December 11th, 2024, posted in for_founders
by Adelina
Your software is probably not reinventing the wheel. But you’re selling a special type of wheel appealing to a very specific group of people. And in doing so, you must find ways to convince these people that your wheels are better than others.
When selling services through software, a great way to drive conversions is through UI/UX design. By doing it properly, you can show users you care about them and their experience. You’ll make them feel cared for and listened to. Which, in turn, will drive them to stick around.
Offering a good user experience means getting to know your key customers, what they need, what they want, and applying that knowledge into the way you build your software.
So in this article, we’re going to tell you how to use UI/UX to your advantage so that you can increase conversions and overall customer satisfaction.
In-app personalization
One of the best recent trends in UI/UX is in-app personalization. In short, this means creating a very personal experience for your users through recommendations based on their user data. The more they access specific parts of the app, the clearer it is that you should help them reach it faster.
The first part of in-app personalization is detecting what parts of your app you can add this feature to. Put yourself in the shoes of your users and take a look at the main pages of your app - is there anywhere you can add shortcuts? Or are there any kind of notifications you can give out to users to bring their attention to certain promotions or suggestions?
For instance, on a food delivery app you can add a section containing restaurants users order from a lot. You can add a section for special offers like discounts or free shipping. Similarly, on an ecommerce platform, you can feature similar products to orders they’ve made before, or you can feature products from searches they’ve made. On a transport app, you can give quick shortcuts to locations they go to often.
Example: Spotify. It remembers what you listen to a lot, what you’ve recently listened to, and recommends those albums/playlists on your main page. It also remembers the type of music you listen to and creates custom playlists for you.
Once you’ve figured out where you can add in-app personalization, sit down with your technical team and ask what kind of user data you can aggregate. You have to draw the line between helping out your users and privacy invasion - make use of app usage data and not their personal data such as their birthday, address, medical history, and so on.
Here are types of data you can use to personalize user experience (this can vary by app type, of course):
- Previous orders: if people have ordered a specific product once, chances are they might order it again. Unless it’s a $2,000 computer, customers tend to repurchase things a lot, especially on food delivery or grocery apps. Similarly, they might book the same car rides a lot or similar doctor appointments. Think ahead and recommend these products to help them quickly order them again. This will make them feel cared for and will speed up their activity.
- Searches made: people sometimes search for something and abandon the search without finding what they’re looking for, or they simply forget to continue searching. If your app is an online shop, recommend products from recent searches your users have made. This might help them quickly find what they actually needed, or it can serve as a reminder of what they were looking for.
- Products saved: this applies to anything you allow users to add to a wishlist, such as products, restaurants, hotels, articles, videos, photos and so on. Use this data to create content cards featuring items your users have saved. In the case of products, these can serve as reminders that they were looking into buying said items and can determine users to place an order.
- Social and economic data: this broad concept covers anything from major events, holidays, weather, or promotions. Recommend ice cream on hot days, beach-side hotels in the summer, barbeque items on the 4th of July, chocolates on Valentine’s day, special promotions on black friday, tire changes before winter or car wash deals after sand storms, and so on. Pay attention to your calendar and to what’s happening around. There’s always a good excuse to recommend products or services.
Where do you place these features, you might ask? Depending on your app type, you can either place suggestions and recommendations on your app’s front page or on product pages, or you can also send out push notifications that determine users to open your app. On food delivery apps, you can send out a notification at lunch time that says “It’s almost noon, how about a lunch menu? Get a good deal by ordering now”. This makes you seem empathetic, like you pay attention to your user’s daily life. It’s also a good way to encourage conversions by anticipating needs and offering deals.
Make it obvious, through copy, that you’re suggesting things. Just like Spotify, name these sections “Recommended for you”, “Top choices for you”, “Get a good deal on essentials”, “Similar to products you like” and so on. This clearly personalizes your user’s experience.
Recommendations and suggestions might not be accurate right away. Keep in mind that such a feature requires a lot of data, which only appears after people have used the app enough. Be patient, as you’ll only see proper results in time.
So what happens when you want to personalize everyone’s experience, even though you haven’t gathered enough data? You can suggest products similar users have bought, popular locations, bestsellers, essentially using data you already have from other users. If you’re just starting out, consider not personalizing parts of your app until you’ve gathered enough user data.
Use spotlights and shortcuts
If you do lots of promotions or give out coupons, make sure to actually show that. Highlighting special offers not only pushes customers to buy things, but it also gives off the impression that you know what they need and you’re making it handy for them.
A great way to do this is by including a highlights slider on the main page of your app. Use the slider to showcase current promotions or parts of the app that the users might be interested in. You can put these at the top of the app’s homepage or wherever it seems more relevant.
Example: Tazz, food delivery app. Tazz highlights current promotions to push conversions. The slider on the bottom half of the page promotes current offers with a time limit on them to make use of people’s fear of missing out.
Put info bubbles on anything that can have an info bubble. Like the example above, highlight specific promotions by adding percentage bubbles, highlight free offers in green and make sure the “$0” aspect of it is very visible, and highlight an offer’s time limit. By putting a clear limit on an offer, you’re playing into the users’ fear of missing out, which can determine them to make a purchase faster.
Do you give out temporary offers or coupons? If you do, you probably announce them in emails or push notifications. But a better idea is to make them big and visible, to offer shortcuts to them so that users can both (1) quickly apply promotions to their order and (2) get determined to place an order upon seeing that they’ve received coupons.
Example: Freshful, grocery delivery app. Freshful features the user’s coupons at the top of the homepage so they can be quickly applied to an order. They highlight all current offers right below and all products contain info bubbles that either say “Promo”, “Get it now”, “Great price”, or specific offers.
If you’ve given your user any kind of promo codes or vouchers and you don’t want to put them all the way at the top of the homepage, you can turn the promo code section from your checkout into a select field instead of a regular input. There, you can directly list all the vouchers the user has. This speeds up their activity and makes it clear that your app prioritizes efficiency.
If you’re offering services through your app, a great thing you can do is create shortcuts for common activities people do in your app. Do people create appointments in your app? Create a shortcut for that on the homepage. Do they check specific documents a lot? Create a shortcut for that. Do a lot of users go on your Help pages? Add a shortcut to that as well.
The trick here is thinking ahead about what would be more convenient for your specific target audience. If you’re selling something, highlight offers and promotions. If you’re trying to help people fulfill certain goals, feature shortcuts to common features used in the app.
Example: Regina Maria, the official app for a series of health clinics in Romania. The top of the homepage shows a series of shortcuts to common things users would do in this app, like scheduling appointments, contacting their call center or going to their shop for subscriptions.
Gamify your app
Gamification is becoming more and more common in software, especially on educational or productivity apps. Of course, it doesn’t work for just any kind of app - if you’re providing mortuary services, you certainly don’t want to push users to fulfill a certain number of orders to get a reward.
Through gamification, you’re asking users to do things in your app in order to reach a target and/or get a reward. This works best when you’re giving them incentives: if your app provides points or XP, you can give more of them as rewards when users fulfill a certain amount of tasks.
Duolingo is the best example for this. Since it’s an educational app, the more you learn the more you gain. Both in your brain and in the app itself - the app rewards you constantly for the lessons you complete, challenges you win, or quests you fill in each day. Duolingo also ranks users by XP earned into a variety of leagues, which can push ambitious users to complete more lessons.
Does this only work for educational apps, you might ask? No. You can do this on a variety of app types:
- Food delivery apps. You can give incentives for a number of orders placed. For instance, if your users have placed 5 orders within 14 days, you can give them a coupon for their next order. Keep a visible slider showing their current order total and highlight that there’s a reward at the end, to incentivize them to place more orders. Similar to Duolingo’s Daily Quests UI above.
- Transportation apps. Similarly, you can give users special deals once they’ve made a certain number of ride orders. Give them a discount or a free ride.
- Health or medical apps. If your app helps people schedule medical investigations, you can gamify the process and highlight the steps they need to take. This plays into the users possibly not knowing what to do next after having a few tests done. By highlighting what other steps they can take next, they’ll have an easier time making appointments and thus creating conversions.
- Any app’s onboarding process. If onboarding is important in your app, gamification can help push users to fulfill all steps. Highlight the steps they need to take through sliders and make the entire element green once it’s fulfilled, to signify success.
Example: A project we worked on, StonePay. New users are being guided on what to do in the app and their profile completion is highlighted through a percentage slider. This pushes them to fill in their profile.
Gamification is a great way to increase conversions, as you’re directly pushing users to do things within your app. But keep in mind, this works best when you’re giving worthy incentives. Especially if you’re asking people to spend more money. They’ll only be convinced if they feel like they’ve earned something, either rewards they can use within the app or promotions/cashback.
Help out your users
A big reason why you might not be getting enough conversions is because people are struggling to use your app. Unclear instructions, confusing menus, error messages that contain bits of code, or bugs that make it impossible to complete tasks within the app - these sorts of things can hinder user experience and make you lose conversions.
Your customers, especially when new to your app, won’t know from the start how to get around or how to use your app. You might have built a homepage that promotes your services but doesn’t give more detailed information or doesn’t talk about costs. In such a case, providing an FAQ section is crucial: address questions customers might have such as how your service works, what they need to do to obtain them, what kind of costs are involved, whether you offer monthly or yearly subscriptions and what they include, and things specific to your business type.
Additionally, especially on complex apps, you can provide pop-up tutorials that explain what each part of the app does. Just like in a game, highlight specific parts of the screen and add speech bubbles next to them where you tell users how that part works. In these bubbles, you can add a button that says “Next” which can trigger another bubble relating to another part of the page. Make sure to put these in a logical order.
You can use these elements to explain key parts of the app, the main workflows, and generally train new users on how to use your app.
Example: Slack. Source
Additionally, you can provide easy-to-access communication channels for your users. Highlight contact forms or add call to action buttons that say things like “Got any questions?” or “Get help”. This makes it clear you’re available to help customers should they have any questions or if they’re having trouble using the app.
You can implement pop-up chat boxes as well, as a quicker customer service method. These are especially useful on ecommerce platforms, where customers might need help choosing a product or they might want more information about shipping or delivery. Make sure to assign real people to reply here, as having fully robotic chat boxes can put off customers. If you’re choosing to make these robots only, provide a proper communication channel as well in case users don’t get the answers they need.
Why are all of these useful, you might ask? Providing a good user experience and enough information can help people make quicker purchase decisions. If they don’t know what they’re buying or how the purchasing process even works, they might give up and go to one of your competitors. Making your app easy to use means making it easy for customers to buy things.
And there you have it, these are a few ways you can use good UI/UX to increase app conversions and overall improve your app’s user experience. Make sure to pay attention to how people use your app and to the feedback they give you. Listen to their concerns and cater to their needs so they know they’re cared for. This way, they’ll enjoy using your app and they’ll do it more.
Looking to improve your UI/UX and increase conversions? We offer a free UI/UX assessment worth $3K where we can pinpoint issues in your app’s design and help you get on the right track. Contact us to get started.
