After the launch: UX analysis of the application | Crysberry
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After the launch: UX analysis of the application

Management, Marketing

28 October 2019

Launching an app is only the start step in the project’s life cycle. Tracking users’ engagement and interaction with your app are what helps to drive your business to success. So, learn users’ interaction with the application. This must become a part of the post-launch stage analysis.

We have already started a long talk about a project’s support stage at Behind the launch veil: what is after the application release blog post. Today we are going to cover the importance of Usage and Engagement research after the launch.

Usage & Engagement Metrics

This category of metrics helps to get a reply to the question “How users interact with my app?”. It helps to understand how people engage with an app and what makes them continue to use it. If you search on the Internet, you can find lots of Usage & Engagement metrics. However, we would like to pay attention to the most useful and basic ones:

  • Downloads and Installs — Separately these numbers won’t tell you much. But this is the foundation for any analysis. If you want to evaluate the efficiency of your marketing strategy. If this metric shows that a few users download your app, then the issue may be in the upper stages of your marketing funnel. For example, this can be caused by an improper listing of your app in the store or by incorrect messaging of your app install campaign.
  • App Acquisition — You need to know where all the downloads came from. And, this is also one of the metrics, which assists in the effectiveness evaluation of your marketing campaigns and channels. This is the basis to make the most of your marketing spend.
  • App Abandonment — This is one of the metrics to find out what’s wrong with your app’s onboarding process and what’s obstructing your users from signing up. It also allows to check a stage or on which page your users are leaving your app.
  • Active Users — Find out how engaging and useful your app is to users. As there can be users, who are just downloading it and not using it. But what is important for your business is how many users are actually using the app. Active users can be further classified into Daily Active Users (DAU) and Monthly Active Users (MAU).
  • Average Daily Sessions Per Daily Active User (DAU) — This metric shows how many times on average users open and engage with your app in one day. It’s an essential one for social media apps or games.
  • Stickiness — This ratio tracks how often users come back to your app. This metric can be easily calculated by dividing DAU by MAU and multiplying by 100. If the DAU and MAU values are close, it means your app has a high stickiness.
  • Average Session Length — Find out how engaged your users are. The metric allows getting more details on how much time a typical user spends interacting with your app in a single session
  • Screen Flow — The metric highlights the problem areas in your app, such as the screen users interact with before they exit your app. Use this info to improve the app and re-engage lost users.
  • Retention Rate — Retaining app users over time is one of the biggest challenges for business. It refers to the number of users who return to your app after their first visit. This metric is also useful while implementing new features or releasing a new update. It will show if the updates still keep users engaged or drive them away.
  • Churn Rate — This is the opposite of the retention rate. It allows to track how many users stopped using your app after a specific period. This rate becomes significant when the leaving users are your high-value users, then your low-value users. Additionally, losing new users also means lost opportunities.

UX Analysis of a launched application

A UX designer’s part of work is a neverending story.

UX analysis of the application is important not only in the pre-development stage, which was covered in Development and design interaction in the IT product lifecycle post. It’s also important to make further users’ research.

After an app’s release, a UX designer can find out more details about your target users and their interaction with your product. There are lots of opportunities to gather feedback, collect data on usage, refine, release and start the cycle all over again. This the best way to identify the issues people are having with a specific UI, and reveals difficult-to-complete tasks and confusing language.

You can use a set of analytic tools and sources to improve an app’s ease of use and overall user flow. From eye-tracking to click-tracking and heatmaps (which show clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior) to UI element tagging which tracks the digital footprint of every user across mobile and web devices.

For example, you can’t even imagine the importance of heatmaps. They allow tracking the areas that gain the most interactions from users. It’s a great way to locate areas of your app, which are getting the best traction and which areas are not so popular with your users. But you can ask how to use heatmaps further? They can be easily used for devising strategies. The information you get allows you to define, which features should be made more attractive to users to gain more engagement. A great app with a heatmap feature to highlight areas of user interaction is Appsee.

heatmaps
Heatmaps for application analysis. Source

Conclusion

A result of successful UX analysis is an actionable list of tweaks and enhancements. The implementation of this list will show measurable improvement to the product’s user experience. It will also affect higher user engagement and retention. And, this means more benefits for your business as well.

l.sidorenko