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User experience isn’t just the colors, graphics, whitespace, and content format. It’s way more than that!

It’s about how seamless the experience is for any user landing on your website or your application. How easy it is to navigate, how quick the pages are in loading, and how swift the interface is while interacting with the user. All these things and many more play a massive role in enhancing the user experience.

Simply said, the functionality of the site clubbed with beautiful graphics is the panacea that attracts, engages, and keeps the users glued to a particular app or web.

And if you want to optimize the user experience, you need to know how functional it is to the end-users. You need to identify the bottlenecks, touchpoints, friction points, variations, and velocity to know what works and what deviates the users from the set-path in the customer journey. This can be achieved by process mining!

Understanding Process Mining

Traditionally, human analysts would sit with the employees or have an interview with them to map the process journey. This had many shortcomings and flaws including but not limited to subjective perspective, missed-out information, tribal knowledge, and many more. These shortcomings are overcome by integrating a process mining tool with the system application.

Wikipedia describes process mining as, “Process mining is a family of techniques in the field of process management that support the analysis of business processes based on event logs. During process mining, specialized data mining algorithms are applied to event log data in order to identify trends, patterns, and details contained in event logs recorded by an information system.”

Simply speaking, process mining ‘mines’ the large chunks of data that have been collected over time with any enterprise. Digital process footprints are created by uncovering the variants that might be missed out in any other type of human-led process mapping.

Process mining literally ‘mines’ your processes. It gives the actual picture of how your processes work rather than how you assume the process to be working. It utilizes new-age technologies like Machine Intelligence, Neural Network, Computer Vision, and many more to uncover the nuances and variants, giving more process transparency.

A process mining and process discovery tool transforms your process inside out and gives you a multitude of data.

Efficiently visualized and analyzed, this data can be put to different uses. And one of the effective yet not much-explored uses of this data is to map the customer journey.

Not only can enterprises use process mining to create a customer journey map but also use it to analyze how the employees are handling the issues raised by the users.

Process Mining To Improve User Experience

It is common knowledge that data is the king when it comes to improving user experience. The larger your repository of data, the better user experience you can provide. Knowing the touchpoints of the customer, his/her pain points, interaction with the system, and the satisfaction level can help offer a more personalized user experience. One can also improve the user experience by analyzing how the employees are responding to customer inquiries or the issues faced by the customers.

So, broadly speaking, there are two ways in which process mining can help in improving user experience. These are:

●  Mapping The Customer Journey

An obvious way for enterprises and companies to improve user experience is through UX process mining. You can mine the digital footprints left by the customer while they were interacting with your application/system. These breadcrumbs act as invaluable data that can give insights into what the users like and dislike.

It can be used to create the process maps with all the clicks and the interactions to know at what stage the user went astray. You can also analyze the trends in user interaction along with the areas where they deviated from it.

Knowledge of this data can help you create the best practices for customer engagement and conversion. Based on this data, you can also analyze the flaws or bottlenecks on which the UI/UX designers can target their focus. The navigation flaws, hard to find buttons, time-consuming pages, or other things are presented with hard evidence through mapping the customer journey.

●   Mapping The Process Flow

This is the root of process mining. It focuses on the task-level synthesis of the workflow to uncover variations and nuances from the expected ideal process model. It tells you how your process is actually working to analyze which task can be done better with slight interference. Let’s understand this better with an example-

KPMG improved the experience of loan applicants through process mining. It used this process mining tool to analyze the time each loan process took, reasons for loan applications, and outcomes of each application. Soon, they know what’s elongating the time period for loan closure.

Through process mining, it realized that 21.90 days was the average wait time in over 31,000 loan applications and the process which increased the overall time was debt restructuring. It worked in the situation and found a solution for the same. With a smaller time for loan closing, KPMG improved the experience it offered its customers.

In addition to this, process mining can also be used for precision training wherein it can train the employees in specific areas of the process flow. This was just one example. There are many other examples where process mining and AI-enabled process discovery tools have helped in realizing the main process and improving the user experience accordingly.

While the UX of your website can be improved by making it responsive or adding new features, to improve the experience users have while interacting with your process, process mining is what you need to go for.

Indeed, process mining can help you understand your process better. But that’s not all! It also enables you to know how your customer is interacting with the systems and how the employees are working on any interaction made by the customer. All these insights gained through process mining can be passed on to the UX designers, UI developers, and others to improvise on the existing processes and improve the user experience.