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How MixPanel can change your app users' life

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Marion Descamps
Marketing Officer

People buy/use your service or product based on their experience with it. But how do you measure their experience and what can you learn from their behaviour? Let me share some insights.

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You are excited today : after several months of brainstorming, never-ending discussions, a bit of sleep deprivation and a lot of sweat, you are ready to launch the brand new version of your mobile app. Everything is coded, developed and tested, and... wait... Did you pay attention to all UX-related aspects? 

Indeed, people who use your product or service will base their decision on the experience they had. "User Experience" : I bet you heard about that notion a thousand times, but what does that mean exactly and, more importantly, how do you make sure your app is 100% UX-proof?

User experience VS Usability

Lots of factors can influence user experience (users' feelings at the moment, previous experiences, human interaction, ...) but let's make it easier and summarize it into 7 major questions, being :

Is your product ...

  1. Useful?
  2. Findable?
  3. Credible?
  4. Desirable?
  5. Accessible?
  6. Valuable?
  7. Usable?

In this article, I would like to focus on the "usability" factor. Let me start by saying there are many interesting tools out there that you can use for your user experience tests. It’s my job to find out how we can make (y)our app(s) more user-friendly, so let me tell about my first project at EASI for ‘usability’ in SmartSales with Mixpanel.

MixPanel, what is this?

MixPanel is an online analytics platform allowing you to track and analyze events performed by users on your app or website. MixPanel offers 4 main analysis themes: technical perfomances, users' acquisition, behaviour and retention. At the moment, we mainly use MixPanel for one of our products : SmartSales.

Technical performances

One of the things you really need to get right are your technical performances. A Google study (2018) shows that 53% of users leave a web page if processing time exceeds 3 seconds. That can explain why according to an Apteligent study, 43% of IOS apps have an average loading time inferior to two seconds.

So if you want your app to succeed, you will (at least) follow these 3 rules :

  1. Your product will have a processing time lower than 2 seconds
  2. The crash rate of your product will not exceed 0,25%.
  3. You will have a good tool to monitor your average processing time, your crash rate and in the case of a crash, the reasons for a crash (linked to app version, device model, OS version, etc. )...

This will be critical to determine whether your app will be used or not. We monitor these things with Mixpanel, so let’s have a look at our product: SmartSales.

Yay. :) 

Users' acquisition

To see how you're doing with users' acquisition, it’s very important to have a clear view on where (why?) users drop off in your flow. I’m sure the obtained results will raise a lot of questions you will need to find an answer to, but this will allows you to make progress. 

Let me give you an example. If we take a look at the funnels we created in Mixpanel for SmartSales, and more precisely at the Free Trial campaign (launched one month ago), we can see that only 18% of users who opened the onboarding email actually enjoyed the free trial until now.

 

These are not exactly perfect results but it is certainly valuable input. It allows us to put ourselves into question and to come up with innovative solutions : What is blocking Free Trial applicants? Is there something wrong? How can we make the customer journey easier and more intuitive?

This constant self-(re)assessment is extremely important for continuous improvement. 

Users' behaviour

This is maybe the most important question for some of you : How are users using my app/website? Is it clear, intuitive? Are the most valuable features properly understood?

The amount of information you can get and analyze about users' behaviour via MixPanel is crazy. You can indeed track single distinct events. In our case, for example, "How many SmartSalers have been placing orders via the Catalog Module in the last 30 days?", but we can also go deeper and get a view on end-to-end users paths.

In the case of SmartSales, we were not sure whether a screen was well understood or not (the "filter screen"). We didn't know if the "Save" button was well positioned.  

MixPanel gave us the answer:

This graph shows us that in the last 30 days, 233 users changed their filter data. Out of these 233 people, 60% of them forgot to save the filters and came back to change the filter data once again. This could affect the global user experience. This input allowed us to challenge this screen and come up with new design, that will be available in later versions (stay tuned).

This is a perfect example of how your tests can make the difference for your clients/users.

Users' retention

Once you released an app/website that is technically on top, user-friendly and that you managed to acquire tons of users, your job is not over : you have to keep it up and running and to make sure your users don't go away. According to MixPanel, "97% of users churn silently".

sexy leonardo dicaprio GIF

Good news is :  MixPanel offers you the possibility to monitor retention. 

You can generate 3 types of retention reports : 

  • Recurring, that indicates how your most loyal users use your app/website
  • First time, to show you how new users use your app/website
  • Addiction, to provide you information about how frequently your app/website is used 

 

For the SmartSales case, results show us that Module client is used more than 5 times/week for 15% of our users. This means that this module seems useful and easy to use, but also that we have to be attentive and ensure this module stays at its best to get more and more SmartSales addicts.

Usability, a never-ending story

It goes without saying that usability analysis is never completely done. Because the way users use and perceive your app/website will constantly change, as well as their needs, wishes, your objectives, the market offer and countless more other UX-influencing factors. Your app/website should be monitored, (re)tested and (re)challenged on a regular basis to make sure you're still up-to-date. 

You can (and you should) also get inspired by the feedback you get from your Sales representatives, the comments on App Store/Google Play Store, by analyzing how are your competitors doing, by setting up user tests, ... . There is no lack of solutions being proposed to make your user experience perfect so do not miss out on these opportunities. 

Good luck!

 

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