can help with auditory indicators used to inform the user of call to actions or changes with the product flow.