8 Mobile UX Problems That a Chatbot Can Fix
Apps usage continues to skyrocket, as mobile devices become more affordable and available — nearly 900 billion hours were spent using apps around the world last year, a 25% increase from the previous year, due in part to the affordability and availability of mobile devices in countries outside of the US. With app usage on the rise and increasing competition, optimizing the user experience to increase lifetime value of your users is more important than ever.
Chatbots are a great way to improve the UX of your mobile app by providing personalized recommendations and guidance to your users, based on their behavior and location within your app. But you can’t just throw any chatbot into your app and expect it to improve the UX, it needs to make sense and address relevant pain points. Here is a list of eight common mobile UX problems that a bot can fix:
1. Adding and Updating Profile Information
During the registration process, you need to limit the amount of information you ask of the user to minimize friction in the signup process. However, this often leaves the app creator in the dark about the demographics, preferences, and segments within the userbase. A chatbot can be a good reminder to add optional information to profiles and gather nuanced information such as what your favorite sports team is, foods you like to eat, or even allergies you have.
2. Updated Pricing and Discounts
Users are increasingly turning online to research, shop, and compare pricing on products. They may manually track the same product for weeks, to see if a price drop or special promotional discount occurs. In this case, a bot could take the manual work out of the process by taking note of specific products user continuously check. Then, the bot could guide the user to deals on those items with helpful reminders.
3. New Feature
Every so often, an app will come out with an awesome new feature and not directly publicize it to users. For example, Snapchat will often release a new feature without any notification. The only way that users discover and activate these new features is usually by visiting the settings page, which can be found deep within the app. Again, a bot could be used in these scenarios to make it easier for users to learn about new features and settings options by automatically pointing them out.
4. Unknown Referral Programs
Referral programs are great — if you know about them. Many users will use their favorite apps for months before realizing they have referral programs, during which time they could have benefitted from, by bringing friends onto the app. A bot could help users maximize their reward opportunities for apps they already love to use, by giving them a heads up on referral benefits.
5. Important Onboarding Questions
There are many scenarios in which an app is far more useful if it has all of the relevant information about the user. For instance, for a financial service such as Mint, the app can help users manage spending, create budgets, and set financial goals. It can also take into account the user’s financial habits and needs to give tailored advice. A bot could, for instance, let Mint know that a user has student loan payments remaining, or is saving to make a particular investment. This information could be passed to the app immediately upon onboarding, so that the user doesn’t need to go through all of the tedious details.
6. Personalized Push Notifications
We live in an age in which every notification could — and should — be personalized as much as possible. This is especially the case with apps that provide content in any format. You can easily add a chatbot to any push notification, which would allow the content to be tailored to personal interests and preferences. The New York Times, for example, has some great content on a daily basis — and a chatbot could help in selecting the most interesting pieces that an individual would care about, using in-app push notifications.
7. Feedback and Filtering
While dating apps have more or less become essential tools for the modern single, the discerning user will need to do a lot of filtering and profile assessing before deciding to swipe right — and this can take a lot of time and patience. A bot with contextual knowledge of the user could help steer him or her in the right direction to make more meaningful connections.
8. Password Help
It’s an all-too-familiar scenario: a user is automatically logged into multiple accounts, until one day he or she must revalidate credentials. There’s a high chance that person won’t remember the particular password associated with each of the many accounts needed to make life run smoothly. In this case, users are juggling with different types of requirements that can make it extra hard to remember which password goes with which account — does this one require a capitalized letter? How about a number? Special symbol? A chatbot could present helpful reminders about the type of password required for each account, and even serve up a hint if the user has set one.
Dima Rakovitsky is the CEO and cofounder of ROKO Labs, the maker of InstaBot, a chatbot for your app.
