7 Steps to Understanding User Behavior

What Is User Behavior?

User behavior refers to users’ way of interacting with a certain product. Leveraging user metrics can hello you analyze the behavior of your users. These metrics include intuitive design and measuring usability. 

You can monitor and analyze user behavior with UX metrics such as session length, clicks, navigation, and conversion rates. Taking a lucky guess will not help you discover why your conversation rate has risen by 20% over the previous month. 

You can only get the right answers by looking into your users’ behaviors and identifying design variables influencing the changes in the behaviors of your users, which could be an added color, the use of a new CTA, new button placement, etc. 

Collecting data on your users’ behavior will ultimately learn why your website visitors behave the way they do. The following are ways to understand users’ behavior: 

Be watchful of deliberate actions

As humans, we love to think our choices are always deliberate. We are conscious of our desires, create goals, and plan to go through with them. However, if most of the decisions regarding the lives of your customers and their engagement with your products are driven by their consciousness, why is it so hard to accurately predict your users' behaviors by 100%? It’s not that simple. Human behavior used to be motivated by the need to stay safe, but in today’s world, humans have unconsciously formed new habits, the conscious processes of repeated actions. 

Both conscious and unconscious insights into customers’ behavior are useful but aren’t mutually exclusive. Learn to get the most from these two aspects by discovering and studying the habitual patterns of your users.

Discover Habitual Pattern

Your users might be galvanized by emotions rooted deep in them. It doesn’t make them powerless against their instincts. They are still thoughtful and make plans for their decisions. They purposeful interact with your products in a meaningful way. What you should do here is to map out their journey, analyze your insights into their interactions and predict user behavior with the information. It will help you guide them toward making decisions that will benefit your users and your business. 

Look for Meaning Behind Actions

Another way to get insights into the meaning behind your users’ actions is using a video-based research platform. A video-based research approach will help you see what your customers think and understand their general reactions to your company. Implementing this method is much easier after you have identified the underlying patterns. Carefully analyze the behaviors of each user and understand what motivates the actions they take while they are on your website. Check the result with your knowledge of your audience. For example, identify why your users tend to gravitate to a part of a page and not where you would prefer their focus. Conducting an audience with your users on what they do will shed light on their audience’s choices for you to gain invaluable insights that will help you understand their behavior.  

Identify the Core Need

Ensuring an effective UX for your website will be a complex process. However, you must understand your users’ core needs at any moment. It makes it easy for them to decide on what they want. As you design a new page on your website, consider where your users are coming from and what they head to next. Fit each page into your intended customer journey for your users. Carefully examine the page individually. Gaining valuable insights from tracking and interviewing users will help you conveniently structure the page. Frustration or distractions on a page can force you to design an effective and smooth page.

Create a Map For Your User Journey

Apart from having an effective UX design on your website, it is also crucial to fully understand the beginning of your audience’s journey to determine where you want them to end up. Map out an audience journey that includes the whole process from the first time they come across your brand to becoming a loyal customer. You will start by learning how people discover your website, how much awareness they have about their problems, and how well they know about your product. You also need to understand what they expect from visiting your website and what triggers them. 

Take your user's journey one step at a time to map out their entire journey. Make it smooth and without friction. While you are on this, there will be some gaps to fill. You can use the feedback and interviews of your customers through online reviews and surveys to do it on a continuous.

Use Behavior Analytics Software

Why users behave in specific ways originates from their automatic, unconscious processes. Behavior analytics software has sophisticated algorithms that can look into the complex interactions among touch points. It exposes you to possibly hidden metrics that will not be visible to someone who explores the relationships themselves. You might consider manually doing the process with a pen and paper. It is not a bad idea. However, that approach is less “intelligent” and less powerful than using the software. So, to avoid getting overwhelmed by customer behavior, incorporate software tools into every aspect of the analytical process.

Be Certain

The perception of your users is more important than yours. Analyze and measure the emotion-driven KPIs and observe the motivations behind the actions. Find out what your audience’s perception of your product or service is. 

Then check to see if the results of the perceptions match. Discovering insights into the links between unconscious and intentional action of the user along with a filtered map of the user flow is the inevitable part of the solution.

As the knowledge of how users interact with your website through the UI /UX design process gets supported by effective analytics software, it will become easier for you to understand the “whys” of user behavior.