Intentful actions: How clicks and taps lead UX optimization

With the ongoing digitalization of services, we have come to depend on the internet to the point of living two somewhat merged lives: online and offline.

It is at a level that, which I’m sure, many of us have already been scolded by our elders at least once or twice that we do not socialize in a healthy way. Whether it is the new norm or simply just a matter of deterioration of communication, not up to me to decide, we now express our feelings by sharing memes, using emojis and such. We just want to leave a like on that picture of our best friend’s wedding and maybe share a few good moments of our last holiday on social media; this is now our way of communicating with each other. Yet there is a stark difference between real life and online, where our communication is limited in a sense, the limit being the fact that we are bound to our devices’ capabilities and the services offered by the online platforms.

Relatively “New” Normal

In order to adapt to the new era, many organizations today use a wide range of online channels to communicate with their customers and prospective users where these channels live on different platforms varying from websites to mobile applications. As the level of communication is primarily dependent on the platform unlike physical stores where the main factor is human to human interaction, organizations have been trying to improve their platforms to provide optimal human to system interaction. Many companies, for example, now enable users to share feedback and rate their experience on their websites and mobile apps. Such data gathered is then processed to improve upon the system. Yet there is a catch; not all users, especially the ones that were not happy with the service provided, leave a like, rate after purchase or get into contact with customer success teams to leave comments. Instead, they do provide something that can be used to improve the user experience: lots and lots of clicks and taps.

In daily life, the human to human interaction has several elements to communicate the necessary information: words, hand gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice and posture. On the other hand, none of these necessary elements is present in average online human to system interaction without the consent of the user. Thus, clicks and taps come in here to fill the gap; along with the pages and screens which can be considered as context, these interactions could be considered as users’ way of communicating with your system latently. So it is necessary to observe where users specifically click or tap on digital platforms and collect interaction data* to detect where the gaps in communication exist.

*The data collected, however, shouldn’t include any personal information on users; with the recent implementation of GDPR, any data collected should be anonymous and the users should be informed about the practices.

Crumbles left: Clicks & Taps

A common practice to observe clicks and taps is the use of heatmap tools. Heatmaps are visual tools that are generated upon interaction data gathered and turned into a map where the most clicked, tapped areas of the pages and screens are coloured in bright red while least interacted areas are in cold blue colour. With these tools, it is possible to easily see which part of your digital product, the system communicates the most with your users. Usually, the area around navigation links, action buttons of main features and modules appear in reddish colours since these areas are the focal points of your design. In contrast, the text area of an article might not have anything to play with, resulting in a blue or non-coloured area in a heatmap. Even so, you could observe inconsistencies regarding the previous statements. Sometimes, despite not featuring a clickable element, an area will be coloured reddish whereas an “add to cart” button appears in blue. In actuality, these inconsistencies are the key findings in filling the communication gap. 

As we expect a human to human communication to work flawlessly as long as its elements are used in a proper way to convey a message, systems are expected to work in a similar manner. Since the algorithms of both are mathematically correct, they should work, shouldn’t they? As the main actors of both are humans, the answer is no. Just like when you sometimes observe people do something entirely different other than what you told them to do despite explaining everything in detail, how you expect your users interacting with your system will be different than what happens in reality. The idea is not just conveying a message but also receiving it through the difference between what functionality the users expect a particular area of your digital products to present. If you see a red area around a price tag of a product, which to your knowledge serves no purpose other than the element highlighting the text content within, your users might be recognizing it as a button or link, a clickable element. Then you might need to reconsider your design choice of the element.

Following our design methodology, we regularly visit quantitative datasets, which are extracted from measurement tools to analytically decide that our designs work as intended or not. Heatmaps and click events that can be configured in such tools sometimes might be the panacea for usability issues otherwise go unnoticed. We build experimentation backlogs through feeding on both qualitative & quantitative analyses in which users lead us to detect any problematic areas by clicking or not clicking specific areas. As the number of clues increases, you’re more likely to come up with solutions to maximize the value of your design effort.