SwBratcher's Posts

Look At How Users Use Your App

If you take the time to look closely at how users are leveraging features of your app, you will inevitably find that they are creative and efficient in ways you may not have anticipated. In fact, the more simple and elegant your application is set up, the more ways users likely have to be creative in establishing their own work flows. Learn from them.

Watch their creativity and let it be a guide to rolling out new, helpful functionality. Here is an example where Guestlist not only looked in on their customer usage habits, but they also uncovered a significant financial leak that they were able to fix.

When we started charging on July 12, we grandfathered all published events that our beta users had previously created but not completed. However, we also have this great copy feature to help customers who run repeat events. I think you can see where this is going. Copied events were inheriting the grandfather status and hence were not being charged commission!

As it turns out, a lot more customers were using the event copy feature than I had thought. In fact, this little oversight cost us about 20% of our first month’s revenue! Well, better learning this now than twelve months from now.

I only noticed this because I was investing time in understanding how people were actually using our app. Before this I had incorrectly assumed that not many people were copying events and as a result did not have that in mind when implementing our payment system.

So do yourself a favor and get to know your application usage data a little better. Not only will it help you build a better product, you might just learn something that surprises you.

via guestlistapp.com

 

• 26 August 2010
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