App development should not happen in the dark. Data-driven design is crucial to getting it right when developing apps that exceed customer expectations and support your company’s growth and profitability. With all the access that companies now have to data—whether publicly available or specific to consumers’ behavior and preferences—it’s critical to leverage data-based insights when designing apps and other elements of your brand’s customer experience.
Create The Optimal Design With Data
Quality data is a designer’s best friend because it helps to guide the process and ensure the success and value of their work. Whether you hire a company to design a new app or provide your in-house marketing team with directions on marketing collateral, data will be vital to their success and your ROI. Here are a few points to consider when determining what type of data you need to successfully inform the design process.
Consumer Needs & Pain Points
Determining your consumers’ needs is the first step in laying out the design goals, elements, and functions. If you don’t have existing consumer data from your website or CRM system, you can try data mining, market research, surveys, or feedback forms to identify trends in customer behavior. You can leverage analytics tools with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to bring patterns to the surface that would be difficult to identify manually.
Consumer Preferences
While consumer needs are the essential first step, you don’t want to stop there. To truly delight your customers, you want to aim beyond need and provide the design elements and functionality that will also fulfill their desires. Data will help you understand how customers interact with your products or services and what they want from the experience. This will help to determine which aspects of your app would add the most value so you can prioritize the design elements accordingly.
You can also use data to segment your customer base and design different user experiences for each group, creating a more personalized journey. This is critical as recent studies have highlighted how important personalization is to consumer purchasing decisions and satisfaction ratings as well as business growth and profitability. Personalization seeps deep into your design strategy, ensuring your app can deliver tailored offers, views, recommendations, modes, features, and more.
Company Goals
Consider your goal when designing your app or any element of your brand. Is your goal to increase customer loyalty or revenue? Improve customer satisfaction or engagement? Drive more web traffic or in-store visits? Once you’ve determined your aim, you can use data to design an experience that meets that objective.
For example, if your goal is to increase revenue, data can help you identify which products are most popular with your customers and have the highest profit margins. Your design team can create a user experience that encourages customers to purchase those items and has built-in recommendations and upselling opportunities. If your goal is to improve customer satisfaction, data can help alert you to areas where customers are struggling and design a user experience that helps them overcome those challenges.
Market & Competitor Analysis
Data can help you evaluate your competition and develop strategies to stay ahead of the curve. You can track market trends, understand what’s working well for other companies, and identify opportunities for innovation. This data can then inform your design decisions and ensure that your app or product offers something unique and valuable to your customers.
Data points such as the number of app downloads, app store ratings, customer feedback, and social media engagement will give you a good idea of how your design measures up and how you can build a competitive advantage into your design. If you find that several of your primary competitors are missing similar features that their customers request, you have an opportunity to meet those consumers’ needs and shave off some market share for your business.
Changes in Technology & Industry
Data can help you anticipate changes in technology and industry trends to ensure your design keeps up. For example, data from the Internet of Things (IoT) can be used to improve product design and the customer experience. Tracking data points such as the number of devices connected to the internet, data usage, and types of data being collected can help you identify opportunities to incorporate IoT into your designs.
Technology Considerations
When designing your app, you’ll also need to consider the technology used to build it. This data can come from a variety of sources, including market research, surveys of developers and consumers, data gathered from previous app development projects, and data collected from third-party sources. Taking all of these data points into account will ensure that your design is using the best possible technology for your needs and that it will be able to scale as your business grows.
Luckily, developing your app design does not have to be done in-house any longer. Businesses are now hiring experts outside their companies to build custom apps. The data you’ve gathered will aid in creating a robust creative brief and direction for the company you hire. App developers like Makeen.io have the expertise to develop your app more efficiently and build it according to best practices, including the latest and greatest technology. So, you don’t have to worry about figuring out every element of the design process alone.
Data-Driven Design Is Critical To Success
In today’s data-rich environment, information is a significant asset. Companies that fail to leverage data in their design processes will likely miss the mark and waste valuable time, money, and resources. Data should be an integral part of every stage of the design process to ensure your app will exceed customer expectations and support business growth.
Keep in mind that there are many ways to use data to improve the design process. When considering how to develop a data-driven design strategy, assess your unique company goals and what is most valuable to your consumers. Leveraging your deep understanding of your audience’s needs and wants will help you provide a seamless and engaging customer experience.
The insights you gain will also help to ensure that your app development process avoids costly mistakes and ultimately drives business success. Data will help you optimize your designs for maximum impact and ROI when used correctly. Remember that no matter what type of data you’re working with, it’s essential to keep in mind that the insights are only valuable when used effectively. The impact on your company’s growth, revenue, and customer satisfaction will only happen when data is translated into strategies that optimize your design, customer experience, process, and company growth.
