How Consumer Data Insights Are Shaping Your Digital Product Development

Big data is essential for marketing. My colleagues and I have discussed the role of data in marketing in many previous articles here on Smart Data Collective. However, most of our content focuses on one of the four elements of marketing: promotion.

While big data is clearly important for improving the promotional campaigns, it is also important in other ways. One of them is in the arena of product development.

You need to understand your customers’ needs very carefully before releasing new products onto the market. Having access to troves of data on your target customers can play a very important role. You will be able to develop products around their needs and make sure they can be marketed better.

What Do You Need When Using Big Data to Deveop New Products?

It is easy to understand how big data can help with product development. Articulating your strategy and focusing on collecting the right data is another matter.

Nowadays, we live in a digitized world, where we use technology in order to conduct most of our daily activities. So obviously, the biggest industries in the world right now, involve digital products. With the way things work in our society, you need an app for almost anything: getting food, transport, shopping, etc. And because these products are meant to be used by the larger public, the past few years have been crucial for the concept of user experience.

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the most important ways how consumers are shaping the process of developing digital products.

Consumer Behavior

Today, most companies work based on predictions and interpretation of change when it comes to their consumer’s behavior. These companies are constantly trying to analyze the way their customers function, what they want to buy, what is missing for them and what they want to be changed. And there’s definitely no better place to figure these things out, than online, especially when it comes to digital products development. There are numerous aspects that can be valuable in this process of analyzing consumer behavior. These are the two main ones:

• Online Reviews. A well-maintained company should be aware of the importance of online reviews. Nowadays, people will often review a service, especially if there is something to complain about. According to MOZ, more than 67% of the people who buy online, make their decisions based on other reviews.
• Social Media. A third of all online activity in the entire world, is spent on social media. It’s easier for people to exchange opinions about products on here, especially if they can simply write a post on Facebook about it. This is the place where companies can interact with consumers and keep up with their changing behaviors.

UI/UX

It is not enough to just interact with people and ask them directly what they want to buy. Most times, you need to dig deeper. And by that, I mean that you need to turn to the concept of user experience, a concept that refers to one person’s attitude towards a certain digital product. A great user experience can offer people what they need, technically speaking, getting their job done in an efficient manner.

If we take the concept as a whole, we could talk about UI/UX design, where you need to provide a great user experience on one side, and on the other side, you need to create a stunning user interface. It is very important, when developing a digital product, to pay attention to the way a user can interact with this product, the way the product makes the user feel, and of course – the way the product looks like.

Testing

I can’t stress enough how important it is to heavily test a digital product, or any piece of software for that matter. We all know it already, but there’s always the time and place for this reminder. The consumers can get mad about a lot of things when it comes to your product. Make sure to test everything, starting from the early stages of the developing process. You could try the relatively new method of crowdsourced mobile app testing, as it involves actual users, who can greatly influence the way you’ll shape the rest of the developing process.

The digital world can be a scary place, where a mistake that your company makes can become viral news in a matter of seconds. The scariest part is that, slowly, this digital world is becoming the entire world. Nowadays, a company, especially one that handles software, needs to pay a lot of attention to the public opinion, and change their development process according to their customer’s behavior. There’s an infinite number of online tools and concepts that can help shape this ideal developing process, all of them meant to provide a great user experience and great user interface to the consumers.

Use Big Data to Revamp Your Product Development Strategy

Are you planning on developing new products? You will need to depend on big data to make more actionable insights. Fortunately, there are a lot of ways that data will be invaluable. You just need to develop the right strategy.