Using Information Experience to Move Consumers Down the Funnel

Today a significant part of the business world is digitalized. Brands invest in designing, developing, and testing websites, applications, and business solutions, but often underestimate the importance of how information is displayed.

Although customers decide to try something based on its functionality, they continue to use it according to how smooth the user journey is. For business solutions, the ease-of-usage determines how fast a new software product can be implemented into internal processes. Respectively, this affects how fast employees will be able to get accustomed to it.

You need to understand something to be able to use it to its fullest capacity. Presenting information in the right way will help users fully understand your product or service and will guide them through the whole user journey.

What Is Information Experience?

You most probably have been in the situation where you’ve been lost in a building, trying to find your way around. You’ve strolled around floors and wandered through corridors searching for a particular room or area. If information experience has been implemented in the given example, there would’ve been maps of the building scattered around it to orient better or signs, guiding people how to get to point A or B. Thus your experience with the building would’ve been much more satisfying, quick, and troubleless.

Information experience is a combination of:

• User Experience
• Features and workflows comprising the application
• Copy/text

It makes all components of the application coherent so that users can easily and confidently move through it. Information experience helps customers discover the value of your solution and use it to its full potential.

Understand Your User

One of the most important things to do when building your solution and designing its information experience is to research who’s going to use it. You have to find information related to your users’ interests, behavioral patterns, abilities, and level of knowledge. This data can then be incorporated into psychographic profiles of your ideal customers – buyer personas.

Develop a Process for Integrating the Information

One of the most useful approaches related to information experience is integrating the solution as part of the development process. This way the information experience copywriter will be able to understand the application better and thus adapt the text/copy according to software development.

This makes creating the information experience evolve organically. It gives you the ability to see critical points in the user journey and come up with ways to present information that will help users navigate your app without problems.

The approach also helps create a more coherent experience without missing anything important in the user journey. Integrating copywriting in the development process will make your app feel more intuitive and seamless to navigate.

Play with Different Scenarios

While designing the information experience, it’s crucial to align it with the needs of end users. Use different scenarios – cases that involve your user, their experience, and various company-related processes responsible for the user journey.

There are different stages in every process, in the “registration” example they involve:

1. Providing Data for Registration – username, password, email address, additional information you require
2. Validation Process – usually done through email or mobile device
3. Completing Registration

To offer a really useful information experience, you have to address what the user needs at each stage of the process. For example, to ensure that no user mistypes their password, you can make users type it twice under “Password” and “Confirm Password” text fields.

If the fields do not match instead of saying “Registration Failed” you can give the user more information like “Provided Passwords Don’t Match”. This will help the customer understand what’s required of them and will significantly ease the registration process.

Your goal with information experience is to deliver the right data to help users move effortlessly to the next stage. What’s important is to guide users through the whole journey, providing exactly the information they need without bombarding them with unnecessary data. This will help your solution feel more intuitive and smoother.

Use Heat Maps

Heat maps are graphical representations of data where values are displayed by colors. They provide an easy-to-understand summary of all information. The user experience heat maps present your solution and the points of interests of your users, indicating the parts of your app users focus on the most with warmer colors.

Heat maps help you understand customer behavioral patterns and get significant insights into both opportunities and potential pain points. It gives a thorough view of the user journey and helps polish the details of each of each stage, offering a uniquely informative experience aligned with users’ needs.

Visualize to Attract Users’ Attention

Customers are literally bombarded with written content on a daily basis. Even though many people read articles online, they usually tend to skim through text and focus only on parts that seem important or interesting.

One of the best ways you could leverage this customer behavior is to emphasize vital information through design. According to HubSpot, if a relevant image is paired with the information, it’s 55% more likely for users to remember the information three days later. This means that visual content not only performs better in terms of attracting users but also regarding informing and educating them.

Personalize

Although it’s important to ensure all users have information experience to guide them at every stage of the user journey, it’s significant to ensure that everything is trimmed to perfection and you do not present users with excessive amounts of data.

Giving information about every single button, line of text, and functionality of your app is just illogical. Focus on the possible pain points and present guiding data only for them, to help the user navigate more seamlessly. Providing unnecessary information about every small detail will be arduous to read and will make the application feel cumbersome.

Moreover, not every user needs this help. People that are more experienced with the solution alongside technically competent individuals would be looking for an experience that introduces new and unfamiliar features but would most definitely be irritated by constant “noob-friendly” tips.

This is why it’s important to align information experience with user needs, and offer a personalized journey with the option to turn off tips for new users.

Help Your Audience Discover Your Uniqueness

Information experience is supplementary to your product/service. It not only helps users fully experience your product/service, but gives them information on how to resolve potential problems, and makes the whole user journey smoother.

To bring value to your customers through information experience, you have to ensure your creative efforts are based on the needs of your users. Come up with possible scenarios and start designing the way you present data to hook users from the very first moment and draw them into a journey where no one is stuck at any point.