The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see — John Tukey, American Mathematician
In an ideal world, your mobile app will be the final full-featured app, perfected to meet users’ demands in every context and environment. But this is not an ideal world.
A successful app is not only a quality app but also one that evolves over time to meet the users’ growing needs. Since the first release of Instagram in October of 2010, they have updated the app with newer versions with the current one on app store being Version 6.2.2.
So how do you evaluate what the next update on the app should be?
As an app entrepreneur, you do everything to ensure a thoroughly tested, market-ready app is submitted to the app store. Through months of hard work, you go through a well-coordinated development process, understand the target market and perform rigorous internal as well as beta testing.
The key to the question – post launch analytics.
Post launch is when the mettle of your app is tested; the success or failure is determined on the field in the hands on the real user base.
We present the top 5 analytics every app maker should track after going live to enhance and improve their app features as well as user experience.
User demographic
Do you know who your users are and where they are from? User profiling tracks geography of users, operating systems, devices, carriers, and application versions. Getting better insights into your users will enable you to make better decisions and target resources where they are needed most. Flurry can give you accurate demographic insights.
Crash Reports
Crashes are fatal errors that impact the reputation and in turn the revenues generated from your mobile app. According to the App Attention Span study by AppDynamics for US adults surveyed, 72% of users never use your app again if it crashes. That’s a staggering number and you certainly don’t want to feature among these.
Crash reports will help you find the issues quickly and resolving these before a considerable user-base experiences them could just set your app on the path to success. Crittercism is a great tool to integrate in your mobile app.
Response Time
Based on the same survey by AppDynamics, the attention span of the user per session is decreasing and the number of times they open the app has increased. Users are consuming content in smaller bursts; think of the number of times you opened and closed Facebook on your mobile phone. It is important to show them something as quickly as you can and then make your application interactive.
Making sure your mobile app then lives up to the performance expectations can greatly impact how frequently it will be used. Measure how quickly the app powers up, device memory and power consumption and how long each service call takes.
Crittercism also gives you reports on your app’s performance.
Screen Flows
Screen flows help map a user’s journey on the application. Like going through a funnel, at each step a percentage of users are lost due to various reasons like technical errors, unclear calls to action, or unnecessary distractions.
With screen flows, you can visualize each screen in the app, the time spent by the user on it, what they did on that screen and where they navigated from there. Looking at this journey, you can identify the problem areas, least accessed screens and drop off screens.
Fix these, and you’ve got a user that’s far more engaged with your mobile app. Intercom.io and Customer.io are good tools to keep a track of this user behavior.
Usability
Any mobile app user should be able to figure out how to use the app easily and quickly. If an app confuses them, they are likely to never access it again. Visualizing user interactions via heatmaps on each screen can identify the elements most and least used; which call to actions are unclear and which elements are expected to provide further navigations. This helps in refining the app’s usability and design as exhibited by the user behavior.
You can explore Heatmaps.io to integrate in your iOS app.
It is important to remember that the above analytics are not in isolation but correlated. It is critical to view the entire picture to make an informed decision that will positively impact your app’s performance and experience.