Precise and accurate location data can provide richer insights into your users’ behavior, interest and intent. Those insights can help you decide the best places to build experiences that reduce friction between the user opening the app and getting value. Having this contextual data on where and when your users are accessing your app and its functionalities can help you to design your app ux to become vital to the daily life of your users, with the end goal of delivering personalized app experiences to each of them.
How you can use good location to impact your UX:
1. Build Appticipation
It's not enough to present the information and functionality your users want when they want it -- apps now need to better anticipate their users needs and satisfy them before they take action with proactive experiences. These experiences change the way users relate to and engage with an app by closing the gap between problem and solution. App personalization based on context removes the friction from your user’s journey.
Appticipation is the ability for a mobile application to think ahead and know what a user will want to do. It is done to increase engagement with the application, increase session time and make the experience more meaningful.
Location is the next big data point to inform user experience design. Designing specifically for what a user will do in place specific use cases means product visionaries need powerful insights into where users go and why they go to those places. Being able to analyze and categorize the frequency in which a user goes to a place or types of places allows designers and developers to vastly improve experiences. It's become about making experiences super relevant in all aspects of the app experience.
2. Enable in-app modes to increase engagement
You need a balance between the list of features your app displays with when and where they are useful to your users. Not every feature in your app is useful to your users at all times, in all locations.
Location-based context can enhance app UX and create dynamic experiences with in-app modes to anticipate what users will need at a time and location. For example, a shopping app can enable “Shopping Mode” to recognize when a user enters a store and deliver content or coupons specific to the user’s environment and automatically preload that user’s shopping list from the app.
Another example, a health and fitness app can enable “Gym Mode” to recognize when a user enters a gym and automatically pre-load the user’s workout routine, designated playlist, or trigger the beginning of a workout.
3.Tailor app experiences to user’s offline preferences
Taking this mode concept a bit further, you can give your users even more options to filter through what they’re searching for to get to conversion. Knowing your users’ unique location footprint with Personas could help deliver relevant preferences to that user, and help to deliver taste preferences based on other users of the same Persona.
Personas are user profiles that unlock mobile consumer behavior - their demographics, interests, and intents - based on location history. That being said, Personas can change. A user identified as a business traveler may want to take a vacation.
Having the capability to flip between modes in a travel app would allow users to easily switch from requiring free Wi-Fi and nearby coffee shops for meetings, to top restaurants recommended by locals.
By having these other prompts, your app can add context to their app to anticipate the next moves of their users, to simultaneously help to make their lives easier and their app more vital.
4. Deliver custom offers based on past location behavior
Your app knows the content each customer consumes and the customers’ online purchase history. With location history and Personas, Skyhook can complete the customer view by knowing the customers’ demographics and offline shopping behavior and lifestyle, helping you further identify buying trends and tailor offers accordingly.
For example, an Internet Retailer app knows a user has been to Nordstrom recently and suggests similar items on sale: “We noticed you like to shop at Nordstrom, we have some items on sale that might interest you.” Knowing location behavior would allow the app to personalize product recommendations. The app can even create a new feed of sales based on stores users frequent regularly and items they’ve previously purchased.
Bottom Line
Imagine the kind of experiences you can deliver to users once you know who they are. Using appticipation, which is based on what we know about what users do in the different places they go, we can create app modes based on the functionality they need in these different locations. Suffice to say, this level of audience intelligence can do wonders for your customer experience and your KPIs.
