Using analytics to build app features your users will love

Planning new app features is fun. You get to use your industry expertise to decide what will make life better for customers and the business. Once you've decided, you develop your features and release them to the world, hoping that they'll be well received. But are they getting the results you hoped for? And if not, why not?

Product analytics help you answer these questions and design better app features for your customers. Let's look at what they are and how you can use them.

Product Analytics

People often think analytics are just for measuring how many daily active users they have or other core metrics. This is true, but they can do so much more.

Product analytics are brilliant for assisting you in building better features. They help you see usage patterns, understand user engagement, and surface important trends. This gives you the information you need to improve your app faster. With a little practice, you can make this part of your app development process.

Try this high-level process

Here's the rough process that has worked for us over the last few years. The process starts when you sit down to plan a new feature for your app.

1. Next time you plan a feature, first work out what metrics you expect to see improve
   E.g: we want to see more people viewing a product
   
   
2. Add analytics to your app to measure those metrics
   E.g: number of people viewing each product, time spent viewing product
   
   
3. Release your app and review how that metric is looking (if applicable)
   E.g: Your analytics should now tell you how many people view each product  
   
   
4. Plan, design and develop your feature in it's simplest form
   E.g: You develop a faster search that makes products easier to find
   
   
5. Test it on a group of beta testers
   E.g: You release a version to 100 beta testing customers
   
   
6. Review the new analytics; how are those metrics looking?
   E.g: You notice people view more products on average, but they don't view for any more time
   
   
7. If the analytics don’t show improvements, tweak your feature
   E.g: You're happy that customer view more products, as that was the goal. No changes.
   
   
8. Test again and review
9. Release once you are seeing good data
   E.g: You now release to your entire customer base

The beauty of this process is that you can see if your work is up to scratch and only ship when you are confident it's having the desired impact. This is very different from fire-and-forget feature development, where you pray that the work you are doing is making a difference.

An example

We recently developed a feature for an app that lets users scan a barcode. We measured a few things.

• How many people have used the feature over time?
• What is the barcode scanning success rate?
• How often do people view foods that they have scanned?

We felt this would give us good visibility of three things:

• Do people find the feature useful and keep engaging with it?
• Does the feature work? Can they actually scan barcodes?
• Did they scan items that they use regularly?

This last item wasn't as useful as we thought it might be, we will probably take out that metric.

Top Tip: Don't be afraid to remove analytics if you don't need them!

This chart above shows an example of how many people are using the scanner. Since this is a beta test, we only shared the feature with < 100 users.

This second chart shows where the scans failed. As you can see, when we first launched the feature, there was a high failure rate. We launched a second iteration on February 19th and told our beta testers to try again. Their usage went up, and the failure rate went down. Our second iteration was a big improvement and we decided to ship it 🎉

Wrapping Up 

Product analytics are an incredibly useful tool for any consumer app. Use them to measure what users do in your app, and then review the impact you're making as you develop new features. You can ship more confidently when you know that your work is creating the desired outcomes for your customers and the business.