Although it often goes unnoticed, real-time analytics shapes our everyday lives. We rely on products equipped with real-time data to provide us with relevant information, anticipate our needs, and respond to issues promptly. 

So when it comes to user experience (UX), real-time analytics isn’t an option — it’s the only way to meet your audience’s ever-evolving expectations. 

Throughout this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know to successfully implement and use real-time data analytics to create a seamless UX for your website and app users. 

Particularly speaking about:

• What is real-time analytics? 
• 6 Applications of real-time analytics 
• How to implement real-time analytics to improve UX by use case
• Best real-time data analytics solutions

What is real-time analytics?

Real-time analytics involves capturing, processing, and analyzing data as it occurs without delay. It gives you immediate access to the data you’re tracking, allowing you to make informed decisions promptly or, better yet, set up automated workflows based on real-time data. 

Real-time data analytics vs historical analytics

Historical analytics focus on analyzing data from the past, identifying trends, and understanding long-term performance. It involves generating periodic reports and summarizing data over specific time intervals. It’s useful for decision-making and long-term planning based on historical patterns.  

Real-time data analytics or historical analytics? You don’t have to choose between the two. While real-time data analysis provides immediate insight for prompt decision-making, historical analytics enables you to anticipate and plan for the future. 

It’s important that your real-time analytics system includes a significant data retention period, as real-time data is not enough to build a sustainable long-term strategy. 

​​​“While data is crucial, it’s essential to avoid analysis paralysis. 

Real-time insights are valuable, but exercise caution for significant business decisions. 

Don’t miss out on leveraging the full potential of data and analytics in your marketing strategies.”

Jorge Cunha

Consultant, Trainer, Digital Marketing Analyst & Manager & Founder at IT Tech BuZ

For instance, real-time data may inform a product team of a sudden increase in app load times. Instead of waiting for feedback from frustrated users, the team can promptly initiate an investigation and optimize app performance. 

At the same time, historical data will uncover patterns affecting your product growth in the long run, such as low usage of particular features. Based on long-term performance insights, the product team can develop a better feature adoption plan or make adjustments to product functionality. 

Historical data also fuels predictive analytics. Only by analyzing large amounts of data regarding past trends, patterns, and behaviors can AI-powered solutions forecast future scenarios with precision. 

​​​“Product Managers can leverage AI to automate repetitive tasks, perform rapid prototyping, conduct user testing, and even optimize product features based on real-time user feedback. This enables faster iterations, accelerated time-to-market, and more efficient use of resources.” 

Shaan Agara

Head of Product at Uniguest

6 Applications of real-time analytics 

The benefits of real-time analytics go far beyond just having enough data to make quick decisions. Real-time data allows businesses to: 

• Enable more personalized customer experiences 
• Improve internal operations 
• Validate ideas  
• Proactively respond to changing behaviors and emerging trends 
• Create a seamless UX 

But to fully understand the benefits of real-time insights, it’s best to observe their practical applications. Let’s explore six use cases that vividly demonstrate the importance of real-time analytics in your daily operations. 

Customer experience personalization

Real-time analytics are behind every dynamic personalization strategy. For instance, a marketing automation tool collects data on a user’s recent engagement to dynamically move them to a different email list, trigger a targeted website pop-up, or send them a personalized offer. 

In a SaaS environment, real-time data helps tailor the user experience within your product, streamlining user flows and maximizing customer satisfaction. Take Spotify or YouTube Music — both platforms capture data regarding the music you listen to and recommend similar content in real-time (by the way, historical data also plays a significant role in creating custom playlists). 

Customer relationship management (CRM) 

Many CRM software providers are powered by instant insights, enabling sales and marketing teams to keep their pipelines up-to-date. You can view lead movements, deal progress, and customer engagement as it unfolds, allowing you to seize every opportunity to create a more personalized customer experience. 

Also, by combining real-time visibility with pipeline activities, teams can allocate resources more efficiently. 

Usability testing 

For product teams, real-time data is a source of valuable UX insights. You can track how users interact with new features and design changes and drive immediate conclusions about the UX.   

Note: Don’t confuse A/B testing with usability testing. Usability testing involves watching users navigate your product, while A/B testing is a product experimentation method (we’ll cover it a little later). Additionally, usability testing focuses on analyzing qualitative insights, and A/B testing gives you quantitative data. 

That said, an emerging real-time analytics use case in usability testing is AI-powered sentiment analysis. The idea behind it is to bring positive and negative emotions to the surface, making it easier to detect friction points. This function is included with usability testing tools like UserTesting and Userlytics. 

Source: UserTesting 

Product experimentation 

As you already know, product experimentation is different from usability testing, yet these two share a common feature — they employ real-time analytics. 

A core application of real-time data in product experimentation is real-time A/B testing. This involves simultaneously presenting different variations (A and B) of a feature, design, or piece of content to equal user segments. Real-time analytics measure user interactions and responses to each variation, providing immediate insight into which performs better. 

Aren’t product experimentation results more reliable when you have plenty of historical data? Yes. But experiments often involve changes in product design or functionality, meaning that things can go completely wrong when you don’t expect it. Real-time data will help you make sure you don’t waste two weeks (or whatever timeframe you’ve set) with the “A” variation of your product being down or not performing as expected. 

Inventory management 

For those working in e-commerce, real-time data is a life-saver. It helps online retailers maintain optimal stock levels, prevent stockouts, and efficiently manage their supply chain. 

New series, TikTok trends, or influencer opinions may create a surge in demand for a particular product without you being ready for it. To avoid running out of stock, e-commerce platforms monitor stock levels and demand in real time and enable retailers to set up alerts based on predefined thresholds for timely restocks. 

UX optimization 

Real-time performance monitoring enables product teams to detect anomalies, address issues, and optimize products for an excellent user experience. Digital analytics tools like Smartlook use real-time analytics to: 

• Detect anomalies in user behavior 
• Create heatmaps for any user session 

• Alert you regarding crashes and errors 

Let’s examine how you can implement real-time data analytics with Smartlook to create a seamless website and app UX. 

How to implement real-time analytics to improve UX by use case 

You don’t need to do complex manipulations to collect real-time data. All you need is product analytics software with real-time data monitoring capabilities. If you entrust UX monitoring and data processing to Smartlook, you’ll get instant insight on two levels: 

1. User behavior 

2. Product performance 

When combined, these insights give you everything you need to create an excellent UX. Here’s how. 

1. Real-time user behavior monitoring 

How do your users interact with your website or app? Do they get what they want? Smartlook’s user behavior data answers these questions in real-time. 

Event tracking 

Events are any actions users take within your product. Tracking events keeps you informed regarding how users engage with your app and whether they take the actions you want them to. 

Smartlook allows you to set up custom events to track specific user interactions in real time. You just need to define the event category (e.g. button click, visited URL, etc.) and specify the event details.  

Creating a new event in Smartlook 

Use case: You release a new feature and create events, but the real-time data uncovers that people hardly interact with it at all — it looks like your marketing campaign has failed to attract user attention. It’s time to revisit your communication strategy to get traction for the new feature. 

Heatmaps

A heatmap is a data visualization method that reveals how users interact with a website or application. It uses color gradients to represent the intensity of mouse movements or clicks on a page. 

Smartlook’s new Page analytics feature creates heatmaps from session recordings in real time. You can create a heatmap directly in the player to identify the most clicked elements. 

Wait, what are session recordings? These are actual recordings of users interacting with your app or website. As you watch a recording, you may wonder what a heatmap for a particular page looks like — just click the Page analytics button, and Smartlook will give you the answer in seconds. 

Real-time page analytics in Smartlook 

Use case: An e-commerce retailer designed landing pages specifically for Black Friday, which means they hadn’t tested them against a real audience before. Click data from Smartlook’s heatmap revealed that the “Shop Now” button, a crucial call-to-action (CTA), wasn’t receiving as many clicks as anticipated. In response, the retailer quickly adjusted the button placement to a more prominent location, ensuring it was immediately visible upon landing. 

Anomaly detection and alerts 

Smartlook’s real-time anomaly detection and alert system sends immediate notifications when unusual user behavior patterns occur. An anomalous behavior may be a sudden spike or drop in user engagement within an event or an entire funnel. 

To enable anomaly detection, you need to choose an event or funnel you want to track and click Anomalies monitoring. You can configure what kinds of anomalies you want to be alerted of (surges, drops, or both) and how you should be notified.   

Anomaly monitoring in Smartlook 

Use case: You’re releasing a major UI update, which can affect user engagement. Setting up anomaly monitoring will keep you informed of shifts in user behavior. Choose key events that reflect user engagement on your platform and configure anomaly detection settings to monitor engagement drops in selected events. Sudden drops will indicate that users don’t understand how to use features in the updated interface. 

2. Real-time product health monitoring 

These insights will help you uncover serious problems with your product experience (PX). Spot and address technical issues or confusing UI instantly without waiting for frustrated users to churn. 

Crash reports 

Smartlook’s crash reports feature informs you about technical performance issues in real time and displays recordings of sessions where a particular crash occurred.  

This unique functionality allows product teams to reproduce any crash by simply watching a session replay — no need to collect user feedback or retrace logs. 

Crash reporting in Smartlook 

Use case: A social media management company was spending hours reproducing crashes before the implementation of crash reporting. The problem was that the customer support team had to collect feedback from users on every crash before they could attempt to retrace the events that preceded a problem. User feedback was hardly ever accurate, which only made matters worse. Crash reporting, combined with session recordings, has allowed the customer support and product teams to resolve issues faster and increase customer satisfaction. 

Rage clicks

Rage clicks are events indicating user confusion. They occur when a user keeps clicking on a page element, but it doesn’t respond. Such events might indicate broken links or confusing UI (so confusing that users try to click elements that are unclickable).  

In Smartlook, you can find data on rage clicks in the Events tab. Here you can see statistics on rage clicks and play recordings of each session connected to these events. 

Rage clicks in Smartlook 

Use case: Your pricing page attracts a lot of visitors, but very few click the Contact Us button. After investigating, you discover that users have been trying to interact with the plain text (that you underlined for design purposes), not noticing the CTA button at the top of the page.  

Best real-time data analytics solutions

These are five business intelligence solutions with real-time data monitoring capabilities that serve different use cases but share one ultimate goal — to help you create an excellent customer experience. 

Smartlook: real-time UX analytics 

Source 

Smartlook provides both real-time and historical UX data on web and mobile apps. It combines user behavior monitoring (i.e. session recordings, heatmaps, etc.) and product health tracking (i.e. crash reporting) features. 

Key features: 

• Event tracking: monitor every user interaction in real-time 
• Heatmaps: visualize user engagement patterns on web and app screens 
• Anomaly detection: receive immediate alerts on unusual user behavior 
• Crash reporting: detect and diagnose crashes occurring within your web or mobile app 

Sentry: real-time product health monitoring 

Source 

Sentry gives you insight into critical real-time product performance metrics like failure rate, request time, event duration, and release health data. The latter allows you to stay on top of releases by tracking user adoption, error count, crashed user rate, and more. 

Key features: 

• Real-time error tracking: remain aware of all errors that occur in your application 
• Release tracking: monitor individual release health to make it easier to connect errors and UX issues to specific releases 
• Performance monitoring: quickly catch performance degradations like slow load times  

Optimizely: real-time experimentation 

Source 

Optimizely is your product experimentation assistant, allowing you to run and monitor low-code product tests. It tracks metrics like conversion rates, demo requests, revenue per visitor, and other conversion KPIs to evaluate the outcomes of your experiments. 

Key features: 

• A/B testing: present different variations of features, designs, and content for actionable insight into the performance of each variation 
• Feature flagging: roll out new functionalities gradually and monitor their impact on user experience and engagement 
• Advanced targeting: create audience segments that refresh every 90 seconds and adapt to customer behavior in real-time 

OptiMonk: real-time e-commerce personalization  

OptiMonk enables e-commerce personalization using real-time data analytics capabilities to enhance the overall shopping experience and drive conversions.  

The platform also uncovers critical campaign performance metrics in retrospect — analyze average order per value (AOV), conversion rates, and other metrics.  

Key features:  

• Website personalization: let OptiMonk tailor your web content to individual users dynamically 
• Campaign analytics: track and analyze the effectiveness of your marketing efforts (historical data only) 
• AI-powered conversion optimization: personalize all of your content automatically with OptiMonk’s AI algorithms 

Zoho: real-time inventory management 

Source 

Zoho Inventory helps e-commerce companies keep optimal stock levels by providing up-to-the-minute data on inventory levels for all products. Its dashboards uncover metrics like the number of active items and products to be delivered, sales returns, etc. 

Key features: 

• Real-time inventory management: always stay on top of your inventory levels and prevent stockouts 
• Real-time shipment data: keep customers informed about the status of their orders 
• Multi-channel sales: aggregate sales data from multiple data sources and manage all online sales through a single platform  

Keep track of your user experience with Smartlook’s Instant Insights 

Implementing real-time analytics is critical to ensure a seamless UX. To meet the demands of today’s consumers, you need to be able to respond quickly to unexpected events — be it an app crash or a surge in orders for a particular item. 

With features like event tracking, heatmaps, anomaly detection, and crash reporting, Smartlook’s analytics platform is a comprehensive toolkit for monitoring and optimizing web and mobile UX on the fly.  

Schedule a free demo or try Smartlook today with our full-featured 30-day trial. 

Adelina Karpenkova

is a freelance writer with a background in SaaS marketing. She loves discovering new product marketing strategies, gaining insights for product experts, and turning her knowledge into helpful content. When she's not writing, she plays tennis or knits cozy sweaters.

The post Responsive and relevant: how real-time analytics shape the user experience  appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Competition in the B2B SaaS sphere is about to reach boiling point as customers are becoming increasingly discerning about the products they invest in. Providing a frictionless product experience (PX) is no longer an additional perk but a key factor in the success and sustainability of your B2B product.

But is it possible to eliminate all points of friction in your SaaS product, or is that more of a pipe dream?

In short, although you can’t (and shouldn’t) get rid of product friction completely, you can minimize it.

In this article, we’ll cover what constitutes ‘good’ and ‘bad’ product friction and equip you with a strategy to help you spot and eliminate harmful friction. In addition, we’ll also cover the following topics:

• What is product friction?
• 3 Types of friction in the SaaS environment
• How to identify friction points in your product
• 5 Examples of points of friction and how to overcome them

What is product friction?

Product friction refers to any obstacle that hinders a user’s experience while interacting with a product. This includes any points of resistance that make it difficult for prospects and customers to complete desired actions.

Product friction can be the result of various factors, including a slow or glitchy user interface (UI), complex navigation, excessive steps to complete actions, slow loading times, confusing terminology, a lack of clear instructions, and more.

3 Types of friction in the SaaS environment

Friction comes in several forms, including ‘good’ and ‘bad’ friction.

Wait, is product friction ever a good thing…?

In short—yes! Good friction refers to intentional design elements that are strategically implemented to achieve specific goals. Good friction should help you guide users, prevent errors, and deliberately create delays regarding specific actions.

Examples of good friction in the SaaS environment include:

• Confirmation dialog boxes. When a user is about to perform a crucial or irreversible action, such as deleting data, a confirmation dialogue box introduces friction by popping up and asking the user to confirm their decision

Source: Slack

• Progressive onboarding. By gradually introducing users to features and offering tooltips, guided tours, and contextual help, you’re introducing good friction by enabling users to navigate your product more effectively

Source: Wingspan

• Setting password complexity. Requiring users to create strong passwords with a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters is an example of good friction that enhances security

Source: Microsoft

Bad friction, on the other hand, is any unintended or excessive obstacle that negatively impacts the user experience. There are three major types:

• Emotional friction
• Cognitive friction
• Interaction friction

Emotional friction 

Emotional friction refers to obstacles that transform the users experience into an intimidating and discouraging ordeal.

This is the hardest type of friction to describe, grasp, and combat due to its complex and subjective nature. You can only address this type of product friction if you have a deep understanding of end-user emotions and struggles.

Here are some examples of emotional friction:

• Unmet expectations—i.e. misleading ads or promises that don’t align with a product’s actual capabilities
• Loss of control—i.e. unexpected changes or actions that users can’t oversee or undo, such as accidental data deletion
• Lack of empathy—i.e. robotic interactions, especially regarding customer support and error messages

Interestingly enough, it’s emotional friction that can give you the biggest competitive advantage. 

In order to gain traction in the competitive market, you should identify friction points in your competitors’ products that bother your target audience the most—this is what we refer to as emotional friction. Only then can you create a solution that appeals to them functionally and emotionally.

“In the context of product-market fit, friction is what’s in the way of a perfect product experience. Traction is the outcome of enough people adopting a product that it removes enough friction to be worth adoption costs (time+money).

A new product won’t gain traction unless the people that come before them experience friction.

You can’t get traction without friction.”

Kenny MacKenzie

Founder & CEO Acen.ai

Source: LinkedIn Post

Cognitive friction 

Cognitive friction occurs when excessive mental effort is required to complete a task within a product. Complex workflows, difficult-to-understand instructions, and overwhelming information all contribute to cognitive friction. 

Examples of cognitive friction in the SaaS environment include:

• Unclear guidance—i.e. complex or technical jargon that makes it hard for users to understand product features
• Over-complicated workflows—i.e. too many steps to complete a task
• Product not performing as expected—i.e. error messages appear in response to certain actions

Interaction friction

Interaction friction refers to the difficulties that arise when users interact with a product’s UI. It can be caused by: 

• Ambiguous navigation—i.e. a cluttered or poorly organized UI
• Unresponsive controls—i.e. buttons or links that don’t work as expected
• Performance issues—i.e. slow loading times for pages or features

How to identify friction points in your product

Let’s walk through a simple yet actionable strategy for identifying points of friction in your SaaS product.

1. Map out the user journey 

You know there are problems somewhere in the PX, but where? 

Your first step toward answering this question is identifying specific touchpoints that may cause friction throughout the customer journey. 

User journey mapping is the process of identifying the key stages and milestones users go through, from product discovery and the conversion stage to ongoing product adoption. 

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Define user personas. You already have user personas in place, so it’s time to revisit them. Each persona should represent a specific customer segment. This will make it easier for you to visualize customer journeys for users with various needs and pain points. 

2. Outline the key touchpoints for each persona. Make a list of the critical touchpoints where user personas interact with your product. These touchpoints can include visiting your website, signing up for a trial, using specific features, seeking customer support, and more.

3. Create user journey maps. Visualize user journeys with maps and flowcharts. The number of customer journeys should correlate with the number of customer personas.

4. Identify gaps and discrepancies. Surprise-surprise, your ideal customer journey and reality may fail to align. Analyze the differences between the outlined journey and the actual customer journey—this is where you’ll identify the biggest friction points. 

Once you’ve broken down the user journey(s) into smaller steps, it’s much easier to analyze your product usage data and identify trends in the PX.

2. Look at your product metrics at each stage of the journey

KPIs like conversion rates, bounce rates, feature adoption rates, churn rates, and others will indicate whether you’re dealing with product friction and whether you need to do anything about it.

To interpret the metrics, look for patterns, trends, and anomalies that indicate areas of concern, for instance:

• Low conversion rates combined with a high bounce rate suggest friction during the onboarding process
• A low feature adoption rate may be caused by different factors—from friction in the onboarding process to unclear communication regarding new features
• A low task completion rate indicates friction in the user interface, such as confusing workflows

Once you spot an alarming pattern, you can dive deeper into the root cause by looking at the user experience from a user’s perspective. 

3. Collect user feedback

You already have some quantitative insight into your product’s performance. Now it’s time to collect some user feedback to gain access to the qualitative insights that metrics alone don’t reveal.

By asking open-ended questions, running surveys, and analyzing customer support interactions, you’ll be able to see your product through your customers’ eyes and uncover the type of friction you’re dealing with. Here’s an action plan to help you on your journey:

• Create targeted surveys to gather specific feedback from users regarding their experiences with your product. Consider running in-app surveys triggered by specific user actions
• Conduct one-on-one interviews with loyal customers. What do they have to say?
• Analyze customer support tickets and interactions. What are the most frequent issues or common user frustrations?

A combination of product metrics and user feedback will give you a good idea of the pain points your users experience. That said, you’ll still lack the necessary context to come up with a solution to minimize product friction. 

4. Look into your product analytics data

First you used product metrics to detect signs of friction. Then you turned to user feedback to understand the customer’s point of view. Now, it’s time to look at the PX through your customers’ eyes. 

These tools will help you collect the PX insights that will provide you with more context and reveal underlying patterns: 

• Session recordings—by watching these recordings, you can see firsthand how users interact with your UI, including moments of hesitation and where they get stuck
• Heatmaps—use heatmaps to pinpoint elements that users attempt to interact with but are not clickable or functional
• User paths—also known as a funnel analysis, a user path analysis highlights common sequences of actions users take within your product, including if and where they deviate from the intended flow

This is where you’ll need the user journey maps you built earlier. Once you understand how different customer segments should behave inside your product, it’s easier to spot the behaviors that don’t align with your user journeys.

Combining the insights from session recordings, heatmaps, and user paths with quantitative data and user feedback will help you spot potential bad friction points in your SaaS product.

5. Translate the data into friction points

Now that you have gathered valuable insights from various sources, it’s time to turn it into product friction points—the good kind.

For best results, consider the following steps:

1. Look for common issues that users repeatedly face, such as difficulty with specific screens or interactions
2. Group friction points into emotional friction, cognitive friction, and interaction friction to understand their nature
3. Prioritize the friction points that have the most impact on the user experience and overall product success
4. Segment friction points based on user demographics or behavior to tailor solutions to specific user needs

With this data in hand, you’re ready to design and implement the solutions that will address your friction points.

5 Examples of friction points, including how to overcome them

Friction points come in all shapes and sizes. Here are the most common friction points SaaS customers face.

1. Overcomplicated sign-up flow

Problem: An overcomplicated sign-up process is the first major source of friction in the user experience. Often, it includes too many steps making it challenging for users to register.

“It doesn’t matter how great your marketing is if your buying process is a nightmare.”

Diego Oquendo

Performance Marketing Manager at Catalyst Consulting

Source: LinkedIn Post

Identifying the problem: Analyze drop-off rates along each step of the sign-up flow to identify where users are struggling. Perform a funnel analysis with Smartlook to spot friction points in your checkout funnel.

Pair a funnel analysis with screen recordings (also accessible in Smartlook) to see what the user experience looks like behind each drop-off.

Addressing the problem: If possible, remove all friction from the registration process. There’s no place for ‘good’ friction in the sign-up flow. Leading product experts recommend that SaaS companies minimize friction in the buying process by showcasing the product first:

“Spotify helps you experience the product’s value with minimal friction.

You don’t even need to sign up—their landing page is their product”

MATT HINDS

Co-Founder at Sauce

2. Lack of user guidance

Problem: A lack of user guidance can be a significant friction point for SaaS customers. 

Identifying the problem: There are quite a few indicators of poor onboarding. Start with measuring the time it takes for users to unlock the core value of your product. If it takes too long for users to achieve value, it’s a sign they’re lacking proper guidance.

In Smartlook, you can assess your product’s time-to-value (TTV) by running a cohort analysis. This involves setting up tracking for a specific group of people (e.g. users that signed up over the last month) to identify how many of them completed the first key action (e.g. save the project). All you need is to define a cohort, a.k.a. a customer segment, and define the event you want to track.

Once you’re all set, you can access detailed stats regarding the cohorts’ activity over a specified timeframe in the retention table:

In the Y-axis in the above table, you can see users split into groups by the day they signed up for a free trial. The X-axis refers to the number of users who took the specified action (in this case, file upload) nine days following their registration. To assess whether your new users are achieving the first milestone fast enough, compare the number of users taking action to the benchmark TTV (oh yea, you also need to set a benchmark).

“If you’re a product manager that keeps an eye on conversions and new business in regards to a product, cohorts will help you a lot.

Every time you put a cut in each of the steps your users make along their journey, you make the data set smaller and more controllable. It’s like freezing a group of users in time.

Cohorts also give you more influence. So the smaller the parts that you chop, the better.

If you look at users that convert and bring money to your business, every chop you make, the more control you have. Let’s say your business has 100 new users. They may convert. But, so what?

If you build a cohort and aggregate, let’s say, 100 users from this campaign on this channel, it gives you more control over what you can analyze. For example, you can dig deeper into:

The time to value (how much time it takes for your free users to turn into paying clients). Do we have the right amount of free features, including behind-the-paywall features? How is our product performing over a specific period of time?

So, cohorts make it possible to improve your product in a product-led growth framework. Cohorts are actually the only way to make an impact on a product and have better control over it.”

MICHIEL VERMEULEN

Growth & revenue manager

Addressing the problem: Unlike the conversion journey, an onboarding flow benefits from ‘good’ friction (adding a layer of educational content before letting new users explore your product).

3. A confusing user interface

Problem: A cluttered UI is a common point of product friction. It often happens when a company incorporates too many features or wishes to create a design that “stands out.”

Identifying the problem: Turn to heatmaps and session recordings. Heatmaps allow you to visualize quantitative data in regard to recurring patterns in user behavior, such as areas of interest and the ones that get ignored. From here, you can dig deeper into the exact reasons behind these trends by reviewing session replays.

Session recordings represent qualitative data that helps uncover the behavior of individual users (which make up patterns when put together). These recordings will show you how users interact with your UI and point out where visitors get angry, lost, or confused.

Addressing the problem: The solution depends on the exact problem you’ve identified during your analysis. But you’re likely to start by improving the visual hierarchy of your UI and creating a consistent layout. You should also consider simplifying the navigational flow by reducing the number of clicks required to reach essential features.

“Recently, we had a major UX challenge with our product: users were finding certain flows unintuitive. Here’s what we did to fix it:

We built and maintained a “core flows” library. Examples for us included setting up alerts, dashboards, investigating outages, etc.

User testing—we started internally since our product is used by engineers. Now every new employee is put into a pool for testing, and we actively recruit our users

We systematically grade and improve the UX towards A’s

A = new user can complete with no guidance 

B = users can complete with conceptual instructions 

C = users require step-by-step instructions 

This way, all major flows are tested, and friction is minimized before GA release.”

ROSS LAZEROWITZ

Head of Product at Observe, Inc.

4. Failure to reach the “aha!” moment

Problem: The “aha!” moment is the point in the user onboarding process where users experience the true value and benefits of your product. In other words, it’s the moment they decide to stick with you. Failing to reach this moment as early as possible in the user journey can lead to user disengagement and churn.

Identifying the problem: This is a difficult one. First off, you need to define when the “aha!” moment happens along the user journey. To validate it, you need to trace the correlation between this moment and user retention—do users that reach it stay with you longer?

Once you’ve defined the “aha!” moment, you can set it as an event in Smartlook and track how many people (if any) reach it. 

The funnel view will work best for uncovering insight into the user journey. Since the “aha!” moment is rarely just one event but rather a sequence of actions, a funnel analysis will help you understand whether users are completing the path you’ve outlined for them, including where they’re experiencing problems. 

Addressing the problem: If the data shows you need to get your users to reach the “aha!” moment faster, you should focus on optimizing the onboarding process. You can start by tailoring the onboarding experience based on user personas and their specific needs. Walk users through the most critical aspects of your product with interactive guides to ensure they understand and experience its value early on.

5. Too much information

Problem: While providing detailed onboarding guidance is helpful, logging into a new app and suddenly being bombarded with multiple instructions can be irritating. Failing to strike that balance can lead to information overload and visual noise.

Identifying the problem: Observe user behavior to see if visitors appear confused or spend excessive time trying to process information. Also, be sure to pay attention to how many users abandon certain screens or features quickly, as it may indicate information overload.

In Smartlook, you can create a funnel for tracking the onboarding process—just define the milestones, a.k.a. events, for your funnel and activate monitoring. 

Addressing the problem: Simplify the screen and trigger one experience at a time. Avoid bombarding users with multiple prompts or options at once, and give them time to absorb the information and take action.

“An example of product friction we recently overcame is overwhelming users with too many options. By breaking down our user onboarding checklist into two parts, we saw double-digit gains in our completion rate—from less than 2% to about 25%.

Initially, our onboarding checklist had several steps and was the same for all user groups. So we decided to split the list out across post-purchase and trial, creating separate lists for each phase of the experience. 

The first checklist now focuses on installing the Appcues Builder. Once the first checklist has been completed, it triggers the second checklist, which includes 3 items: create a flow, track an event, and create a goal. 

The idea is to daisy-chain the checklists together so folks don’t have a 45-page to-do list. They have just a couple of little setup tasks—truly bite-sized tasks, teeny little things. This makes each step more palatable and easy to complete.”

RAMLI JOHN

Content Director at Appcues and the author of Product-Led Onboarding

Identifying and reducing user friction with Smartlook

The goal of product designers and developers is to strike a balance between good and bad friction. While good friction can guide users and enhance PX, bad friction creates unnecessary barriers to the user experience. 

To draw a line between these two and minimize bad friction, turn Smartlook’s PX insights. The platform offers a set of product analytics tools to help you go as deep as possible into the points of friction in your PX and the context behind them. With event funnels, heatmaps, and session recordings, you’ll be able to access a visual representation of your product’s quantitative and qualitative data helping you understand and resolve user pain points.
Schedule a Smartlook demo or start your free, full-featured 30-day trial today.

Adelina Karpenkova

is a freelance writer with a background in SaaS marketing. She loves discovering new product marketing strategies, gaining insights for product experts, and turning her knowledge into helpful content. When she's not writing, she plays tennis or knits cozy sweaters.

The post Create a Seamless User Experience: 5 Ways to Overcome Product Friction in B2B Saas appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

But it’s well worth the effort. By taking the time to improve the product experience, you’ll do the following:

• Drive more conversions
• Boost customer loyalty
• Increase customer retention
• Reduce churn rates

All things considered, it’s a path toward achieving (and outperforming) your revenue goals.

So how do you actually do it? What does it mean to create a great product experience, and what steps should you take to achieve it?

In this guide, we explain how to collect product experience insights, including what you should pay specific attention to and what you should do with your newfound insights to improve the product experience.

We’ll cover:

• What is product experience
• How to monitor and analyze the product experience (using quantitative and qualitative insights)
• 7 Ways to improve the product experience backed by real-life examples

Smartlook helps you collect quantitative and qualitative insights to make informed decisions regarding improving the product experience. Book a free demo to see how Smartlook helps you understand your customers and their pains, or try it yourself with a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

What is product experience?

Product experience is the impression that users get when interacting with your product. It’s not just about what the product does but how it does it, how easy or difficult it is to use, and how it makes users feel.

Often referred to as the “customer journey within a product,” let’s take a pause to reflect on the connection between the product experience and customer journeys.

The customer journey involves all the touchpoints a customer makes when interacting with a company and its product(s). This includes interactions that occur before and during the product experience. 

The post-purchase customer journey is what a person does with your product, and the product experience is how they feel about these interactions.

There are several factors that determine the overall product experience:

• Usability: Is the product interface user-friendly and easy to navigate?

• Functionality: Does the product include the features users are looking for?

• Design: Does the product have a modern and visually appealing design? 

• Support: Can users resolve arising issues and get answers to their questions fast?

• Value: Does the product provide great value for the price?

Creating a positive product experience is crucial for a SaaS business as it’s the key to creating long-lasting relationships with customers and increasing customer lifetime value.

Product experience vs. customer experience

The customer journey has the ability to make or break the product experience. So let’s take a moment to talk about the relationship between product experience and customer experience.

Customer experience is a mix of customer impressions from every interaction with your company, from the first moment they hear about you to ‘we’re sorry to see you leave’ emails. While the customer experience forms the overall brand perception, product experience is all about how your customers feel about your product.

Nebojsa Savicic of Plainly states that the product experience is part of the customer experience: 

“The difference between the product experience and the customer experience is reflected in the following: the customer experience is the way a user interacts with your company (e.g., customer success or customer support teams), while the product experience is their independent experience when interacting with your product. I would say that customer experience is definitely a broader term that also includes product experience, but it’s not vice versa.”

Nebojsa Savicic

Co-founder at Plainly

Simon Bacher of Ling App, refers to the customer experience as a combination of the buying journey experience and the actual product experience:

“There’s a thin line between product experience and the customer experience in terms of touchpoints. Product experience focuses more on all aspects of the product, such as its features and benefits and the emotional connection a customer has when engaging with it. 

On the other hand, the customer experience encompasses multiple touchpoints of the purchasing journey, including product awareness and interaction. Unifying and activating product touchpoints enhances the customer experience.”

Simon Bacher

CEO at Ling App

How to monitor and analyze product experience

Before you take action, you need to dig into product experience analytics. Start by collecting quantitative and qualitative product insights to spot issues relating to the product experience and understand the reasons behind them. 

Start with quantitative insights

First, turn to quantitative insights to collect statistics and spot trends in the product experience.

Have users been churning after a recent product update? Is there a decline in daily active users? Quantitative data will reveal the answers to these questions and help you understand what you should pay attention to.

Track user engagement metrics

Tracking user engagement metrics will give you a basic understanding of your product’s health. Some key metrics to track include:

• Active users: the number of users who are actively using your product within a given time frame
• Churn: the rate at which users are leaving your product
• Retention: the percentage of users who continue to use your product over time

A UX tool like Google Analytics or Smartlook will help you collect these engagement metrics.

“One of the most important metrics that a product team should pay attention to before improving the PX is user engagement. User engagement indicates how much users are interacting with the platform and using its features. It is a key indicator of how successful your product is with users and helps inform decisions around the user experience.”

Natalia Tomchyshyn

Marketing Director at Relokia

Only when you have a grasp of user engagement trends will you be able to dig deeper into the data. Now it’s time to monitor user behavior. 

Set up event tracking

Events consist of all user actions within your product. You need to set up event tracking to learn how exactly your customers interact with your app, including whether they’ve nailed navigation or not.

Smartlook is a product analytics platform that allows you to monitor in-app events. It enables you to track a variety of user events, including rage clicks, CTA clicks, interactions with non-clickable elements, etc.

By tracking these events, you can identify unpopular product features, spot usability problems, and see whether users are adopting new features successfully or not.

Monitor user paths

Tracking user paths will help you identify areas of your product that may be resulting in user drop-offs.

Let’s say a company sells an email marketing solution. After taking a look at user paths, the product team may discover that many users are abandoning their email campaigns at a certain stage, such as when they are creating email templates or designing email layouts. By investigating further, they may find that users are struggling to create visually appealing emails or that the available templates are not meeting their needs.

Smartlook’s funnels allow you to visualize the paths that users take through your product and see where they’re getting stuck and failing to complete intended actions.

To help you make sense of the data fast, Smartlook offers filters and custom views:

• Retroactive funnels. Set a custom time period to see how user paths change over time
• Funnel breakdowns. Segment user behavior data by location, events, and technology
• Funnel anomalies. Set up anomaly monitoring to receive alerts when pre-defined rules aren’t met
• Session recordings. Watch session recordings of all events in your funnel 

Collect qualitative insights

In addition to quantitative data, collecting qualitative insights can help you gain a deeper understanding of your users’ product experiences. Here are some ways to collect qualitative insights:

Watch users interact with your app

To understand real user behaviors and determine what is causing poor user engagement, you need to turn to session recordings.

Whenever you spot issues in your funnels (e.g., drop-offs), watch Smartlook’s session recordings, aka session replays, to uncover the reasons behind them. 

This is one of the most effective ways to detect opportunities to improve the product experience. You can see what exactly prevents users from completing specific tasks, uncover bugs and errors, and come up with ideas to improve your product’s user interface (UI).

Analyze customer support conversations

Customer support conversations may become a source of valuable insight into specific customer needs or pains that users are experiencing with your product.

You can use a qualitative data analysis tool like Dovetail to automatically consolidate insights from all customer support chats and detect repeating topics. Use your findings to prioritize your product roadmap and fix the most crucial issues first.

Talk to your customers

You can simply talk to your customers to better understand how they feel about your product, including what they’d like you to change.

Use surveys to back quantitative data with qualitative insights. A survey tool like Survicate will help you with this. You can create contextual in-app surveys to collect feedback on specific workflows or features in the wild.

Survicate integrates with Smartlook, which means that you connect real customer feedback from Survicate with web session recordings in Smartlook to get the full picture as it relates to the product experience.

“I typically like to schedule 1 on 1 interviews — remotely or in person. Try and structure interviews around what you see in the metrics. Since the metrics will tell you ‘what’ is going on, use the interviews to understand ‘why’ it’s happening. 

This way, you have hard numbers and metrics (the ‘what’) and behavior to suggest ‘why’ it’s happening with qualitative data, essentially giving you the full picture as to what to work on or improve next!”

Zack Naylor

Co-Founder at Aurelius

How to improve product experience (backed by real-life examples of experienced products)

After analyzing product experience insights, you should be ready to act. Based on what the data suggests, you’ll choose one of the following product experience management strategies:

Analyze and improve the onboarding experience

The onboarding experience is crucial to the product experience because it sets the tone for how users will perceive your product and whether they’ll stick around. 

If the data has shown that you’re losing new users or failing to earn loyal customers, you’ll need to revisit your onboarding flows. 

• Create interactive product walkthroughs. Interactive guidance allows users to navigate your product features while completing tasks on their own. It helps users become more familiar with your product and feel more confident using it
• Offer personalized onboarding support. Assign a dedicated account manager to guide new users during their first days with your product to make the onboarding experience as smooth as possible. Alternatively, you can offer one-on-one training sessions or chat support to provide immediate assistance 
• Maintain an up-to-date knowledge base. Update your knowledge base and make sure it reflects all product changes 

“To improve product experience, it’s crucial to prioritize optimizing the user onboarding process. As the initial experience users have with a product, onboarding sets the tone for their ongoing experience. If the onboarding process is poorly designed and users find it confusing, overwhelming, or frustrating, they are likely to abandon the product before they have a chance to fully explore its features.

By focusing on improving the onboarding experience, product teams can help users feel motivated to use their product to its full potential. This can include simplifying the sign-up process, providing clear instructions and tutorials, and offering personalized guidance to users.”

Akash Roy

Product Manager at Napta

Example: Agendor

Agendor, a Brazilian CRM software company, used customer feedback to revamp its onboarding process.  

The company ran an in-app survey to learn about its users’ mobile experience. The results revealed that most users didn’t know how to use their mobile app. Based on this feedback, Agendor made several changes to their onboarding process, resulting in higher mobile app activation rates.

Optimize user paths

Do users drop off too often? You may need to revisit your workflows. Here’s how to do it:

• Test and iterate. Once you’ve identified bottlenecks, test different solutions to see what works best. This could include simplifying the UI, improving load times, or adding contextual help. Iterate on these changes based on user feedback and analytics data
• Streamline the user flow. Look for opportunities to streamline the user flow by eliminating unnecessary steps or consolidating multiple steps into a single action. This can help users complete tasks more quickly and with less effort
• Provide contextual help. Consider using tooltips, walkthroughs, and other forms of in-product guidance to help users complete tasks more efficiently

“The most important thing to remember about improving the product experience is that it’s all about the user, not about the features. It’s easy to get caught up in the bells and whistles of a product, but if you’re not considering how your customers will use it and what their needs are, you’re missing out on the opportunity to make your product the best it can be.

So start by mapping out the user’s journey through your app or service. Where do they start? What steps do they take? What questions do they ask themselves along the way? How do they decide when it’s time to move on?

Once you have a clear picture of where your users are coming from and where they’re going next, it becomes easier to identify areas where you can optimize their path through your app or service, so they get exactly what they need (and no more).”

Gauri Manglik

CEO & Co-founder of Instrumentl

Example: Airbnb

In 2015, Airbnb redesigned its mobile app with the aim of improving the user experience, making it easier for users to find and book accommodation.

One of the key changes Airbnb made was to simplify the user flow for booking a stay. Previously, users had to navigate through multiple screens to complete a booking, which could be confusing and time-consuming. With the new design, Airbnb consolidated the booking process into a single, streamlined flow that allows users to complete bookings in just a few steps.

Implement in-app guidance

When you’re struggling to drive product adoption or reduce customer churn, implementing in-app guidance may help. 

Here are some formats you can use to support your users throughout their journey:

• Use tooltips. Tooltips are small pop-up messages that provide users with information about specific page elements. You can use them to explain complex features, provide helpful tips, and guide users through specific processes

• Offer contextual help. This refers to help content that’s triggered by specific user behavior or actions. For example, if a user clicks on a button that requires a specific setting to be enabled, contextual help can provide guidance on how to enable it

• Provide in-app tutorials. In-app tutorials are step-by-step guides that walk users through specific tasks or processes 

• Use videos and animations. These formats will help you demonstrate complex features or processes. Use them to provide step-by-step instructions, highlight specific features, and showcase use cases

Example: Salesforce

One example of a company that successfully implemented in-app guidance is Salesforce. They created a comprehensive in-app training system called guidance prompts that allows users to create help content for their Salesforce interfaces. Now, Salesforce users can create customized CRM interfaces that are intuitive for teams and speed up the onboarding process.

Remove unnecessary features

Removing unnecessary features is part of user flow optimization, but it deserves a separate section. 

The abundance of features in a product creates clutter and confusion. Oftentimes, removing features, buttons, and workflows not only simplifies the user interface but also makes the product more value proposition-focused. 

When you spot an underused feature, ask yourself whether you need to work on improving feature adoption or simply remove it from your product. While it may be enticing to fight for a feature your team worked hard on, it’s often more rational not to.

Example: CricHeroes

One example of a company that successfully removed an unnecessary step to improve the product experience is CricHeroes. They used Smartlook to analyze user behavior and discovered that some features were being neglected, causing confusion for users. 

CricHeroes users can challenge other teams to matches right in the app. When the CricHeroes team looked into its workflows, they realized a lot of users were abandoning this process as it required them to share their phone numbers with other people. After removing this step and implementing an in-app messaging system, the company fixed the issue and saw higher user engagement.

Update the user interface

Updating the UI is another way to address a poor user experience. If your users don’t follow the paths you’ve designed for them or even complain about your app’s UI, it’s time to make your product more intuitive.

To update the UI and improve the product experience, product teams should:

• Conduct a design audit: A design audit is an assessment of the current UI to identify areas for improvement. This includes analyzing user journeys, reviewing user feedback, and running usability testing

• Incorporate user feedback: Gathering feedback from users regarding your current UI will point out areas for improvement. Product teams can use this feedback to inform the design process and ensure the updated UI meets user needs and expectations

• Simplify the layout: A cluttered or confusing layout makes it difficult for users to navigate a product. Simplify the layout by removing unnecessary elements and organizing content in a clear and logical way

• Use a consistent style: Staying consistent across all elements of the UI will make your product more visually appealing and memorable. This includes using a consistent color palette, typography, etc.

Example: StoragePug

After analyzing UX metrics and user behaviors with Smartlook, StoragePug took a series of steps to improve the product experience, including UI updates. 

The product team designed small, non-interactive tiles for its product dashboard. However, session recordings revealed that when customers tried interacting with the tiles, it hurt the user experience. After spotting loads of rage clicks, the team created bigger, clickable tiles, allowing users to get the necessary information with just one click.

Set up automatic issue detection

A good product experience isn’t just about intuitive UI or smooth workflows. It’s also about the ability to resolve arising issues fast. 

To prevent churn and provide a delightful product experience no matter what, set up automatic issue detection and address crashes immediately.

In addition to providing user behavior insights, Smartlook delivers detailed crash reports, helping you spot and fix issues that frustrate users. You can watch crash recordings to trace crashes and determine which actions lead to them.

Example: Kiwi.com

Kiwi.com’s UX research team uses Smartlook to review bugs and user experience-related issues and report them to relevant teams.

Whenever they spot a bug or a UX issue, they send a request to the appropriate team and attach a link to the session recording in Smartlook. This way, it’s easy for all stakeholders to quickly get context into every bug or crash and resolve issues immediately.

Create a cohesive customer support system

What if you notice your customers need help navigating your product, but you don’t have the resources to make immediate product changes? In this case, you’ll need to build a strong customer support system.

An excellent customer support team often makes up for tiny shortcomings and helps establish long-lasting customer relationships and prevent churn.

Here are some ways that businesses can create a cohesive customer support system:

• Establish a clear support process: Make it easy for customers to get in touch with your support team, outline the types of issues they can resolve, and estimate the expected response time

• Offer multiple support channels: Provide customers with a range of options for getting help, including email, phone, and live chat support

• Train support staff: Equip your support staff with the tools and resources they need to help customers fast. This includes access to product documentation, FAQs, and a knowledge base

• Use an automated ticketing system: Set up automated ticket routing to ensure support tickets are sent immediately to the right staff

Example: Envato

Before updating its support system, Envato couldn’t keep up with the volume of support requests they were receiving and was struggling to coordinate with multiple customer databases.

To address the issue, the company implemented Kayako’s single-view dashboard, which gave its support agents a complete view of every interaction between the company and its customers.

Having all the necessary information in one place allows the Envato team to handle more requests in less time while increasing the quality of customer service. 

Improve your product experience with qualitative and quantitative insights

Before you make any changes to your product, turn to the data first. From measuring user engagement to monitoring user behaviors and product performance to talking to your customers — you need to perform a detailed analysis of what’s affecting your product experience right now.

Smartlook helps you collect insights to make better product decisions. This data allows you to do the following:

• Detect issues relating to product experience
• Reveal the reasons behind these issues
• Create a customer-centric strategy for improving the product experience

Book a free demo to receive a detailed presentation of how Smartlook can help you improve your product experience. Or try Smartlook right now with a full-featured, 30-day trial.

Adelina Karpenkova

is a freelance writer with a background in SaaS marketing. She loves discovering new product marketing strategies, gaining insights for product experts, and turning her knowledge into helpful content. When she's not writing, she plays tennis or knits cozy sweaters.

The post 7 ways to improve product experience (plus examples that nail it) appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

The goal of this process is to get a clear, detailed view of your users’ actual experience, so you can improve your app’s UX, retention, and revenue by:

• Boosting user engagement.
• Finding and removing points of friction.
• Optimizing each part of the user journey.

However, achieving this goal requires more than just tracking metrics like active users, retention, or churn. 

While these metrics do a good job of indicating your app’s performance at a high level, the app experience analytics process is about diving deeper into individual user journeys and gathering subjective insights about users’ wants, needs, and pain points. This process requires the collection of a lot more (and different types of) usage data.

This article will guide you through everything you need to know about app experience analytics, including the features and capabilities you need to collect and analyze usage data. 

Here’s what we’ll cover below:

• How does app experience analytics work?
• 5 essential features of an app experience analytics tool

1. Session recordings: Watch how users interact with your app
2. Heatmaps: See the typical user behavior on an app screen
3. Events: Monitor business-critical user actions
4. Funnels: Analyze how users navigate key flows
5. Crash reports: Understand when and why app crashes occur

Smartlook can help you analyze and improve your app’s UX, conversions, retention, and revenue. Book a free demo with our team to see how Smartlook can benefit your business or try it yourself with a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

How does app experience analytics work?

App experience analytics (sometimes called digital experience analytics) is a multi-step process that relies on accurate product usage data. This data shows you how end users interact with your app — where they click, which features they use, how they navigate the onboarding flow, and so on.

The more of this data you collect, the better you can understand your users’ experience (provided you know how to analyze it). 

However, the volume of data isn’t the only relevant factor. You also need to collect two different types of data to get an accurate representation of users’ journeys and experiences:

1. Quantitative data, which is a numerical measurement of what’s happening in your app. You can use it to quantify user behavior and answer questions like:

• How often do users from this segment log into the app?
• What’s the conversion rate for our checkout?
• How many subscriptions did we sell in Q3?

This data is usually displayed in charts, reports, and dashboards, like the Smartlook dashboard shown below:

2. Qualitative data, which is rich in context and detail about the behaviors, pain points, and needs of individual users. 

This makes it ideal for understanding why users do what they do, e.g., why they purchased a specific product or why they don’t convert after adding an item to their cart. 

Qualitative data is usually collected via session recordings (shown below) and surveys.

Today, there are tons of product analytics tools that can help you gather and analyze both types of app experience data. 

Modern solutions like Smartlook make the process simple by automatically recording all user sessions and interactions in your app. This auto-capture method prevents you from having to accurately predict each interaction you’ll need to track in advance because all the interaction data is collected by default.

More traditional analytics solutions like Amplitude and Mixpanel rely on a manual event tracking setup. This means you need to define which user interactions (events) you want to track and set up the tracking for each one individually.

Both methods can help you gather the app usage data you need, but the manual method requires more time, effort, and technical skills compared to auto-capturing. 

We’ve discussed this in more detail in our product analytics guide.

5 essential features of an app experience analytics tool

In this section, we’ll show you five essential capabilities that you need for the app experience analytics process. We’ll also use real-life examples to demonstrate how each one can benefit various teams inside your organization.

Note: We’ll be using Smartlook— our product analytics and visual user insights platform — to demonstrate how these tools work. However, if you’re interested in learning about other solutions, check out our article on the top free and paid mobile app analytics tools.

#1. Session recordings: Watch how users interact with your app

Session recordings (also called session replays or session playback) are visual representations of users’ sessions in your app. They show you everything a user does during their session — which features they use, which app screens they open, where they get confused, and so on.

For example, check out the screenshot below:

On the right, there’s the actual session replay video of a user navigating a checkout flow. On the left, you can see useful details like the user’s device, location, and other sessions. Finally, there’s a timeline containing all user actions under the session recording.

Here’s how session recordings, along with the additional data they capture, can be helpful for different teams:

• Product teams canuse session recordings to show others exactly what’s going on with the product and communicate their findings, vision, and strategy. This is a huge improvement over traditional dashboards filled with stats, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs) which aren’t intuitive for most people. 
• Marketers can watch how customers use the product, instead of focusing only on what brought them to it (i.e., attribution). This can give them ideas for which features and benefits to highlight in their campaigns.
• UX designers and researchers can see how users interact with the app in the wild, instead of relying solely on interviews, usability testing, and surveys for user research.
• Customer support teams can watch how bugs and other issues occurred, instead of relying on users’ explanations (which are often inaccurate). Hookle’s support team even uses session recordings to provide proactive customer service when they see users struggling. 

CricHeroes — the largest network for cricket players in the world — is a great example of a company that uses session recordings to improve user engagement and retention rates.

For example, they used session recordings to uncover new points along the customer journey where users were likely to contact other users. They added extra nudges at these points, which resulted in an 11% increase in the number of messages sent by users.

They also use session recordings for a host of other tasks, such as analyzing how users navigate certain screens or uncovering where they get stuck.

“With Smartlook, we can check and analyze data regarding different user segments for different features. This allows us to better predict the types of changes we can make with our current app features, including new features we can introduce to help achieve the metrics we have set for user engagement. When viewing recordings, I can see exactly how much time a user is spending on each step, where they click on a particular screen, where they’re not filling out details, and where they get stuck.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHereos

For more details on their approach and results, check out our CricHeroes case study.

#2. Heatmaps: See the typical user behavior on an app screen

Heatmaps show you how most users navigate a page or app screen, including where they click, how far down they scroll, and where they move their cursor. 

Smartlook, like most other heatmap software tools, supports three types of heatmaps: click maps (left in the screenshot below), move maps (middle), and scroll maps (right).

• Click maps show where users click (or tap on mobile) and how often they interact with call-to-action (CTA) elements. 
• Move maps show where users move their cursors while navigating a page. 
• Scroll maps show what percentage of users reach each part of a page. 

Because they’re so easy to create and read, heatmaps are a great starting point for analyzing user behavior. For example, you can use a scroll map to quickly see which elements on a screen most users see without scrolling. This can help you determine if you should move important buttons or copy higher up so that more people see them.

Sewio actually used heatmaps to find a few key issues on their homepage:

1. The buttons in the hero section were actually below the fold for some visitors.
2. Almost no one clicked on the client logos that led to customer success stories.
3. There was a big visitor drop-off in one section on the page, indicating that people didn’t find it useful or interesting.

Once they implemented changes based on these findings, Sewio’s team saw a 276% boost in clickthrough rate for their “Go to store” button and a 3x increase in clicks to their customer success stories.

Learn more about heatmaps in our guide: How to read a heatmap and get actionable UX insights

#3. Events: Monitor business-critical user actions

Events are user actions like button clicks, text inputs, or pageviews. 

Tracking these events lets you quantify user behavior and monitor the occurrence of business-critical interactions. For example, you can use events to see:

• How many clicks each feature button gets.
• How often people tap on the “Add to cart” button.
• Which buttons on your app’s homescreen people tap on most often.

With Smartlook, you can track many events without any coding, since the user interaction data is collected automatically. All you have to do is decide which interactions appear as events in your dashboard — a process called “defining an event.” 

We’ve created three ways to define events without coding:

1. Use our no-code event picker. This method lets you define an event by clicking on elements in your app’s UI. 

2. Choose from a template list of standard events, including clicked on URL, clicked on text, typed text, clicked-on CSS selector (allowing you to select any element on the page).

3. Define an event from a recording. Oftentimes, you may notice an action you’d like to track while watching a recording. You can pause the recording, click on the “Session events” tab, and easily turn that action into an event.

You can also define custom events via JavaScript to track pretty much any other activities in your app.

Additionally, Smartlook lets you combine the power of event tracking and session recordings. For example, the screenshot below shows two events being tracked on the same screen.

You can click the “Play” button under each event to jump straight into all the sessions where it was triggered. This lets you watch the full context behind each event, i.e., what users did before and after triggering it.

Disivo — an app that automates product pricing for e-commerce stores — uses events to understand how users interact with their product and where they struggle. They also combine events and session recordings to:

• Quickly find the relevant session recordings with event-based filters.
• Jump straight into the part of each session where certain events were triggered.

“When I think about how much of developers’ time I am saving with Smartlook, I am easily around 300-400% ROI. And that’s just for the devs. Once your support team starts using Smartlook, the ROI goes up even more.”

Petr Bláha

Founder and CEO of Disivo

#4. Funnels: Analyze how users navigate key flows

Most applications have a few critical flows — sequences of steps that users take to complete a goal — that are closely tied to revenue. Analyzing how users navigate through these flows is essential to understanding their experience and improving the app’s performance.

This is where funnel analysis comes in.

Funnel analysis is the process of mapping out these flows, so you can see how many users complete each step and where they get stuck.

With Smartlook, you can create all kinds of funnels by simply placing two or more events in the order you believe your users follow. The funnel visualization will then appear instantly, as shown in the GIF below.

For example, you can map each step of your onboarding sequence to an event and build an onboarding funnel. This will show you points of friction in your onboarding, which may be hurting your activation and retention rates.

Or, you can map out your checkout process and see which steps cause users to abandon it. For instance, the checkout funnel below has a conversion rate of 61.74%, with most drop-offs (26.14%) coming between Steps 1 and 2.

You can build this funnel with three events, without any coding:

• Event 1: Users click on “Add to cart” (select the button with our no-code event picker to define the event).
• Event 2: Users click on the “Pay Now” button (again, select that button with the no-code event picker).
• Event 3: Users land on the “Thank you” page (use the “Visited URL” standard event and enter the page URL).

And because Smartlook also offers session recordings, you can watch the sessions of users who dropped off at a specific stage by clicking on the “Play” button. 

In the example above, you can watch the drop-offs between Steps 1 and Step 2 (26.14% of all users), as well as between Step 2 and Step 3 (16.41% of all users) to see why drop-offs happen and increase conversions.

AstroPay — a fintech payment app — actually used this process to improve the conversion rate of one of their most important funnels. 

They mapped out the funnel and then they jumped into the session recordings of users who dropped off. The sessions revealed obvious points of friction, which AstroPay’s team was able to quickly fix, leading to a 56% boost in conversions.

“Smartlook is very helpful in understanding why some users are unable to complete certain flows, as we can see exactly what steps they followed, as well as where they see errors or decide to abandon the flow.”

Karen Bauer

Product Manager at AstroPay

Check out our AstroPay case study for more details on their challenges and the impact of working with reliable product usage data. 

#5. Crash reports: Understand when and why app crashes occur

It’s essential to know when and why crashes happen, so you can find their root cause before they affect too many of your app’s users. Tools with crash reporting capabilities help you do that. 

For example, Smartlook’s Crash Reports (available for Android apps) give you a list of all app crashes, grouped together by the first three lines of the stack trace. 

You can also see how many users experienced a crash, as well as which versions of your app the crash occurred in.

From here, you can dig deeper by clicking on each crash fragment, analyzing the entire stack trace, and seeing the user’s platform, device, date, and country.

This information is useful, but usually not enough for developers and quality assurance (QA) professionals to diagnose the problem.

That’s why with Smartlook, you can click on the “Play session” button above the stack trace to watch all sessions where a certain crash happened.

As a result, devs and QAs can see exactly what led up to the crash, instead of guessing or trying to reproduce the issue via trial and error. This makes debugging much easier and lets your team fix crashes that they otherwise couldn’t have.

Vertigo Games — a game development studio — is a perfect example of the power of being able to see how issues occur. In the early stages of developing their Critical Strike game, their product and dev teams lacked essential information about:

• The paths and user actions that led to crashes and other bugs.
• The number of new users who completed the onboarding guide.
• How players completed the game’s missions compared to the initial design.

These blindspots made their development process very time-consuming and inefficient, which is why they turned to Smartlook. Having session recordings that show the actual customer experience transformed Vertigo Games’ process of finding and fixing problems.

“Before Smartlook, we couldn’t find the reasons for the drops occurring in various parts of the funnels in our game. In order to find a solution when we had a high drop rate, we were trying to experience it ourselves and to determine the source of the error in the specified place, which caused a great waste of time.”

Sinem Bulut Selduz

Game Analyst at Vertigo Games

Start collecting and analyzing app experience data with Smartlook today

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show what your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all in one place. 

Our platform can be used on:

• Mobile applications built with many popular platforms and frameworks. Our mobile SDK is currently compatible with Android, iOS, React Native, Flutter, Cordova, Ionic, Xamarin, and Unity apps.
• Websites and web apps, including ones built with popular CMS like WordPress, Joomla, and Shopify.

Smartlook also has integrations with A/B testing platforms, like Google Optimize and Optimizely, traditional web analytics platforms, like Google Analytics and Mixpanel, and other widely-used SaaS tools, like Slack, Zendesk, Salesforce, and many more.

If you want to see Smartlook in action before you set it up on your app, you can book a free 1-on-1 demo here. Оur team will give you a detailed Smartlook presentation that’s tailored to your business at a convenient time for you.

You can also try Smartlook yourself with a free 30-day trial (no credit card required).

Martin Bolf

is the product manager at Smartlook. Martin is enthusiastic about delivering the best possible customer experience. Prior to joining Smartlook as a product manager, he used to work as a consultant for Oracle NetSuite. Martin has a deep professional interest in biometric signing and work digitalization. He is also an NFL enthusiast and likes to enjoy good food (ideally while watching NFL).

The post How to build better products with app experience analytics appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

• How do customers on our most expensive plan use our newest feature?
• How do mobile users from the US navigate the onboarding tutorial compared to desktop ones?
• How do customers who found our site via Facebook ads behave compared to those brought in organically from Google?

User analytics is also a subset of product analytics since it relies on the data gathered during the product analytics process. 

But while product analytics focuses on how people interact with the product, user analytics goes a step further by combining behaviors (like in-app purchases) with individual characteristics (like demographic info) and business-specific properties (like customers’ pricing plans) to help you find your most valuable users.

Once you know who your top customers are, user analytics lets you analyze how they interact with your product and find ways to attract more of them.

In this guide, we’ll discuss everything you need to know about user analytics, including:

• The importance of user analytics for improving acquisition, product experience, and retention
• How to capture and analyze user analytics data: 4 key capabilities

Smartlook records the sessions of every single user in your app, shows you everything they do, and helps you uncover why they do it. Book a free demo with our team to see how Smartlook can help you build better products or start a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

The importance of user analytics for improving acquisition, product experience, and retention

The biggest value of user analytics is the ability to uncover who your most valuable customers are and how they use your product. 

This information can be extremely valuable for many teams in various use cases. For example:

• Product managers can monitor how user behavior correlates with key metrics and KPIs, like engagement, churn, retention rates, and customer lifetime value (CLTV) for their most valuable customers. Product teams can also create detailed customer segments, as we’ll discuss in the next section.
• Marketers can analyze high-paying customer segments — their devices, what brought them to the site, which features they like, and so on. This helps them focus on certain channels and highlight product capabilities that can resonate with other similar customers.
• User experience (UX) designers and researchers can see how specific customers use the product in the wild. This gives them an unbiased way of looking at user behavior, as we discussed in our article on the top UX analytics tools. It also helps them validate or disprove the assumptions they have about each user persona.

Additionally, looking at the journeys of individual users can help you uncover actionable insights for improving your conversions, revenue, and retention. 

For example, say you analyze how high-paying customers navigate your onboarding tutorial and find a step that often causes friction and, in some cases, results in users abandoning the tutorial. Fixing that problem can result in more of your ideal customers becoming active users, which in turn leads to higher retention and CLTV.

How to capture and analyze user analytics data: 4 key capabilities

In order to perform user behavior analysis, you need a tool that can:

1. Segment users based on their behavior and characteristics.
2. Collect data at the individual level, instead of only aggregate, anonymized information, so you can zero in on the journeys of your most valuable user cohorts.

The four capabilities below can help you do both of these things.

Before we dive in, note that we’ll be using Smartlook — our product analytics & visual user insights platform — to demonstrate how each of these four capabilities works.

1. Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of grouping users together based on common properties and behaviors. 

Even the simplest product analytics tools allow you to segment users based on characteristics, like their device, country, and city. However, it’s essential to also add a behavior element to your segments, so you get a more accurate picture of your users.

Because segmentation is such a versatile capability, you can create all sorts of different segments depending on your product, like:

• European customers who bought your most expensive plan.
• First-time visitors from Canada who made an in-app purchase.
• Returning US users with Android devices who’ve made at least two purchases in the last month.

With Smartlook, you can save any combination of user behaviors and characteristics as a segment. 

For example, the screenshot below shows a segment of PC users from the Czech Republic who clicked on “Add to cart” over the last seven days. 

You can continuously monitor the behavior of this segment in your dashboard by clicking on “Save as segment”.

2. Event tracking

Event tracking is the ability to monitor specific user actions, like button clicks, page visits, text inputs, and so on. Like segmentation, events are fundamental to the user analytics process, because they let you add a behavioral element to your analysis.

That’s why Smartlook collects valuable product usage data automatically and lets you track useful events (like button clicks, page visits, and text inputs) without coding.

You can select which actions to track as events (called “defining an event”) by simply clicking on your product’s UI, as shown in the screenshot below.

Outside of the standard events, you can also:

• Define custom events via JavaScript to monitor pretty much any other user activities.
• Add properties to each event to further enrich your behavioral data, like the revenue property which helps you track potential and lost opportunities during the checkout process. 

Each event can also be broken down by specific properties. 

For example, the screenshot below shows an “Add to cart”event broken down by device and country.

This functionality is useful when you’re trying to understand how often different types of users trigger certain events.

3. Session recordings

User analytics tools have traditionally been focused on quantifying user behavior. This quantitative approach provides organizations with concrete stats and metrics about their users. 

However, it also has a big limitation — it doesn’t give you any context about the motivations behind users’ actions and doesn’t paint a complete picture of their journey. 

Fortunately, session recordings allow you to overcome this issue.

Session recording tools like Smartlook capture everything your users do, including where they click, which pages they visit, which features they use, how much time they spend with the product, and much more. 

For example, take a look at the Smartlook session recording below:

The session recording video shows a user navigating an onboarding tutorial. You can observe the user experience in detail, including which steps people skim through, which ones they focus on, and where they hesitate.

These qualitative product experience insights are accompanied by quantitative user data about:

• Each event that was triggered during the session (under the video).
• The user’s device, location, and session duration (to the left).

For the purposes of user analytics, you can also zero in on the recordings of individual users.

As you can see in the screenshot below, the “User information” section contains identifying details, like email and username.

If you configure our Identify API, you can jump straight into the session recordings of users based on one of these identifiers.

This capability allows product and marketing teams to watch how valuable customers interact with the product, which helps them:

• Understand which features attract their attention and which ones don’t.
• Inform the product development process with reliable insights.
• Come up with ideas for attracting other similar customers.

In fact, CricHeroes — the world’s largest cricket network — uses Smartlook’s session recordings and segmentation capabilities to get a deep understanding of the customer experience.

“With Smartlook, we can check and analyze data regarding different user segments for different features. This allows us to better predict the types of changes we can make with our current app features, including new features we can introduce to help achieve the metrics we have set for user engagement. When viewing recordings, I can see exactly how much time a user is spending on each step, where they click on a particular screen, where they’re not filling out details, and where they get stuck.”

Parita Pithwa

User Engagement Lead at CricHeroes

4. Funnel analysis

Funnel analysis is the process of monitoring how users navigate different flows in your product, like:

• Checkouts.
• Onboarding tutorials.
• Levels in a mobile game, and more.

In the context of user analytics, funnels help you understand how individual users navigate these flows and where they struggle. 

For example, with Smartlook, you can build a funnel by placing two or more events in the order you believe your users follow. Then, our tool automatically calculates the funnel’s conversion rate and the drop-offs between different steps, as you can see in the screenshot below.

You can click on the “Play” button under each step, including the drop-offs, to jump into the relevant session recordings. This is a massive advantage over traditional web analytics tools (like Google Analytics), which only show where users drop off but can’t help you uncover why.

Once you’ve built your funnels, Smartlook lets you zero in on how different customers navigate them. You can do this by breaking down each funnel by:

• Users’ locations (country, city, or state/region) and technologies (device, browser, and operating system).
• Customevent properties, like users’ pricing plans or how much they’ve spent with your business over the last year.

Lastly, if you use the revenue property when defining your events, Smartlook can calculate the total revenue of your funnels, as well as how much revenue you’re losing from funnel drop-offs.

Note: You can also set up our Anomaly Alerts and receive notifications in case of a sudden spike or drop-off in the conversion rates of your funnels.

Start finding user behavior insights with Smartlook today

Smartlook gives you robust analytics that show what your users are doing — paired with session recordings and heatmaps that show why — all in one place.

Our tool records all user sessions on your website, web app, or native mobile app with a single code snippet. With all that behavior data automatically captured, you can analyze the entire user journey, monitor important actions and funnels, create detailed customer segments, and track key product metrics, like active users and retention. 

Additionally, Smartlook supports integrations with CRMs, analytics platforms, A/B testing tools, and other widely-used solutions, making it easy to fit our tool into your existing workflow.

To see how Smartlook can help your business (without setting it up), book a free demo with our team. We’ve found that customers who go through the demo have a 70% faster onboarding time and leave positive reviews 99% of the time. 

If you want to give Smartlook a go yourself, start a full-featured, 30-day trial (no credit card required).

author Ondřej Machek

CTO

The post The ultimate user analytics guide for product, marketing, and UX teams appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Over the years, an entire ecosystem of tools has emerged to help with this task. The vast majority of them are quantitative analytics tools that track what your users do and report on stats and metrics, like daily active users and retention.

While useful, these traditional analytics platforms can’t show you your users’ entire experience with your app. As a result, you can’t understand why users do what they do or see the exact situations in which bugs occurred.

Imagine a fitness app product team armed with traditional mobile app analytics notices a concerning trend: a drop in engagement and an increase in user drop-offs, particularly on the screen where users log their daily nutrition. Standard metrics indicate a decline in user interactions on this screen, but the team struggles to understand why users are disengaging.

Without fully understanding specific user pain points, the team initiates a series of generic push notifications encouraging users to engage with the app. These notifications include reminders to log meals, join community discussions, and explore new app features.

Unfortunately, the change doesn’t bring the desired increase in engagement. If only the team had a way to record exact user experiences (UX)…

Many dev, product, and UX teams often aren’t aware of (or overlook) another category of tools for tracking mobile app users — session recording tools. These tools allow you to:

• Watch everything your users do in your app throughout their session (without hurting their experience or endangering personal data).
• Find and reproduce bugs fast.
• Fix edge case errors that you couldn’t have tested before a release.

In this article, we’ll show you how to do all three of these things with Smartlook, our mobile app analytics and web session recording tool.

You’ll also learn how to combine session recordings with events and funnels to find valuable user behavior insights and improve retention rates.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• What in-app tracking says about your user behavior
• 3 mobile app tracking tools recommended by product teams
• 2 unobvious use cases for session recordings in mobile app analytics
• How to make quantitative data and session recordings work together
• How to record sessions without affecting the user experience or endangering sensitive data

To start tracking the behavior of your mobile app’s users today, sign up for a free Smartlook account (no credit card required). Our tool has SDKs for 10 mobile app platforms, frameworks, and game engines — including iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, and Unity  — and can also be used for website analytics.

What in-app tracking says about your users’ behavior 

Mobile app tracking is more than merely a way to detect issues with the UX. It gives you an inside view of your customers’ preferences, pains points, aspirations, and habits. Only by understanding these (which is a tricky, because they can change constantly), can you build an app that users love.

Here are the key aspects of user behavior that in-app tracking can reveal:

User retention 

User retention is a critical metric in gauging the health of your app, and traditional analytics tools provide the foundation for understanding it. Metrics like daily active users and returning visitors offer a snapshot of user engagement over time.

Smartlook takes this a step further with Retention Tables. You don’t have to make complex calculations to learn how many visitors continue to return to your app after signing up, our Tables do that for you.

Retention statistics in Smartlook

Later, we’ll tell you more about tracking mobile app user engagement with Smartlook’s Retention tables. In the meantime, just remember — it’s the starting point for retention analysis. 

Once you get a grasp on the state of your app’s retention, it’s time to move on to analyzing session recordings. Here, you can see the exact screens where drop-offs occur, identify patterns, and discern the reasons behind user disengagement. 

Think of the fitness app scenario mentioned earlier. Instead of relying solely on quantitative data that indicates a decline in user interactions, in-app tracking through session recordings allows product teams to witness precisely when and where users disengage. 

Navigation patterns 

Understanding how users navigate through your app is crucial for optimizing their experience. This is where you’ll discover whether they’re following the paths you’ve built for them.  

With Smartlook’s Funnels (a.k.a. user paths), you can precisely track how users move from one screen to another, including where you lose them most often. Funnel reports uncover whether the app’s logic and navigation align with user expectations and let you know if you need to make adjustments. 

Later, you’ll find out how to set up funnel monitoring to analyze user behavior patterns. 

Feature adoption 

How do users perceive new features? Are they reaching the “aha!” moment? Have they realized the value of your app at all? 

You can get answers to these questions and more by monitoring app adoption. This is where mobile in-app event tracking comes in handy.  

Events are specific in-app interactions that you define and monitor. By creating events for every critical action within your app, you can keep track of how many users engage with different features. 

Use this data to refine your onboarding process and provide existing users with supporting resources to help them make the most of your app. Later, we’ll delve into the specifics of setting up and utilizing event tracking with Smartlook.

“How to improve activation rates in an afternoon:
– Run a website/app heatmap (e.g. Smartlook)
– Where are your customers spending the most time?
– Prioritize features and ask yourself the following questions for each:
– How many customers ‘activate’ using this feature?
– How long does it take to activate?
For the best performing features:
– How can we drive customers to these faster?
– Does this require human intervention?
For the worst performing features:
– How can we drive customers to better-converting features?
– Does this require human intervention?
Repeat for different customer segments if you have them.
There is a lot more to explore, but you’ll be surprised at your findings.
7 questions, 1 website, 1 afternoon.”

Rob Wilson-Croome

Senior Customer Success Manager at Freshworks

Usability issues and behavior patterns, by user cohort 

Mobile app tracking should allow you to identify friction points, non-responsive UI elements, and confusing flows in your product experience (PX). Top-level quantitative data doesn’t always uncover UX issues that particular user groups experience. These may occur on specific devices, operating systems, or any custom attribute.  

With Smartlook, you can run a cohort analysis to understand how UX differs across different user groups. By segmenting your audience, you can pinpoint usability issues and behavior patterns unique to each user cohort. 

“For us, it is very important to look at the cohorts of users who filter recordings. We use events to see particular actions, and regularly check funnels and watch recordings of these actions. This is where we closely watch engagement and retention for these cohorts.”

Martin Bolf

Product Manager at Smartlook

Smartlook is free for up to 3,000 monthly sessions. Sign up for your free, full-featured 30-day trial now. 

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytics solution with mobile application tracking capabilities. 

Key features: 

• Cohort analysis: Use Mixpanel’s powerful segmentation feature to compare funnels and analyze user engagement across different cohorts 
• Funnel analysis: Analyze conversion paths and user journeys 
• Experiments: Run A/B tests to make informed app optimization decisions 

Note: While Mixpanel offers robust analytics features, it doesn’t provide session recordings, limiting its ability to provide a visual playback of user interactions. 

Adjust

Adjust is a revenue-oriented analytics platform. It aggregates data on mobile app revenue, return on ad spend (ROAS), and lifetime value (LTV). 

Key features: 

• Attribution tracking: Identify the sources and channels that drive app installation and user engagement 
• Audience building: Enable automated segmentation to create highly personalized experiences for your users 
• Fraud prevention: Take advanced fraud prevention measures to tackle mobile ad fraud in real time 

2 Unobvious use cases for session recordings in mobile app analytics

Session recordings (sometimes called session replays) show you users’ real-time experience in your app, from the moment they open it to the moment they close it. This means you can see every interaction inside every user session.

With Smartlook, session replays are always-on by default. Once you set up Smartlook, our tool automatically starts recording everything your users do, so you don’t have to worry about manually starting and stopping recordings.

You can use over 30 filters to quickly find relevant recordings. 

For example, Smartlook has technology filters like device and operating system, user filters like new users and returning ones, and event-based filters, which allow you to quickly find recordings where a specific user action occurred. 

We’ll talk about event tracking later on, but if you’re interested, feel free to jump to that section.

Smartlook also has an Identify API, which you can use if your app collects some type of user identification details like username or email. When the API is set up, the selected identifier will appear in users’ session recordings, as you can see in the lower left-hand corner.

This is a great way to quickly find and debug issues that specific users have reported. For example, if an identified user reports a bug to your support team, your dev team can instantly jump into their session recordings and see exactly what happened. 

Seeing how an issue occurred from a users’ point of view is extremely useful for debugging and fixing edge cases.

#1. Find and reproduce bugs fast

Debugging mobile apps and games is notoriously hard. In many cases, you can’t reproduce the circumstances in which the bug occurred. And even when you can, the reproduction process can take lots of time and effort.

Session recordings allow you to massively speed up this process. Having access to relevant session replays lets dev and QA teams see how each bug occurred from a users’ point of view, instead of guessing what went wrong.

One of our clients (Hookle) uses session recordings to save 10 hours per week on bug finding and reproduction for their social media management app. 

Before finding Smartlook, Hookle’s support team often struggled as customers described their problems one way when in reality something else happened. This prompted them to look for a session replay tool that’s compatible with Flutter. 

Once they set up Smartlook, session recordings made it possible to find the root cause of customers’ problems way faster than quantitative data alone ever could. In some cases, their support team contacts customers proactively, explaining and resolving issues before a support ticket is even opened.

#2. Understand edge cases that you couldn’t have tested before a release

There are so many mobile devices and technologies out there that it’s impossible to test everything you release on each device. In reality, it’s only possible to test on the top five to 10 devices and technologies that most of your customers use.

This inevitably means you have to deal with bugs that only affect a handful of users with specific devices and technologies (i.e., edge cases) as more and more people download your app. And when such edge cases come up, it’s difficult to find the root of the problem if you can’t see what’s going on.

Again, session recordings show you what happened, so you don’t waste time and effort trying to understand the situation via trial and error.

Let’s say a user on an older Android device reports the occurrence of some peculiar situation that you haven’t encountered before. According to Android’s website, 1,300 brands have produced over 24,000 different Android devices, so edge cases like these are bound to come up.

If you’ve set up the Identify API, you can find the relevant session recording instantly and see the situation. And even without identification, you can locate the session recordings from a specific date and filter them by operating system and device type. 

In both cases, you can find and fix the edge case much faster than you could with quantitative data alone.

How to make quantitative data and session recordings work together 

No doubt session recordings are the best tool to see your PX through the eyes of your users. But this tool is even more powerful when combined with quantitative data, like events, funnels, and retention tables. 

Now that we’ve covered session recordings, let’s look at how you can use them in combination with classic analytics tools — events and funnels — to find valuable insights fast.

Use events to filter session recordings and monitor app adoption 

In the context of mobile and web analytics, an event is a user action, which you can track, like an account login, button tap, or text input.

Smartlook automatically captures two types of mobile app events:

• User interaction events like finger touches, gestures, and focus on UI elements.
• Analytics events that initialize an action in your application, like button clicks and navigation between screens (for native iOS and Android apps). Recording and tracking navigation events is essential, as it helps you understand how users move between different screens to achieve their goals.

You can also build custom events via JavaScript to track important user milestones or other interactions that Smartlook doesn’t capture by default. You can learn more about Smartlook’s event tracking in our documentation.

“If you’re using tools like Smartlook or Mixpanel, set your events based on data tracking IDs on your elements or custom events depending on what tool you’re using.

What’s best is that tools like Smartlook enable you to organize them in folders.”

Daniel D.

Senior Product Manager at Apify

In general, there are three vital use cases for event tracking:

1. Quantitative analytics. For example, event tracking can show you how many people clicked on the button for your newest feature since you added it.
2. Filtering session recordings based on events that took place in them. As you can see in the screenshot below, there’s a play button under each event. Clicking it takes you directly to all session recordings where this event occurred. This ability to combine quantitative insights (events) with qualitative insights (session replays) lets you see the entire context behind an event. Going back to our previous example, you can watch all session replays where users clicked on your new feature button and see what they did before and after that.

3. Build funnels to analyze the user journey across your app and calculate conversion rates. For example, you can build a funnel to find out what percentage of the users who logged into their account (Event 1) and clicked on your new feature button (Event 2) ended up turning the feature on (Event 3). We’ll cover funnel analysis in more detail in the next section.

It’s also important to note that Smartlook automatically tracks rage clicks and JavaScript errors as events. This means you can quickly find session replays of users who were frustrated or experienced a technical problem.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can compare two events on the same screen. To do so, open one of the events and then click on the other event while holding down Cmd/Ctrl.

You can see how event tracking works in Smartlook’s free public demo (no registration or credit card required).

Unlock navigation patterns with funnels

Funnels let you analyze the user journey across different steps (i.e., events) and calculate conversion rates. 

“Once your events are set, simply connect them into funnels. It’s important to see where’s the biggest gap and rethink what could be done better in the process.”

Daniel D.

Senior Product Manager at Apify

In Smartlook, you can create a new funnel by putting two or more events in the order you believe your users follow, like in the GIF below.

Funnels are a versatile tool, which you can use to analyze the different paths that users take to complete a goal.

For example, we often see funnels being used to analyze and improve an app’s onboarding flow. You can do this by mapping each step of your onboarding flow to an event. Then, put the events in the order you believe your users follow to create a funnel. 

Once the funnel is created, you can see how many users went through each stage of the funnel, where most of them drop off, the funnel’s overall conversion rate, and the drop-off rate between steps.

Vertigo Games — a game development company and Smartlook customer — uses this process to analyze and improve their users’ experience. One of their most important funnels consists of 60 steps and tracks how many users complete the onboarding process since that’s crucial for retaining users.

Additionally, Smartlook provides the option to break down the funnel (or specific steps in it) by properties. When you hover over a step in the funnel, you’ll see a “Break down funnel” text appear, like in the screenshot below.

Once you click it, you’ll be able to select from different parameters such as country, device, operating system, and more. When you select a property (in the example below — operating system), a breakdown table will appear below the funnel.

You can also break down the entire funnel by selecting “All steps” in the “Breakdown” section below the funnel and clicking the “+” button to select a property.

For instance, a breakdown might show you that far fewer Android users complete your onboarding tutorial compared to iOS users. This might indicate that your app is too resource-intensive for older devices or that there’s some compatibility issue. Regardless of the specifics, you know there’s some issue and you can begin investigating it by jumping into relevant session recordings.

Lastly, you (or your dev team) can further customize this analysis to your needs by creating custom properties, which let you log specific data for every event.

You can see how funnel analysis works and build a funnel yourself with Smartlook’s free public demo (no registration or credit card required).

Find out why users drop off with funnel analysis

While funnels can show you where most users drop off, they can’t tell you why they do so. 

Fortunately, Smartlook lets you combine funnel analysis with session recordings to analyze the behavior of users who dropped off. 

Let’s go back to our game tutorial example. Below, you can see a screenshot of a funnel that tracks tutorial completions, with an overall conversion rate of 71.43%.

As you can see, there’s a “Play” button under each drop-off step of the funnel. 

When you click the button, you go directly to the session recordings of all users who dropped off at that stage. This saves you time and effort, as you can watch only users who didn’t complete that step in the funnel, instead of going through all other sessions.

In the case of this tutorial, you can easily see where the largest drop-off is (Step 46, as shown in the screenshot above) and jump straight into the relevant session recordings. Again, this is how you uncover the “why” behind your users’ behavior, which helps you improve their experience.

Another common use case for this functionality is tracking users who began filling out a purchase form but didn’t complete it. You can track each form field input as an event and then create a funnel to monitor the entire process. Once you see where the largest drop-off is, you can watch the session replays and see what went wrong. 

Monitor app retention rates with Retention Tables

Besides specific user actions, Smartlook also lets you track important metrics to monitor your app’s user engagement and monetization strategy. 

We’ve discussed metrics like in-app purchases and average revenue per user (ARPU) in our mobile game analytics article, so we won’t go over all of them here. 

One essential metric we will cover is retention. 

There are different methods and formulas for tracking retention. Lots of mobile apps (and especially mobile games) need to keep daily usage high, so it’s essential to track the number of users who return to your app or a specific feature each day after first trying it. 

The better your retention, the more chances you have to improve users’ lifetime value (LTV) and other important KPIs. Retaining existing customers is also much cheaper than bringing in new ones, so high retention typically means a healthy business model.

To calculate retention, you first need a user action (i.e., event) to follow over a period of time. 

For example, you may want to follow the event that tracks when people click on the latest feature added in an update. The goal here would be to analyze how many of the users that try the feature on a specific date continue to do so each following day. The group of people you track (in this case users trying out the new feature for the first time) is called a cohort.

For example, say 550 users opened your new feature for the first time on a specific day — Day 0. If 130 of them opened the feature again on the next day — Day 1 — you’d have a Day 1 retention rate of 23.63% (130/550*100). 

Once you have that baseline, you can judge how changes to your app design or the feature itself affect Day 1 retention for the next user cohorts.

Smartlook has a special feature called Retention Tables, which lets you track user cohorts over time and calculates retention for you. 

Let’s look at a quick example of creating and monitoring a retention table in Smartlook. 

First, you need to select the event for which you’d like to analyze retention. For this example, we’re going with the account login event.

Once you have your event, you can select: 

1. The data range.
2. Whether Smartlook should display the data by day, week, or month. 

After that, scroll down to the “Retention table” section and click on “Generate”. A retention table similar to the one below will then appear.

As you can see, on Monday, Day 0, 376 users completed the “Account Login” action This group of users, which we’ll track over the next few days, is our cohort.

Here’s the retention data for the next five days:

On Day 1, 76 of the 376 users (20%) performed the action again. That number gets progressively lower, with a big drop between Day 4 and Day 5.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that just tracking retention (or any other metric) won’t tell you how to improve it. However, it’s an essential first step toward diagnosing potential issues. 

Imagine you release a new feature, set up event tracking for it, and notice that it’s got a low retention rate. Thanks to the ability to filter session recordings based on an event, you can watch sessions where users tried the feature. That’s not a guarantee for finding the problem, but it gives you a much better chance than simply looking at quantitative data.

How to record users’ safely, without affecting their experience 

As we said, session recording tools are sometimes overlooked by product, dev, and UX teams. 

For some teams, this may stem from concern about impacting the user experience. Some session replay tools can be very taxing on users’ devices, leading to fast battery drainage, high CPU usage, additional network traffic, and even app crashes. If users notice that an app is draining their battery quickly, overwhelming their CPU, or increasing their mobile data usage, they may decide to uninstall it. 

There’s also the issue of sensitive data — tools should not under any circumstances record things like passwords and credit card information. 

At Smartlook, we take these concerns seriously, which is why we created our wireframe rendering modes. These rendering modes (along with a few other features) allow you to automatically capture users’ sessions, without affecting their experience or compromising their personal data. 

Here’s how.

Record sessions with minimal impact on battery consumption, CPU usage, and network traffic

Smartlook has three capabilities for minimizing the load on users’ devices, while still recording their sessions:

1. Wireframe rendering modes. When one of these rendering modes is turned on, Smartlook draws a representation of the content on a screen, as you can see in the screenshot below. You still see all user interactions, only the UI elements are replaced by an abstract representation. This is much less taxing on users’ devices as opposed to capturing the screen as they see it. It’s also a great way to protect personal data automatically, as you’ll see in the next section. 

2. Adjustable recording quality and frame rate. If you need to see the UI as your users see it (which might be necessary in some cases), you can choose between three recording quality settings — high, medium, and low. Smartlook also lets you adjust the session recordings’ frame rate. The higher the quality and frame rate, the more taxing session recordings are on the device and vice versa.

3. No snapshots when the UI is idle. Smartlook records user sessions by taking snapshots of the UI between regular intervals. However, when the user isn’t doing anything, Smartlook doesn’t take snapshots. This optimization, called adaptive frame rate, reduces Smartlook’s overall footprint on the device and the app’s performance.

Record sessions and events while ensuring the safety of users’ personal data

Protecting users’ personal data is another concern when using session recording tools. That’s why Smartlook offers different ways to ensure the safety of your users’ data while recording their sessions.

First, we have two important default settings:

• Smartlook doesn’t record passwords or credit card information. Elements containing such data are obfuscated automatically and replaced with a neutral color box during the rendering process. 
• Our tool also doesn’t record click events that occur over the system keyboard when it’s visible. The location of the clicks can be used to reverse-engineer a users’ password, so we never record these click events.

Besides these defaults, we offer two other ways to further protect user privacy at the screen and element level:

• The first one is using one of our wireframe rendering modes. As we mentioned, wireframe rendering modes let you control what Smartlook captures on a screen level. Since they don’t show you the full UI as users see it, inputs like emails, passwords, credit card numbers, and other sensitive data are never captured.
• Secondly, you can prevent Smartlook from recording specific UI elements or classes manually. This process is called blacklisting and can be done with a few lines of code, as described in our documentation on handling sensitive data. For instance, you can blacklist the image element that contains users’ profile photos.

Track user behavior on your mobile app with Smartlook

You can set up mobile app tracking for free with a Smartlook account (no credit card required). As soon as you set up Smartlook, it will automatically start recording all user sessions.

For a detailed presentation of how Smartlook can benefit your business, schedule a demo with our team.

Pavel Kroh

graduated in biophysics, but the whole professional life works as software developer. He spent years with desktop, backend and database programming, then smart mobiles changed the game and opened the whole new software universe. Last ten years he devoted to various kinds of iOS programming, lately specialising in SDK development.

The post How to set up mobile app tracking to analyze user behavior appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Traditionally, UX analytics tools have made it easy to gather quantitative data, which can help researchers understand what users do. But to gather qualitative data — the subjective insights about what users really want or need or why they behave the way they do — researchers have had to go through an expensive and time-consuming process of conducting interviews, doing usability testing (or user testing), and gathering customer feedback through surveys. 

But many companies don’t have the budget or resources to set up a testing space, recruit product testers, and spend time interviewing real users about what works. Because of this, a lot of teams end up relying on quantitative data alone, which can easily be misinterpreted. For example, quantitative data can tell you that a landing page has a high bounce rate, but there’s no way to know whether that’s because users found what they were looking for immediately or the page was so confusing they left. 

Fortunately, there’s a new class of UX analytics tools that offer an efficient way to gather both quantitative and qualitative data: session recording tools. 

Our tool, Smartlook, was designed to help UX researchers, product managers, and marketers gather accurate user behavior data quickly and cost-effectively by automatically capturing every interaction of every real user on your site, product, or mobile app.

In this article, we’ll show you how to use Smartlook to track and quantify specific user actions and trace them back to session recordings, so you can be confident your design decisions are based on accurate behavior data.

Then, we’ll compare six other UX tools for quantitative and qualitative analytics. Here are all the analytics tools we’ll compare in this article:

1. Smartlook
2. Google Analytics
3. Adobe Analytics
4. Mixpanel
5. Hotjar
6. Crazy Egg
7. UXCam

Lastly, we’re also going to cover two A/B testing tools: Google Optimize and Optimizely. While these aren’t analytics tools per se, they’re vital when researching user behavior and testing design hypotheses.

If you want to start analyzing the user experience on your website or mobile app today, sign up for a free Smartlook account (no credit card required). 

1. Smartlook

• Quantitative or qualitative analytics: Both. 
• Session recordings: Yes.
• Web or mobile analytics: Both. Smartlook can be used on websites as well as native iOS and Android mobile apps and games.

Smartlook helps over 2800 paying organizations analyze user behavior on their websites and mobile apps. 

Once Smartlook is set up, it automatically starts recording all user sessions, so you can watch each users’ entire experience. 

Smartlook also automatically tracks specific user interactions (like URL visits, rage clicks, or in-app purchases) and gives you the ability to trace them back to the session where they occurred. This capability lets you do two things: 

1. Verify that the quantitative data was gathered correctly. If the data shows that 15 users clicked on a call-to-action (CTA) button, you can replay the sessions of those 15 users to see them actually click on the button. You don’t have to trust that a developer set up the data collection correctly.
2. See the interactions you’re tracking in the context of the users’ full session. In many cases, watching a user’s session will immediately show you why a user did what they did. Session replays can also quickly reveal bugs or problems with the user experience that would take weeks to figure out through cycles of A/B testing.

Here’s how this process works in detail.

Record all your users’ sessions automatically

Again, Smartlook’s session recordings are always-on by default from the moment our tool is set up. This mechanism ensures that:

• You don’t have to worry about turning session recordings on and off.
• You won’t be working with a limited sample or missing vital data when it comes time to research users’ behavior.

You just have to set up Smartlook (by selecting your platform or framework and following the instructions) and session replays will start appearing in the “Recordings” tab of your dashboard.

There are more than 30 filters available to help you find relevant session recordings fast, like device, operating system, new or returning users, and more.

A common scenario we see UX researchers and product teams explore with session recordings is the onboarding experience. 

To find session recordings that show you real users’ onboarding experiences, you can add a filter for new users and another filter for sessions that include an event that happens during onboarding (like creating an account). You’ll then see a list of sessions of all new users of your product who completed that event during the specified date range — and you can watch each one, or add more filters to further narrow down the list. One of our clients (Vertigo Games) does this to understand what type of first impression their games make, as that’s crucial for retaining users.

Smartlook also has an Identify API that you can set up, so that specific user details (e.g., username or email) get parsed into Smartlook. If you do that, these details will appear in users’ recordings, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Besides helping you find replays of an individual user’s sessions instantly, the Identify API can also be used to integrate Smartlook with A/B testing software like Google Optimize and Optimizely. Once you do that, you can jump straight into recordings of users who landed on a specific variant of a page or screen you’re testing.

In addition, Smartlook’s Session Vault lets you save specific session recordings for a longer period than your plans’ data retention period. That way, you can store important replays for a long time and refer back to them when you need to.

Lastly, Smartlook allows you to set up masks on any user input forms to exclude sensitive information so that it never gets sent to our servers.

While session recordings are a powerful tool, combining session replays with traditional quantitative tools (events and funnels) provides even more opportunities to quickly uncover vital insights about the user experience.

Track important user interactions and filter session recordings with events

Smartlook lets you track specific user actions over time, like button clicks, account logins, or form submissions. This capability lets you quantify how users interact with your site or app.

The interactions you track are called events. To choose which interactions you want to appear in your dashboard, you have to define an event.

With Smartlook, you can define events in four ways:

1. Choose among pre-selected standard events: URL visits, button clicks, text input, or clicked-on CSS selector (allowing you to select any element on the page).

2. Use the no-code event picker: This allows you to define an event by clicking on your website’s UI.

3. Define events from user session recordings: While watching a recording, you can pause and turn an important user action into an event without leaving the recording.

4. Create custom events via JavaScript: Custom events allow you to track pretty much anything else beyond the standard events.

For websites, you can define most events without coding by using one of the first three methods we showed. For mobile apps, most events are typically custom.

Once you’ve defined an event, you can track its occurrences in your Smartlook Dashboard.

With event tracking, you can answer important questions like, “How many times has the button for our new feature been clicked since we added it?” In addition, you can use Retention Tables to analyze how many of the users who performed an action for the first time (in this case — clicked on the new feature button) do so again over the following days.

But you can also combine these quantitative insights with session recordings to watch the session where each event occurred.

Here’s how:

There’s a play button under each event name.

Clicking it takes you directly to all session recordings where that event took place. For example, if you have an event that tracks when users click on your new feature, you can jump into their session recordings to: 

• Validate that they clicked on the new feature button intentionally.
• Get the full context behind their action by seeing what happened before and after they clicked the button.

Smartlook also tracks rage clicks and JavaScript errors as events. This means you can instantly find recordings of users who were frustrated or experienced an error.

Watching users who rage-clicked is a great way to find frustrating or confusing moments in the product experience. For instance, you may find that users are excessively clicking on an element that’s not clickable. In these cases, the element might have to be redesigned, so it doesn’t look clickable to users.

As far as JavaScript errors go, you can send the relevant recordings to your developers, who can debug and fix the issue much faster, as they can see the exact circumstances that led to it.

One of our clients (StoragePug) used the combination of event tracking and session recordings to quickly find and resolve a critical issue. 

After a recent release, they noticed their site had stopped receiving orders. In the past, when they only had access to quantitative analytics tools, they’d have to wait a few days to gather enough user data to confirm that something was wrong and start investigating. 

But with Smartlook, they were able to watch a few relevant session replays within a few hours of the release, which showed that the UI wasn’t rendering properly. As a result, their engineers were able to debug and resolve the problem right away.

You can see how event tracking works with Smartlook’s live public demo — no registration or credit card required.

Analyze user paths through your site or app, find drop-offs, and calculate conversion rates with funnels

Funnels allow you to analyze paths users take through your site or app before completing a goal, like purchasing a product or trying out a new feature.

In Smartlook, funnels are sequences of events. All you have to do is take two or more events and place them in the order you believe your users follow. When you do that, Smartlook automatically creates a funnel visualization, like in the GIF below.

You can see how funnel analysis works with Smartlook’s live public demo — no registration or credit card required.

Going back to our example from the introduction, let’s say you’re unhappy with the completion rate of your app’s onboarding tutorial. You’re considering redesigning it, but you aren’t sure exactly what you need to fix.

With Smartlook, you can map each step of your tutorial to events and then create a funnel to track how many users go through each stage.

The image below shows a moment during a session replay of a mobile user’s journey while navigating an onboarding sequence. 

During the roughly 10-minute session, the user completed 91 events. Let’s say the overall drop-off rate for this funnel is 90%. That might make you think that redesigning it entirely is the right way to go. But if the average user completes almost 100 events before quitting, the tutorial is likely designed well in a lot of places.

The benefit of having a funnel that maps each step is that you can see where most drop-offs occur. In other words, you can pinpoint the moment where the majority of users abandon the tutorial.

Perhaps there’s a technical error happening between those steps, or the users simply think they’ve learned everything they need. Regardless of the reason, knowing where most users quit helps you make more informed decisions regarding your tutorial’s design. For example, if 80% of all drop-offs occur between two specific steps, it makes more sense to redesign only them, not the entire tutorial.

And, as with event tracking, you can also combine these quantitative insights with session recordings.

Find out why users abandon tasks by combining funnel analysis with session recordings

Since funnels only provide quantitative data, they also have the same blindspots as other quantitative tools. They can show you where users drop off, but not why or how to improve their experience.

Again, the solution is to combine quantitative analysis (funnels) with qualitative analysis (session recordings). Here’s how you can do that with Smartlook:

The example above shows a 3-step funnel where 32 users (16.41%) drop off between clicking “Pay now” and landing on the “Thank you” page. In theory, there shouldn’t be any drop-offs here — users who clicked “Pay now” clearly want to buy.

There’s clearly a problem, but the funnel alone can’t tell you what it is. It may be that the payment processing is taking too long. Or maybe users are getting distracted and clicking on something else before their payment goes through. Or maybe there’s a technical error. Again, without watching their sessions you can only guess.

Similar to the events section, there’s a “Play” button under each step of the funnel, including the drop-off stages. Clicking that button under the drop-off between steps two and three takes you to the session recordings of these 32 users, so you can find out why they dropped off. You save lots of time and effort since you don’t have to sift through all 195 sessions of users who clicked “Pay now.”

One of our fintech clients (AstroPay) used this process to research how users navigate their site and app and inform their product design process. 

Their event tracking and funnel analysis showed that a lot of users didn’t complete their cryptocurrency process after starting it. Since Smartlook compiles these quantitative insights from session recordings, AstroPay’s team was able to watch the exact replays of users who dropped off, which led to the following insights.

• Some users dropped off because there were way too many steps in the purchase process.
• After purchasing, many users spent minutes anxiously looking for the cryptocurrency in their wallet, not realizing the transaction was still pending. 

In short, Smartlook’s combination of quantitative and qualitative data allowed AstroPay to find two crucial user experience problems without conducting any user interviews. 

Armed with these insights, AstroPay’s team was able to confidently redesign the cryptocurrency purchase flow, removing unnecessary steps and adding a “Purchase Pending” banner. This resulted in a much better user experience, as evidenced by a 56% lift in conversions.

Get an overview of the typical user experience and compare user behavior before and after design changes with heatmaps

Besides session recordings, Smartlook also automatically captures clicks (or taps on mobile), scrolls, and mouse movements to create heatmaps. 

Analyzing heatmaps can give a good overview of the typical user experience on a page or screen.

Each type of heatmap can provide different insights into users’ behavior:

• Scroll maps show what percentage of visitors reach each part of a page. This can help you determine where to place design elements, based on their importance, as well as inform your decisions regarding messaging and overall information architecture.
• Clicks maps show where users click the most. You can quickly see where most clicks are gathered on a specific user interface and how often users interact with important call-to-action buttons (CTAs).
• Move maps show where most users move their cursors. Hectic cursor activity around parts of a page or screen may indicate that users don’t know where to click or are getting distracted.

In addition, you can compare the behavior of new versus returning visitors and that of users on desktop, tablet, and mobile devices.

After updating a design, you can also create a new heatmap and contrast the user behavior with the old one, just by changing the date range. This is a great way to see how design changes affect user behavior at a glance. 

In short, heatmaps are a good first step toward developing an understanding of your users’ behavior. However, you can’t use them to put the interactions on a single page in the context of the entire user journey. Making successful design changes requires a deeper understanding of the user experience, so it’s essential to also use event tracking, funnel analysis, and session replays, alongside heatmapping tools.

Smartlook Pricing

• Free Plan: Captures up to 3,000 sessions/month. No credit card required.
• Paid Plans: Start at $55/month, with a 30-day free trial. There are pre-made plans as well as an option for building custom plans.

If you want to start analyzing user behavior on your website or mobile app as soon as possible, sign up for a free Smartlook account (no credit card required). 

2. Google Analytics

• Quantitative or qualitative analytics: Quantitative only.
• Session recordings: No.
• Web or mobile analytics: Both. 

Google Analytics is the most popular analytics tool out there. It’s a traditional analytics solution, reporting on statistics and metrics like pageviews, sessions, time on page, and bounce rates, as well as users’ demographics.

While it has a steep learning curve, Google Analytics is highly customizable and can be used to track goals (similar to tracking events in Smartlook), build funnels, attribute conversions to marketing channels, track user flows, and more. But without a way to gather qualitative data, it’s not a complete UX analytics solution.

Google Analytics Pricing

• Google Analytics is free. 
• The enterprise version (Analytics 360) is paid, but there’s no public pricing page. Reviews online suggest a starting price of $150,000/year.

3. Adobe Analytics

• Quantitative or qualitative analytics: Quantitative only.
• Session recordings: No.
• Web or mobile analytics: Both. 

Adobe Analytics is an enterprise-level analytics platform with a focus on quantitative analytics. The platform brings together a suite of tools that can help you capture and analyze real-time data from the entire customer journey. They have a huge focus on attribution and predictive analytics, which analyzes users’ data and makes predictions about their future behavior. 

Again, like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics lacks any tools for gathering qualitative data to understand the subjective aspects of the user experience.

Adobe Analytics Pricing

• There’s no information about a free plan.
• Adobe Analytics’ price is available upon request to their team. 

4. Mixpanel

• Quantitative or qualitative analytics: Primarily quantitative, but qualitative analytics features are available through third-party integrations.
• Session recordings: Only with third-party integrations.
• Web or mobile analytics: Both.

Mixpanel is a product analytics software tool, with features for analyzing conversions, app usage, and retention rate. The software lets you build reports, as well as custom dashboards to analyze product adoption, conversion rates across different segments, and other important metrics. 

Like other traditional analytics tools, Mixpanel doesn’t offer session replays (but they do offer an integration for Fullstory).

Mixpanel Pricing

• Free Plan: Includes up to 100,000 tracked users (unique visitors that performed at least one event). 
• Paid Plans: Start at $25/month, with the option to build custom plans.

5. Hotjar

• Quantitative or qualitative analytics: Qualitative, with limited quantitative capabilities.
• Session recordings: Yes.
• Web or mobile analytics: Web only. 

Hotjar is one of the most popular qualitative analytics tools on the market. It’s best known for its session recordings and heatmaps, but it also has user feedback widgets as well as survey templates. It’s a beginner-friendly tool suited for marketers, product managers, and UX design and research professionals. 

Two downsides to this tool, which we’ve discussed in our Hotjar alternatives article, are its limited quantitative analytics capabilities and the lack of support for mobile apps.

Hotjar Pricing

• Free Plan: Records up to 35 user sessions per day. 
• Paid Plans: Start at $39/month, with the option to build custom plans, depending on how many sessions you want to record.

6. Crazy Egg

• Quantitative or qualitative analytics: Qualitative, with limited quantitative capabilities.
• Session recordings: Yes.
• Web or mobile analytics: Web only.

Crazy Egg is a CRO and web analytics tool, which has heatmaps, user recordings, A/B testing, and features for tracking ad traffic on your website. Although it has session recordings, Crazy Egg doesn’t capture every user session on your website. Instead, it samples your traffic, and you can choose the rate at which the sampling happens. 

In our opinion, this feature set is better suited for conversion rate optimization than UX analytics.

Crazy Egg Pricing

• No Free Plan available.
• Paid Plans: Start at $24/month, with a 30-day free trial. All plans are billed annually.

7. UXCam

• Quantitative or qualitative analytics: Both.
• Session recordings: Yes.
• Web or mobile analytics: Mobile only.

UXCam is an analytics solution for mobile applications only, with a primary focus on session recordings. The solution also offers heatmaps, events, funnels, and other useful features for analyzing user behavior.

UXCam Pricing

• Free Plan: Records up to 10,000 total user sessions. 
• Paid Plans: Customizable, based on how many sessions you want to record per month.

2 A/B testing tools for testing design hypotheses

A/B testing tools can help you test your hypotheses and see how design changes affect user behavior. That’s why they’re a vital part of the user research process, while also complementing the analytics tools we just went over.

Google Optimize

Google Optimize is one of the most popular A/B testing software solutions out there. It supports different types of tests, including A/B, A/B/n, multivariate, and split URL testing. 

One of the biggest benefits of Google Optimize is that it’s designed to work with other analytics, advertising, and design tools that UX/UI designers, marketers, and product managers use, including Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Firebase. 

Smartlook is also compatible with Google Optimize.

Google Optimize Pricing

• Google Optimize is free.
• There’s a paid enterprise version (Optimize 360), but no publicly available pricing for it.

Optimizely

Optimizely is a Digital Experience Platform, which offers products for scaling content, managing workflows, running e-commerce shops, and optimizing users’ experience. Their A/B testing is part of the Optimize product. As an enterprise platform, Optimizely has lots of advanced testing features such as exclusion groups, which let you safely run multiple A/B tests on the same page.

Optimizely also has an extensive suite of integrations with popular tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Google Analytics. 

Smartlook also has an Optimizely integration.

Optimizely Pricing

• No information about a free plan.
• Pricing is available only after a request to their team.

Collect reliable user behavior data quickly and cost-effectively with Smartlook

You can start analyzing your users’ experience with Smartlook today by signing up for a free account (no credit card required). As soon as you set up our tool, it will start recording all your users’ sessions.

If you want to see a Smartlook presentation that’s tailored to your business, schedule a demo with our team.

Tomáš Hlavoň

is a UX Designer at Smartlook. Tom tries to creatively solve problems with user and client involvement. He believes that project preparation and proper planning determine the success of a project. He’s not afraid of mistakes, because they move the whole project forward. In his free time he likes to go for a walk or play video/board games with friends.

The post ​​7 best UX analytics tools for user research in 2023 appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

After reading the following article, you’ll understand all the aspects of mobile customer onboarding strategy. 

What’s in it for you?

What is mobile user onboarding?

• Why a good customer onboarding experience is so essential 

11 practical ways to improve your mobile user onboarding process  

• Set a straightforward onboarding goal
• Design an onboarding flow
• Include a “skip” button and make sure it’s visible
• Optimize the number of onboarding steps, and track anomalies
• Segment users and implement contextual onboarding
• Highlight key features and underline user benefits and values 
• Onboard mobile users like online games do (they do it best)
• Use gamification and the endowed progress effect to your advantage
• Ask for as little as possible — be minimalistic with your mobile onboarding screens 
• Automate onboarding welcome emails
• Collect user data and analyze your mobile onboarding outcomes

Never stop optimizing your mobile customer onboarding process

What is mobile user onboarding (mobile app onboarding)? 

Mobile user onboarding is the second step in a mobile user’s journey.

Step 1

Mobile app installation

Step 2

Mobile app onboarding

Step 3

Mobile app adoption (retention)

Step 4

Plan renewal (commitment)

It’s the process of introducing new users to your app. During onboarding, you guide new users through your product, provide them with relevant information, and help them set up their accounts.

It’s also the first time a user starts to understand the value of your product. After the mobile customer onboarding process is complete, users should be familiar with:

• Your mobile user interface (UI)
• Gestures and navigation patterns
• Basic functionality of the app

For example, say you have a healthcare medical app. First, users create an account in a few taps (or log in if they already have an account). It should be easy for them to confirm their medical ID, find a specialist, and book a visit. Afterward, the path to access a doctor’s recommendations and fill out a prescription request should be short.

Why a good customer onboarding experience is so essential 

Good mobile onboarding is vital as it:

• Helps users reach the “AHA” moment and understand an app’s value 
• Ensures users are familiar with core features of your app and their benefits 
• Motivates users to pay for the app at the end of the free trial
• Helps improve in-app conversions
• Helps increase user retention

Let’s focus on user retention — the number of unique users that visit your app over a specific period. The average retention curve looks like this:

Andrew Chen says that the average app loses 77% of its daily active users (DAUs) in the first 3 days after installation. Within 30 days, that number increases to 90%. 

There are many reasons why users drop mobile apps, including a bad user experience (UX), crashes, low app value etc. But low retention rates are also due to poor mobile onboarding. 

If you want to bend the curve and retain more users in the first days of installation, keep reading to discover 11 practical ways to onboard mobile users properly. 

Note: In this article, you’ll learn how Smartlook can help you improve your onboarding process. If you don’t have an account, set one up here for free.

11 practical ways to make your mobile app onboarding process stand out

1. Set a straightforward onboarding goal 

A clear goal makes it easier to measure the success of your in-app user onboarding process. Be sure to keep things simple and realistic. For example, “I want 70% of my users to complete the onboarding process.” 

To keep track of your goal, create a list of mobile events. Think screens visited, and elements tapped. 

To ensure your goal remains on track, compare two or more events, such as:

• “Reached_first_step_onboarding”
• “Reached_second_step_onboarding”
• “Finished_onboarding”

For example, you can track the orange Finish button to determine how many users tapped it.

Take a look at the following short video to see how easy it is to create an event.

Another example of goal setting is to compare the number of users that reached your app’s paywall vs. the number of users that went all the way and paid. Create “Purchase_plan_begin” and “Purchase_plan_success” events to view the numbers.

Compare these 2 events by pressing Ctrl/Command and selecting the events from the action sidebar. Your comparison will look like the following graph:

You can also play with events in the open demo environment.

2. Design an onboarding flow

After setting a goal, it’s time to consider your onboarding flow and the type of mobile onboarding method you would like to use. 

The onboarding flow should:

• Be frictionless, so users don’t have to put much thought into it
• Consist of easy-to-accomplish tasks before moving on to the “harder” parts of the onboarding process
• Afford users the option to skip binding offers (unless necessary)
• Take into account the user’s intent (ask about their goals at the beginning, then personalize the rest of the onboarding process based around them).

Let’s take a closer look at various onboarding methods. Feel free to mix and match — you’re not limited to one technique. 

• Contextual onboarding (aka instructional or progressive). A progressive onboarding guides users through your app, explaining how to use it. This can come in the form of a deck-of-cards tutorial, contextual help, or an interactive walkthrough.

PRO TIP: In our opinion, contextual onboarding is a great way to familiarize users with your app. Relevant instructions combined with a hands-on approach will strengthen a user’s memory. Learn more about this approach in section 5.

• Benefit-based onboarding. Prioritizes benefits and added value over teaching users how to navigate your app.

PRO TIP: Choose this method if your app is easy to use. Don’t focus on this type of onboarding if you have a complex UI or uncommon in-app gestures and patterns. Learn more about this approach in section 6. 

• Feature-based onboarding. Users learn how each feature works so they can accomplish their goals. 

PRO TIP: This onboarding model works great with a benefit-based process. Don’t stick to a feature-based onboarding approach if your app is for tech-savvy users. Showcasing features without explaining the value may result in low user retention. Learn more about this approach in section 6. 

Whatever onboarding method you choose, test it with your users and analyze the flow. The easiest way to track a user’s path is to perform a funnel analysis. 

For example, Vertigo Games created a 60-step tutorial funnel to determine if their users completed the onboarding process.

The most significant drop-off occurred on step 46 of 60. Vertigo watched the recordings with a push of the “play” button to verify what was responsible. 

3. Include a “skip” button and make sure it’s visible

Frictionless onboarding involves skippable options. Not only should you include the “skip” button, but make sure it’s visible. 

Barely visible return arrows and skip buttons in low-engaging sections trick users into doing something against their will. Be aware. Not everyone wants to have their hand held throughout the onboarding process.

There are various reasons users skip through the mobile app onboarding process, including:

• Lack of time
• Level of technical expertise
• Knowledge of app functionality
• Motivation to learn things themselves

A practical example is Blinkist — a book-summarizing subscription service. Dan Benoni, Co-Founder of Growth.Design, analyzed the app’s onboarding model, stating that he never noticed the “skip” button even though he wished to skip the flow.

If you want to check the user engagement on each of your mobile onboarding screens, analyze mobile heatmaps. You’ll see what users engage with and what they skip. On mobile devices, heatmaps allow you to mark specific areas of interest to track user interaction.

Have trouble reading mobile heatmaps? Hot (the most engaging) spots are red, whereas cold (the least engaging) spots are blue. There is also a range of colors between red and blue that depict average user engagement. 

4. Optimize the number of onboarding steps, and track anomalies

An expert onboarding process will quickly lead your user to the first “AHA” moment. If it doesn’t, consider shortening the number of steps to motivate users to complete the onboarding process. Keep users up-to-date regarding how long the process will take by numbering the steps involved.

To check how your onboarding flow is performing, use an event-based funnel. Learn how to create a funnel below:

If you want to keep tabs on abnormal changes in your funnel, toggle “Monitor anomalies.” Set the alert type — what anomalies should be reported (surges or drops), and what percentage threshold should trigger the alert?

If there is a 35% drop in the funnel, you’ll receive an email. It may indicate that something is wrong with the funnel. Consider optimizing the funnel, making it easier for users to complete.

Analyze the most significant drop-off point and watch recordings by pressing the “play” button. It may be that step 1 is confusing, or your process contains a problematic task that users can’t complete.

By redesigning the flow and removing a step or two, you can increase the number of users that complete the onboarding funnel. 

5. Segment users and implement contextual onboarding

Contextual onboarding lets you adjust paths to match a user’s goal. For example, if a user starts with a less popular feature, contextual onboarding allows them to discover it before jumping to key features. 

This type of onboarding supports user segmentation and will enable you to exchange different messages with different user groups. Consider making the onboarding process more personalized after you’ve gathered data regarding your first user group.

You can segment users by the following:

• Patterns of behavior – group users by the intent they reveal at the beginning of the onboarding process. Take, for example, a meditation app where users choose among the following goals: relax, better sleep, and reduce anxiety. Based on their choice, create 3 separate paths to delight your users.
• User type or job title – if you have a business-related app, group users by profession. Later, you’ll be able to determine if there is any significant difference between the behavior of various user groups.

Funnels are the best way to analyze how user segments behave throughout the onboarding process. Consider breaking down your funnel by custom properties for a more detailed analysis. 

For example, if you want to know how different segments of users behave when they face your paywall, create a 3-step funnel and go to the “Breakdown” section.

Press the “+” icon, and choose your custom property. In the case below, it’s user.type.

Thanks to this feature, you can see which user groups go through the paywall and which don’t. Be sure to provide a more benefit-oriented version to groups that convert less often.

6. Highlight key features and underline their user benefits and values

Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, shares a great thought about the difference between a feature and a benefit-oriented approach. Although the quote is from 2013, it’s still relevant:

As a product owner, growth marketer, or product manager, you’re probably focused on the technical side of your mobile app and the onboarding process. As such, you inevitably highlight your mobile app’s features.

Remember, your users have to see the benefit and final value of a feature. The more user-centric your approach, the more your users will appreciate it.

Ask yourself the following questions to uncover the final value of your mobile features:

• What makes your app relevant to your users?
• How does feature X allow users to achieve their goals?
• How quickly can they use feature X to complete a task and share results with their colleagues or boss?

But if you want to still focus on feature adoption, be sure to read about StoragePug and how they study recordings every time they release a new feature.

Thanks to recording filters, their product team can target and watch only the users that experimented with their latest feature. Based on these recordings, they can verify if their users are benefiting from the feature or if it requires tweaking.

7. Onboard mobile users like online games do (they do it best)

Even if you’ve never played an online game, you’ll understand the basics in no time at all. You’ll be performing basic moves, killing enemies, and learning how to access equipment out of the gate. Games heavily rely on providing additional instruction in context boxes, like the example below from “The Last of Us 2.” 

By experiencing products as early as possible in the onboarding process, users don’t feel like they’re being onboarded at all. While they’re busy having fun, the app guides them through the process. It’s a great way to immerse users into a game gradually — let them learn by doing it themselves. 

If you want to learn about mobile game analytics, read this article.

8. Use gamification and the endowed progress effect to your advantage

Gamification in mobile app onboarding

Staying on the topic of games, another way to use game-like onboarding methods is to implement gamification. Gamification uses elements from game design to make non-game applications more fun, competitive, and engaging.

If users collect points, unlock levels, or receive awards, they’re taking part in a gamified experience. Gamification helps users navigate the onboarding process with the satisfaction of accomplishing a goal. 

For example, we wanted to make our sign-up process more fun, so we created a simple user checklist. Once you complete each step, it disappears which makes using Smartlook for the first time fun.

Another example of effective gamification is a car rental app for minutes. The last stage of the mobile onboarding process displays the stats of other users, including speed, braking, and driving technique. Users can then engage in friendly competition to see who is the best driver, stat-wise. 

Endowed progress effect in mobile app onboarding

The endowment progress effect is a great way to motivate users to complete the  onboarding process. This effect involves using artificial advancement to pull users through the flow. 

9. Ask for as little as possible — be minimalistic with your mobile app onboarding screens 

According to Hick’s law, the more options there are to choose from, the harder it is for a user to make a decision. 

When users feel overwhelmed with options and information, they are more likely to:

• Struggle with decision making
• Lose sight of the main goal
• Churn

When it comes to the customer onboarding process, minimalism pays off. Design each screen with care, and remember that users differ in levels of determination when it comes to completing the flow. 

Take a look how Smartlook designed the onboarding process.

Step 1: Select a project type.

Step 2: Type your name and choose your profession. 

Step 3: Type your company name and confirm the size of your organization.

Step 4: Tell us how you heard about Smartlook.

After pressing “Finish,” you can invite teammates and access your account. All that’s left is implementing a tracking snippet to your website or product, or installing SDKs if you want to track mobile. 

10. Automate onboarding welcome emails

Don’t forget to automate the email flow of your mobile onboarding process. With an automated email flow, your users will get the correct information at the right time. 

When it comes to timing, we mean spot-on. For example, a typical mobile Dropbox onboarding mistake we see often involves “verify email” prompts while the user is still navigating the onboarding process. 

Instead of distracting users during the onboarding process, trigger automated emails to dispatch when the onboarding process is complete. Don’t interrupt first-time users. Remember, not all users have the same motivation when it comes to completing the onboarding process.

11. Collect user data and analyze your mobile onboarding outcomes

Your first attempt at the onboarding process may be imperfect. Still, you’ll increase your user retention rate by improving your flow along the way.

Remember, an optimized user onboarding experience contributes to better user satisfaction. You’ll need in-app analytics data regarding user behavior to optimize your flow. By analyzing this data, you’ll get a good idea of what works and which steps cause friction. 

Here are some key mobile onboarding metrics:

• Daily, monthly, and weekly active users
• Conversion rates
• Retention tables (retention cohorts)

If you want to dive deeper into the top 15 mobile metrics, read this article. 

Daily, weekly, and monthly active users (DAU, WAU, and MAU)

First, let’s explain what daily, weekly, and monthly active users mean:

• Daily active user (DAUs): the total number of mobile users that logged into your app on a given day
• Weekly active user (WAUs): the total number of users that logged into your app in a specific week
• Monthly active users (MAUs): the total number of users that engaged with your app over a particular month

Track this data within Smartlook by creating a new dashboard tile and choosing the “Active User” option. Simply select a tile, decide what to track (DAU, WAU, or MAU), and set the data range. Press the “Save” button — that’s it.

Each metric will provide you with insight into how many users visit your app at a given time. As you already know, the first days of user interaction are the most critical. This is why keeping a close eye on the DAU, WAU, and MAU metrics is paramount. 

Conversion rates

Developing your in-app conversion rate is vital for retaining users. Use events to measure the number of successful purchases (e.g., going through the paywall or purchasing a paid plan).

Spot different user behavior patterns by comparing 2 events:

• “Plan_purchase_success”
• “Plan_purchase_error”

Compare these 2 events by pressing Ctrl/Command, then selecting the events from the action sidebar. Additionally, view recordings to see how user behavior differs between the 2 events.

With event analytics, you can verify if the goal you set at the beginning of the onboarding flow is obtainable or if it needs modification. 

Retention tables (cohort analysis)

Retention tables show how groups of users perform a specific action over time. The data in the columns depict the number of users who perform an action day by day.

Using retention tables, check how many users log into your app in the first critical days. You’ll be able to see if your mobile onboarding process provides a good user experience. If it does, they’ll want to continue using your app.

To create a retention table, you have to define an event or create a custom event via API. Here is an example of the retention cohort of the event “Trial user login.” On Monday (day 0) 24 users logged in. But on day 1, only 3 users out of 24 logged in.

Never stop optimizing the customer onboarding process 

As you remember, the mobile app landscape is saturated and competitive. Offer a great app to your user base and polish the mobile onboarding experience constantly.

Here is a short recap of everything you need to know about onboarding psychology:

• The timing of every element is crucial. Before they trust you, don’t ask users for too many favors (notification settings, paywall screen, long forms). Never ask for reciprocity if you didn’t give your users anything beforehand.
• Be as specific as you can. Vague language, weasel words, and unclear communication make users feel confused and unwilling to continue onboarding. Be very specific, don’t use any dark patterns, and reassure your users that they made the right decision by choosing your app.
• Take advantage of user information to create user groups and personalize in-app screens. If you ask new users for a lot of information, then serve them generic screens afterward, they won’t trust you. Be wise about collecting data and using it ethically to help users solve their problems.

Lastly, listen to user feedback and check your analytics data often. This approach will help you design a delightful mobile onboarding experience that users trust. All in all, your app success depends on giving your users a great onboarding experience.

Joanna Kaminska

is a content marketing strategist at Smartlook. She is a seasoned writer interested in storytelling, SaaS and new technologies. Her goal is to create content that is easy to understand for all. After work, she enjoys hiking and nature photography. | LinkedIn profile

The post 11 ways to improve the mobile app onboarding process appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

On the other hand, advanced behavior analytics tools like Smartlook (in addition to the capabilities above) help you understand the why behind user actions — why users converted (or didn’t). Do users experience frustration while navigating your website or app? What about the overall user experience?

In both cases, either set of analytics data doesn’t allow you to derive much actionable insight when accessed only for a short time.

In this article, we’ll discuss:

• Data retention, including various data retention periods
• The benefits of extended data retention periods 
• The importance of extended data retention periods (using actual use cases)
• The perfect data retention period

Data retention and data retention periods

In analytics tools, data retention (aka data storage) refers to the period in which analytics data is stored. To put it simply, you only have access to the data for a limited amount of time.

Data retention periods vary across analytics tools. Typically, the minimum data retention period is roughly 30 days, with the maximum being “always/never expires.” Although there isn’t one data storage period that suits all businesses, the longer the data retention timeframe, the better. 

The benefits of extended analytics data retention periods

When analyzing user behavior, whether on your website or mobile app, the more data you have access to, the better you can spot patterns and trends, detect errors, and provide an enhanced user experience. 

In addition, you can segment your data into smaller, more digestible chunks without sacrificing the accuracy of your insight.

Throughout this article, I will be referring to real-life use cases to highlight how having access to historical data can help you better understand user behavior and gain insight into what’s working and what’s not concerning your website or mobile app.

Real use cases that highlight the importance of extended data retention periods

The ideal data retention period depends on your business goals. The following advice will help you understand what period is suitable for your needs. 

Continue reading to understand how access to historical data with a large lookback window can help you optimize the user experience. 

1. More analytics data = accurate insight

To make a meaningful analysis that translates insight into action, you need access to plenty of data. Having a broader timeframe of analytics data will allow you to understand the impact of marketing activities and seasonal promotions. Furthermore, you’ll be able to better assess the release of new app versions, features, and landing pages.

For example, when releasing a new homepage, it is important to compare its performance to its predecessor. 

Heatmaps are a great way to view aggregated data in a single image and see what users click on. With Smartlook, you can generate retroactive heatmaps in minutes using existing historical data rather than the data collected the moment you create a heatmap. 

To put it simply, if your tool’s data storage allows you to retain data for 3 months (as Smartlook does by default for Business and Custom plans), then you can build heatmaps based on your 3-months of existing data. This comes in handy when using heatmaps to visualize changes in user behavior. You can generate heat maps that represent various versions of your homepage monthly or at other points in time.

Take a close look at the screenshots below to visually reference how user behavior changed from February (top right) to March (bottom left). From this month-over-month comparison, we can conclude that running more remarketing campaigns that direct people to a homepage leads to users being more interested in pricing than features. 

2. Accurately measure the impact of your enhancements

One of our clients, StoragePug, relied on analytics data to evaluate one of their newly launched features. 

The StoragePug product team launched a scheduled email report feature as an alternative way to access essential data rather than visiting their Insights platform.

With the help of session recordings, they could zero in on users who experimented with their new feature. Insights from the session recordings helped validate their hypothesis that users prefer to access data via scheduled email reports rather than by visiting the Insights platform itself.

Based on these findings, after determining that their new feature remained stable, the team decided to promote it to their entire user base.

The ability to access analytics data related to scheduled email reports allows their product team to create a funnel to understand the benefits of feature adoption. In this case, having an extended data retention period will enable them to better understand how StoragePug users interact with their new feature. 

Keep in mind that launching a new feature isn’t something you “set and forget.” You need to constantly check your system to ensure everything is working correctly and that your users find value in it. Over a year or two, you may discover that a feature dropped from favor, from being used 2,000 times a month to 400. This is indicative of a serious problem.

In this case, having access to feature-related data dating back 12 months (or even more) can help you evaluate the long-term effect a new release has on the performance of your website or app. 

3. Detect errors and isolate bugs

Launching new features doesn’t always go smoothly. The product team at StoragPug found this out the hard way. They noticed that once they launched their latest feature, their users were unable to place orders. 

Typically, their team would wait for a day or two to collect enough quantitative data before declaring something amiss and launching an investigation. Still, this time, their PM didn’t want to wait. He opened Smartlook, looked over some recent session replays, and quickly noticed that their UI was not rendering correctly. He immediately notified their engineering team, and the problem was quickly fixed.

Another client, Hookle, aims to resolve client issues as quickly as possible. But sometimes, it’s hard for their support team to understand the problem a customer is facing. For instance, discrepancies occur between what a user describes and what actually happened. Smartlook’s session recordings make it easy to solve disparities and locate root problems faster than any other data source. 

Thanks to session recordings, their development team saves more than 10 hours a week locating and reproducing bugs — that boils down to a lot of hours saved each month.

In both actual accounts, you have enough user behavior analytics data at your disposal to detect and take quick action regarding any issues and problems your users may experience. 

Although there isn’t a need for comprehensive historical data in the above case, the ability to go back a month or 2 allows you to pinpoint the exact moment a problem first started. Such was the case with a quality assurance manager in an education-tech startup that used Smartlook to detect bugs under their radar for months.

It took their engineering team a long time to locate a bug affecting the desktop version of their app. They didn’t know that the metrics they were using to track the bug were misleading them.  

In actuality, the bug appeared on mobile devices when users accessed the desktop view in their browser. After using Smartlook to review session replays of the users who experienced the bug, the problem became apparent and they were finally able to correct it.

If you are determined to continually optimize the user experience of your website or app (which you should be), an extended data retention period will allow you to pinpoint precisely when an issue first appeared.

4. Identify trends in user behavior

If you aim to reduce churn, you need to rely on large amounts of data. This will help you spot patterns and identify trends that you can utilize to retain users. 

Retention tables are an excellent feature for spotting trends as they will help you understand how frequently and how long users engage with your website or mobile app after their first visit. 

Retention tables allow you to work with cohorts. In Smartlook, a cohort refers to a segment of users who share the exact date of appearance on your website or app. 

When analyzing a cohort, your data retention plan has a significant impact on identifying a user: a new user or a returning user. If a user returns on day 31, they will be seen as a new visitor if your plan stores data for 30 days. Depending on the type of business, user lifecycle, and the amount of traffic you receive, your data could potentially be skewed, leading you to form a wrong hypothesis and, subsequently, bad decisions. 

In Smartlook, you can define behavioral cohorts based on a specific action (aka event) a user performs on your app or website, like clicking on a sign-in or pay button within a particular time frame. Below is a cohort analysis of our trial users (users registered for a Smartlook trial plan). The ability to customize the date range of our analysis (for example, 3 days vs. 7 days vs. 10 days) allows us to receive precise user behavior data and decide the best course of action and – most importantly – when this should take place to convert them to paid users. 

Suppose you are a Saas company offering your users a monthly subscription. In that case, you can perform a similar analysis for, say, 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days to spot patterns relating to when users tend to become inactive or churn. From here, you can easily take the necessary action to retain them. 

Another way to gain insight is to compare one behavioral cohort, say free vs. trial users, to understand how long they remain active after performing particular actions. However, this is only possible when you have enough data to dive deep into user groups to observe the behavior that leads them to action (or inaction).

5. Spot patterns in user behavior

A great way to identify patterns is by breaking down Events based on properties. In Smartlook, breakdown tables provide a numeric breakdown and visual overview. They can also be paired with custom properties enabling you to tailor them to your specific needs. 

Custom properties allow you to concentrate your website or mobile app metrics into more meaningful data. A combination of properties and events will help you understand how often registered visitors buy from you, how blog visitors consume your content on specific days and times, and how certain user groups (e.g. pro plan users) interact with particular features.

Using my earlier example regarding analyzing the behavior of trial users, I can get a wealth of insight via custom properties, including “Is Setup Completed” and “Has Website Project” (see screenshots below). 

For our users to initiate a user behavior analysis with Smartlook, they will first need to add a piece of code to their website or native mobile app. This refers to the “Is Setup Completed” property. 

Additionally, when users log into Smartlook, they can select the type of project they wish to track — a website or a native mobile app. This information connects to the “Has Website Project” property.

With this information, let’s try to analyze the behavior of our trial users. Above, we see that 1,258 users installed the tracking code, with most users having a website. We also see that 1,120 mobile app users didn’t complete the setup. 

This high number tells us that there could be an issue preventing them from adding the snippet of code to their mobile app. With this information, I can form the following hypothesis: “Mobile app owners have difficulty implementing the code due to the nature of the asset.” 

Suppose I can confirm this hypothesis (by talking to customer support agents, the sales department, etc.) In that case, we could go ahead and create relevant content in our help center and even assign someone to onboard and guide them through the process.

The perfect data retention period

Unfortunately, there isn’t a “one size fits all” answer to this question. The important thing to remember is that the period for which you can store your data limits your ability to make data-driven decisions depending on your business goals. 

You can find an ideal Smartlook plan that suits your needs on our pricing page. You can choose a data storage period starting at 1 month (free plan), up to an unlimited number of months.

Sign up for a free Smartlook plan to better understand the data retention period that works best for you.

Renata Ekine

is the content marketing manager at Smartlook. She is a passionate digital marketer with experience in paid advertising, analytics, SEO, and lead generation. A data-oriented and creative-ideas seeker who loves creating engaging content.

The post Data retention periods and their impact in analyzing user behavior appeared first on Smartlook Blog.

Offer a good mobile user experience (UX). Make the app easy to use, so people feel in control while using it. Design the app in a way that lets people complete a desired action. But, how to verify whether users are happy with the app or not?  

The best way to check whether your app satisfies people or not is to analyze in-app user behavior. But if you don’t want to dive into numbers straightaway, mobile app heatmaps are a good starting point.

These are the topics the article covers:

• What are mobile app heatmaps (heat maps)?
• The 5 benefits of mobile app heatmaps 
• 5 hands-on examples of using heatmap analytics to improve your mobile app
• Advance your analysis: Combine heatmaps with session recordings, events, and funnels
• Complement your mobile app heatmaps with the right analytics tools

Read the whole article or go straight to the most interesting section for you.

What are mobile app heatmaps (heat maps)?

Mobile app heatmaps are also called touch heatmaps. They are visual representations of numerical data in an app. The color overlay shows how each element of your mobile app engages users. Heatmaps in mobile analytics are the first overview of in-app user behavior.

How to read a mobile heatmap? Hot (the most engaging) spots are red and cold (the least engaging) elements are blue. There is also a range of colors between red and blue to show average user engagement. 

Based on the mobile heatmap analytics, you’ll see if people use your app in the way you intended them to. You’ll spot what attracts attention and which areas might need improvement. Also, behavioral analytics tools like Smartlook let you mark a specific area to see the aggregated number of taps.

The 5 benefits of mobile app heatmaps 

Heatmaps for mobile can help you answer questions related to the intuitiveness of your user interface (UI) or the number of button taps. They can also pinpoint areas of your app that might be confusing for users. 

Thanks to mobile app heatmaps, you can:

1. Get a quick visual overview of your app, so you don’t need to dive into numerical data straightaway
2. Check if users engage with call to actions (CTAs) and non-interactive elements
3. Support your hypothesis testing if you plan to redesign your app
4. Come up with ideas to declutter your mobile app user interface (UI)
5. Generate new ideas about ways to improve your conversion/sign-up form 

Let’s see how you can use those benefits in a practical way.

5 hands-on examples of using heatmap analytics to improve your mobile app

We have 5 practical use cases from different industries for you. You’ll see that no matter your industry, heatmaps can always help improve your mobile app.

The way you’ll use mobile app heatmaps will depend on your company’s goals. But you’ll find below use cases adjustable to your specific needs. Read on and discover what problem you can address with heatmap analytics for mobile. 

1. Use mobile app heatmaps for a general overview

If you’ve a lot of numerical data, but you want to get a big picture first, mobile app heatmaps are a good start. Thanks to its visual format, you’ll see at a glance which elements are engaging and which are skipped by users.

Based on the mobile app heat map above, you see that users engage with the top CTA “Sign up for free” button. The “Play” button at the bottom isn’t engaging for users. And the company’s headline attracts average user interest.

Based on the heatmap, you can make improvements to your mobile home screen. You can either:

• Think about making the “Play” button more prominent and placing it higher on the screen
• Remove the “Play” icon and video and implement something else there. For example, a short description of your company’s hosting service. 

At the same time, the high engagement with the “Sign up for free” button is a good thing for you. It means users want to try your services, so you shouldn’t plan any radical changes to your home screen design.

2. Use mobile heatmap analytics to check the engagement with UI elements

Buttons and links help users navigate through your app. But if the call to actions (CTAs) aren’t prominent enough, users can miss them. And if users tap or swipe non-interactive elements, they face unresponsive gestures that may confuse them.

To make sure your app design is explicit, check the engagement of all buttons and non-interactive elements. A mobile app heatmap will show you what attracts users and where they tap. 

Based on the mobile app heatmap above, you see the top banner engages users. Also, they tap the 3 icons below. It seems users want to start the “Basic course” by tapping the banner or icons, but those elements aren’t interactive. At the same time, the button “Next session” at the bottom gets very few taps, meaning users might miss it.

You can improve the confusing UI of your mobile app by:

• Making the top banner and 3 icons interactive. Make it clear for users where they’ll land after they tap on it
• Making the bottom banner similar to the top banner and enlarging the “Next session” button so people see it

Either way, make sure that the UI serves its purpose, so users access the meditation courses they want.

3. Use heatmap mobile analytics to test a hypothesis about UI redesign

Mobile heatmaps are a good starting point when you plan to redesign a part of your app. They will support you in hypothesis testing and verify how users engage with your app.

For example, you develop a banking app where users can:

• Access their account balance
• Slide chart to see money spent over time
• View how much they’ve spent, when, and with what merchant

Let’s say your team had a hypothesis: “Users interact a lot with the chart. It’s an important element of the app, and we need to improve it.” 

The mobile app heatmap above can support you in verifying if the hypothesis is true or not. As you see, the chart is almost untouched by any users while they interact with the bottom part of this screen. 

This can signal to you that the chart doesn’t need changes, and you can use your developers’ time to fix a more serious bug or app issue. But if you’d like to explore the chart topic further, be sure to add more context to the mobile app heatmap. Use other analytics tools to be sure you make decisions backed by data.

4. Use mobile app heatmaps to help with UI decluttering

Mobile screens have limited space, so you’ve to make the UI simple and easy to navigate. Too many fields and too small buttons are prone to erroneous taps. Users might feel lost and unable to complete the desired task fast. 

For example, the app for a flight search engine above has a lot of fields to complete, and the buttons are small. The UI might feel heavy for users. Analyze the heatmap, and you’ll see that the heat spots don’t make sense. This is a clue that something with the UI might be wrong.

With this mobile app heatmap, you can assume that:

• There are unnecessary fields that make it hard for users to complete a search
• The longer the search form, the fewer users will reach the end
• The “Continue” button at the right bottom isn’t prominent enough

Explore the UI issues with other analytics tools to justify the redesign. Remember that significant UI changes affect users. So make sure you back your redesign decisions with hard data.

5. Use heatmap analytics to improve your form conversion rates

Most mobile apps have their unique goals – fill in a form, create a playlist, make a payment, or start a new course. No matter if you’re a for- or non-profit organization, you’ve mobile app-specific goals, too. 

For example, you’re a non-profit organization that supports dogs. With a heatmap for mobile apps, you can check how your users engage with the money donation form.

Above, you see that a lot of users engage with money tiles, and name fields. But the engagement decreases when users have to type an email, phone, and set a payment method. This might indicate that users are reluctant to give you their personal data.

To increase conversions of your form, experiment with your form redesigns and:

• Make the form shorter and remove the email or phone number field
• Justify why you need personal data from your users
• Make some fields optional

Before you implement changes, be sure to explore data by watching session recordings of how users navigate this form. Using more analytics tools will give you a true overview of what’s the real issue.

Advance your analysis: Combine mobile app heatmaps with session recordings, events, and funnels

Despite mobile heatmaps being great for the start of your analytics journey, they’re limited.

The 3 heatmap limitations are:

• The insights tend to be obvious and sometimes not that actionable
• They only show aggregate trends about a single screen of your mobile app
• Many heat mapping tools can’t handle dynamic content

To move past those limitations, combine heatmaps with session recordings, events, and funnels. See how to use heatmaps with those analytics tools below. 

Pair mobile app heatmaps with session recordings

Mobile heatmaps are way more powerful when combined with real-time session recordings. 

You can pair them in 2 easy ways:

1. Go to a public demo or create a free account.

Press the “Heatmaps” section and choose a heatmap gallery. If one mobile heatmap screen gets your interest, watch session recordings of it. To do so, press the “Play” icon under that particular heatmap. You’ll see recordings of the users who interacted with that particular screen.

2. Go to the “Recordings” section and watch all recordings or filter them by duration, location, technology, and more.

Filtered session replays let you see user actions that interest you the most. For example, Android users reported that they can’t submit an order form. To get actionable insights filter recordings by Android OS, specific duration, and screen with the form. You’ll learn what’s wrong in minutes.

Pair mobile heatmaps with events

Similarly to recordings, you can pair a mobile app heatmap with events in 2 ways. 

1. Create an event based on a mobile app heatmap.

If a screen in a heatmap gallery catches your attention, make an event out of it. Press the “Create an event” button under the specific heatmap, and you’ll create a new event, which is a visit to that specific screen. 

2. Go to “Events” and press the orange “Create a new event” button at the top.

Choose if you want to create a new event based on a visited screen, tapped element, or another more advanced option.

For example, you want to compare 2 events:

• Plan_purchase_begin – users who started the purchase
• Plan_purchase_success – users who completed the purchase

Compare them by pressing Ctrl/Command and choose those events from the action sidebar.

Below, you see that not all the users who started the plan purchase finished this process. To explore this case, press the “Play” button to watch session recordings of those who performed each event.

Pair mobile heatmaps with funnels

Create event-based funnels that are a powerful addition to your mobile app heatmaps. Heatmaps show you only a single app screen. Funnels give you more context, so you see what users did before getting to this screen and what happened next. 

For example, create a funnel based on 2 events in a sequence: Login_request_begin and Login_success. Next, check how many people completed it.

As you see, not all users log in successfully. Out of 45 users who tapped the “Login” button, 14 users didn’t reach the post-login area. You wouldn’t get this information if you only looked at the mobile app heatmap.

To explore what took those 14 users away from getting to the post-login area, press the “Play” button at the bottom of the funnel.

Now you understand how powerful mobile app heatmaps can be when combined with recordings, events, and funnels. Thanks to advanced analytics, you’ll see all in-app user behavior patterns. If you want to learn more about how to improve your mobile app UX, read our article.

Complement your mobile heatmaps with the right app analytics tools 

Mobile app heatmaps give you a good overview of your mobile app. But be sure to take them with a pinch of salt because, often, they lack a wider context. Before you make any decision, dive deeper into the data and see different perspectives.

Also, collect user feedback and combine it with analytics data. This will help you optimize your mobile app usability and UX. By constantly optimizing your app, you’ll stand out in the competitive mobile landscape. 

Check Smartlook’s pricing plans and sign up for a 30-day trial.

Joanna Kaminska

is a content marketing strategist at Smartlook. She is a seasoned writer interested in storytelling, SaaS and new technologies. Her goal is to create content that is easy to understand for all. After work, she enjoys hiking and nature photography. | LinkedIn profile

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