LEARN/GUIDES/PX INSIGHTS GUIDE
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What are product experience insights? (and why every product team
needs them)
Product experience insights help teams see how customers really use
their products, making it easier to remove bugs, delight users, and
reduce churn...
PX INSIGHTS AND BEHAVIOR ANALYTICS
Have you ever wished you could put yourself in your user’s mind and know exactly what they’re
thinking as they interact with your product? With valuable product experience (PX) insights, you can
not only take a peek into the customer journey, but make the necessary product changes that elevate
the user experience and increase conversion.
This article guides you through what product experiences are, how you get them, what product teams
can achieve by implementing them—with actual success stories—and the differences between
product, user, and customer experience.
What are product experience insights?
THE PRODUCT TEAM AT REED.CO.UK REVIEWING HOTJAR RECORDINGS
Product experience insights are data that helps product management teams understand exactly how
customers are experiencing a product. As you focus on PX insights, you can improve user experience
and customer satisfaction levels, and increase retention rates as a result.
Product insights are collected via tools like heatmaps , session recordings, and surveys, which give a
quick, visual overview of how frustrated, satisfied, confused, or delighted users are throughout their
product journey
Qualitative product insights are invaluable for teams who want to understand how people experience
a product, figure out the most impactful changes to make, and get buy-in for their ideas fast.
Product experience insights vs product analytics
A Hotjar user tweets feedback on their PX
When you think of analytics, you’re probably thinking about numbers, and that’s what product
analytics will deliver: quantitative measurements of how customers, in aggregate, are using your
product.
In contrast, product experience insights are qualitative data that reveal how individual users feel,
think, and behave when using a product, which ultimately is a lot more actionable when coming up
with ways to create a successful product.
For example, a product analytics tool like Mixpanel tracks many quantitative product metrics like new
users, retention, and churn rates.
MIXPANEL PRODUCT ANALYTICS DASHBOARD
But a product experience insights tool like Hotjar (yup, that’s us 👋) records interactions between
individual users and the product, so you can see what’s working, where people are getting stuck, and
collect feedback to learn what they’re thinking.
A Hotjar Feedback Widget
You need both to succeed: product analytics to see the big picture of how your product is performing
in general, and product experience insights data to zoom in on how individual customers are using the
product. With the right data and a customer-centric approach, you can get actionable ideas for
product improvement.
For more case studies and a detailed guide on the differences between product analytics and product
experience insights, check out Hotjar’s comprehensive article.
What product teams can achieve with PX insights
If you’re not sure where to get started, here are four ways any product manager can use PX insights to solve product challenges and turn them into opportunities:
1. Reduce churn and increase customer retention
Unless you’re in the business of making butter, high churn (aka low customer retention) is a major problem, especially for product teams in the SaaS space.
PX insights help teams understand why product users churn through direct user feedback (e.g. a survey or Feedback response) and observe user behavior within the product (e.g. watching session recordings and seeing where people get stuck
See it in action: the one question that reduced churn for Hussle and Hotjar
A HOTJAR SURVEY ASKING HUSSLE USERS WHY THEY'RE CANCELING THEIR SUBSCRIPTION
Luke Calton, Hussle’s Product Lead, exported survey data as a CSV file, grouped similar responses into themes, and found that 26% of churning users chose to buy membership directly from a gym. The insight led the team to expand their product offering and allow users to buy gym membership directly through Hussle, leading to a reduction in churn and an increase in customer retention.
Not bad for a one-question survey
We use the same strategy: here’s how product experience insights reduce SaaS churn at Hotjar.
2. Prioritize the product roadmap
Hotjar’s public roadmap
Understanding user needs is important when deciding what product features or bug fixes to prioritize.. Once you find the most common problems affecting product usage (e.g. by watching session recordings or surveying users about where they’re getting stuck), you can quantify which features aren’t giving users what they need.
With these customer insights, it becomes a whole lot easier to prioritize the product backlog with data instead of relying on guesswor
See it in action: how TechSmith used Hotjar surveys to prioritize their product roadmap
THE SIMPLE HOTJAR SURVEY TECHSMITH USED TO FIND OUT USERS’ PRODUCT REQUIREMENTS
Software company TechSmith, known for products like Camtasia and Snagit, used an on-site survey to find out what users needed from their products. Using JavaScript triggers, a survey pop-up appeared for users who clicked a certain element or scrolled to a set point.
Conan Heiselt, TechSmith’s UX Designer, gathered product experience insights and categorized the responses into 15 general themes, making it possible to quantify the most common issues and requests.
Analyzing responses from open-ended questions makes it possible to convert qualitative data into quantitative insight and use it to prioritize the product roadmap.
Hotjar Highlights helps product teams group insights—like TechSmith did— to organize and curate data to make confident decisions and prioritize brilliantly to reach business and product goals.
3. Increase customer delight
A Hotjar user explains how they increased customer delight
PX insights are not just about finding bugs to fix; you can also use them to measure and improve customer delight. Instead of settling for merely satisfying users, you focus on exceeding expectations and prioritizing customer needs, wants, and interests above everything else.
An example of an off-site Hotjar Survey
Delighted customers are good for business since they’re more likely to stay loyal, provide valuable feedback, and promote your product. User feedback can lead to more satisfied and happier customers if you use it to find out what pleases and annoys users, and work to remove friction and pain points from the product. As you gather deeper insights to guide quality control, this customer-centric mindset helps you achieve better product-market fit.
4. Improve cross-functional communication
A TEAM MEETING AT REED.CO.UK REVIEWING HOTJAR RECORDINGS
Having shareable, visual data helps different product teams—marketing, tech, social media, and management—communicate internally and achieve cross-functional collaboration across the business. It’s also a lot easier to explain why, for instance, you need the dev team to prioritize a new feature if you’ve got evidence-based insights to back up your suggestions and product ideas.
