In short: What are user insights? User insights are the data and feedback gathered from user interactions, offering an enriched understanding of your customer preferences, expectations, and behaviors. User insights play a critical role in product development, marketing, and sales by giving insight into a target audience's needs and desires, allowing them to make well-informed strategic decisions. Using user insights transforms how companies develop their product or services, ensuring they resonate effectively with their customers, driving engagement and satisfaction.
A core component of any successful business is understanding your customer. Whether it’s how they interact with your product and or service, creating target audience profiles, or tailoring marketing campaigns based on their location, you need user insight data. Otherwise, you’ll be aimlessly swimming in a pool of assumptions.
We’ll be going over the types of user insights, why they are useful for mobile apps, a user insight example, and the value of location-related user insights.
Types of user insights
We'll be discussing two types of user insights: attitudinal and behavioral.
Attitudinal user insights
Attitudinal user insights derive from attitudinal research. This is about gathering data from things that can’t be directly observed because they exist only in the minds of the customer.
Basically, we can’t read people's minds so we have to ask questions to construct user insight data from subjective experiences.
Attitudinal user insights give you insight on what consumers feel and say about your product or service. The typical way of gathering this information is through user feedback sessions and surveys. The goal of these methods is to gauge the consumer with a specific line of questioning to get the attitudinal insights you’re looking for. In the realm of mobile apps, you will notice some companies integrate in-app surveys as a direct feedback mechanism. This can range from a short survey to a rating scale.
Behavioral user insights
While attitudinal insights are about what consumers feel about a product or service, behavioral insights show how consumers engage with them. Behavioral user insights provide data on consumer preferences, usage patterns, and potential UX issues.
These insights are gathered through user tracking and user testing. Tracking refers to interaction, using real-time tools to provide quantitative data on consumer behavior. Testing refers to studies such as A/B testing to gather qualitative user insights that will help improve the user experience.
Why are user research insights useful for mobile apps?
The answer to that question is in the word itself, insight. It’s data, whether gathered through behavior or attitudinal, that companies can capitalize on. You’re getting knowledge about your consumer's behaviors, preferences, and needs allowing you to adapt accordingly and make informed decisions. It’s worth considering this data as user research insights, given you’re collecting and researching data to improve the mobile app experience.
A user insights example
Behavior patterns provide context into why consumers interact with your products and services in a certain way. For example, you’ve identified a restaurant location that your consumers frequently visit. With that data, you can contact the restaurant and offer a partnership on your delivery platform. Here, you’re providing the restaurant with greater exposure and customer service, while giving your consumers a better user experience with a delivery option from a new trending spot. In the context of mobile apps, and in this case, delivery apps, user retention, and loyalty is low. User insight data can be a saving grace in giving you real-time information that will help you adapt to your customers and retain them.
What are location-related user insights?
When we talk about location-related user insights, we mean looking at patterns of behavior and engagement based on location. This data consists of consumer POIs or identifying home/work locations, but can also include other data points such as mobility traffic around store locations.
- User POIs: These are location points frequently visited by users outside of their “home” and “work” locations. Knowing where your consumers spend their time through POIs allows you to develop your location-based marketing strategy. Location-based notifications can give a significant boost to the ability of your app to drive customers to your stores. POI data lets you reach your customers at the right place and right time.
- Home/work locations: Some apps will have the ability to identify your home and work locations to better the user experience. For example, our Insights API will use multiple parameters to determine these locations with just enough machine learning. The bonus? You can tailor notifications with deals and promotions based on the time of day and location to reach customers when they want to be reached. I.e. offer a discount at the end of a customer's work day so they can pick up a meal on their way back.
A user insight tool: Insights API
There are plenty of user insight tools around for all types of user insights. This ranges from user testing tools like PlaybookUX, to survey tools like SurveyMonkey, and analytic tools like Google Analytics.
For location-related user insights, we provide our own, Insights API. We’ve developed Insights API to help developers gather data on a variety of user behaviors, including their home and work locations, and the points of interest they frequently visit.
Insights API makes your business and app location intelligent. For marketers that means you can create POI-based targeting campaigns, and location-based notifications specific to the user's location patterns. For developers, you’ll be able to integrate these features without worrying about the accuracy of the location data, or the effect it will have on the mobile device. Combined with our battery-efficient SDK, developers can prioritize features that lend to customer needs. Once you understand patterns of behavior based on location, you’ll be able to effectively reach your customers, improve their experience, and make business decisions with strategic insight. All of this is possible within the legal framework of GDPR, of course.
Check out our Insights API page to learn more about it, and get in touch with us to learn more about what Insights API can do for you and what Roam.ai can provide for your mobile app.