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Oct 27, 2015 8:02:06 AM

Location-based User Insights You Can Leverage with Personas

Posted by Skyhook

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What is good location? It’s a function of three things. 1) The accuracy and precision of the latitude and longitude. 2) The usefulness of location: putting useful contextual power tools like venues and Personas on top of a data point makes it possible to provide better experiences and targeting. 3) The ownership of data. Your data is your data.

Good location is a result of where the data comes from. On-device location enables apps to know the accurate and precise location of the user’s device. This means you can have finer level detail of the place such as venue category, name and address. In order to get this fine level of precision and accuracy, the user must enable location services in the app.

With good location you can know the offline behavioral profile of your users, the location history of their devices and the patterns it yields. In other words, you can know where they are, when they are there, and the frequency.

Good location offers two huge opportunities to optimize app usage and engagement.

Personalize the Experience by Knowing Personas

Knowing the history of precise location tied to a device opens up the ability to categorize behavior at a granular level. Add venue level context to each precise location and you have a story of the device behavior called a Persona. Knowing a user’s Persona allows the app to tailor the experience to the user and reduce the time to value.

Screen_Shot_2015-10-21_at_11.14.18_AMFor instance, if a user visits coffee shops frequently, he is a “Coffee Lover”. Knowing this level of detail about a user’s behavior without actually knowing the identity of the person allows apps to deliver relevant content to their users.

Now apps are in a position to know who the person is and the right place and time in order to give them the content they need when and where they need it. The more granular the location data, the closer we can get to knowing who the person is without identifying them on a personal level because we know the venues they go to and can unlock their behavior.

Create Dynamic Experiences with Geofencing

Knowing that a user enters a geofence is an important insight you can leverage to create dynamic user experiences. When app users are in a store making decisions, they want different content and experiences than when they are browsing products from a website or smartphone at home. With geofencing, apps can know when a user enters a store and change the app UX to Store Mode, populating the screen with the user’s shopping list and highlighting where all of their items are located in the store.

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Good location data can provide richer insights into user behavior and interest, as we’ve covered previously in our Designing for Place series. Those insights can help you decide the best places to build experiences that promote ease of app use for the user opening the app and getting what they need as quickly as possible. We call this "appticipation”, and its end goal is to deliver personalized app experiences to each user. Having contextual data on where and when your users are accessing your app and its functionalities can help you optimize your app to become a vital part of users’ daily lives.

This level of contextual data is critical to delivering the most relevant and valuable experiences to users in real-time, as well as driving global optimization of an app to suit the entire audience better. Dynamic user experiences can respond to a user's intent, adapt to their location, change based on time of day, and tune to their skill level. Implementing a dynamic user experience will ultimately result in better ratings and reviews, helping your app stand out in the app store, leading to lift in average session length, an increase in daily active users, and growth in the number of sessions per day.

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