Empowering Product Managers with Digital Experience Platforms

How to supercharge your insights for ideation and problem solving

We're diving into how digital experience platforms (DXPs) can enhance your ideation process by providing insights through video session replays.

DXPs offer various features such as zone-based heat maps, journey analysis, error analysis, frustration scoring, speed analysis, and retention analytics for user segments.

Today, we'll focus on the video session replays capability that can be used for ideation and finding problems you didn’t know you had!

Included is a real-life example of how a product manager can use this powerful tool to uncover customer behavior insights.

Let's jump in.

How do Experience Platforms Support your Ideation

As a product manager, generating value adding ideas is crucial to staying ahead in the competition. Digital Experience Platforms offer a unique edge by allowing you to watch video session replays of your customers' interactions with your product. These replays provide an unfiltered view of user behaviors, pain points, and opportunities, offering valuable data to inform your next idea.

Why Video Session Replays?

• Visual Insight: Understand the user's journey visually, making it easier to identify where they encounter issues or drop off.

• Behavioral Patterns: Spot recurring patterns that might indicate larger underlying problems or untapped opportunities.

• Contextual Understanding: Gain context around quantitative data by seeing the actual actions users take on your site.

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Case Study: Enhancing Search and Filter Conversions

A product manager at an e-commerce company used Contentsquare (an all in one experience platform) to investigate why customers who used the search and filtering features were converting at a lower rate compared to those who only used the search feature.

Findings:

• Unexpected Behavior: The filters were supposed to help narrow down search results, yet they led to lower conversion rates.

• Video Replays Revealed: Customers were adding multiple filters, expecting inclusive results (e.g., blue OR black shoes), but the filters were showing results for items that met all criteria simultaneously (e.g., shoes that were both blue AND black).

• Solution: Redesign the filtering logic to allow for more inclusive search results (e.g., blue OR black shoes), aligning with customer expectations.

This insight, directly obtained through ContentSquare's video session replays, helped the product manager make data-driven decisions, improving the overall user experience and increasing conversion rates.

This product manager should also make sure to work with the QA team to include this specific test case in the regression test approach to ensure the logic is working as intended moving forward. Also, should recognize how this specific requirement was left out of their original product requirement documents and to learn from this mistake.

Communicate to your co-creators

• Start with a Story: Begin your communication with the story of a user struggling with the current search and filter functionality. This sets the stage and grabs attention.

• Visuals and Data: Use snippets of the video replays to visually demonstrate the problem. No need to try and reproduce the issue; you’ve got customer session replays to showcase!

• Detailed Analysis: Break down the data showing how conversion rates differ between users who only use search and those who use search and filters.

• User Behavior Insights: Explain the filtering issue discovered through the replays and its impact on the user experience.

• Proposed Solution: Present the redesigned filtering logic and how it addresses the discovered issue. Given the product manager did not make this specific logic request in the product requirement user stories, this is not a bug but rather a feature enhancement. Be sure to write the new user stories prior to presenting to co-creators.

• Benefits: Highlight the expected improvements in conversion rates and user satisfaction. Here are some tips on how to build the return on investment case.

All-in-one experience platforms that provide video session replays are crucial for better understanding your customers' experiences.

As part of the Product Protégé Guide, I frequently emphasize the importance of "playing" with your product to identify situations where the website, app, or experience does not meet expectations. Session replays help you recognize these patterns more efficiently by utilizing real customer experiences.

Does your company utilize Digital Experience Platforms? Leave a note in the comment if you use Contentsquare or something similar.

Until next week!

-Jason