Contextual

Blog

  • When your analytics doesn’t track click events

    If you’ve been tasked with user activation, user retention or getting new users to complete a core action in your App, one of the frustrating things is discovering you:

    1. don’t have an event recorded because you analytics needs you to explicitly add some code to track it 🙁
    2. can’t connect that event with a specific user or relate it to another event for that user.

    “So close but so far” – this can be very frustrating because, to get this done needs developer work to be done. The turn-around time puts you in another sprint and more roadmap negotiation.

    The Analytics Gap

    We’ve experienced this so many times with customers we were helping with working on the retention or engagement projects! The conversation would go like this:

    Us: Do you have analytics?
Customer: Yes, we use Google Analytics [or Mixpanel or Amplitude or Segment].
Us: Are you tracking this click?
Customer: I don't think so.

    Game over. Everyone would get crest-fallen and all the big hopes of being able to run an agile project with multiple growth/retention experiments collapses into roadmaps delays. Some of these analytics products are great but often people have implemented them to just track aggregated analytics and trends vs. people analytics and put them aside.

    Mixpanel also charges differently for this kind of people tracking and its only available in GA’s super expensive product.

    Its profoundly frustrating for us and the debilitating to the customer’s retention and growth plans – roadmap delays can be a straight-jacket.

    straight-jacket

    Supertags

    In Contextual we decided to take this problem away and track events without demanding the Product Manager or Developer think or worry about it.

    By default, Contextual tracks screens and clicks. The applications are:

    1. 30-day retrospective review of particular button clicks. (purchase buttons, profile uploads etc).

     

    2. Target an audience that haven’t visited a screen or clicked a button in X days. This is a combination of filters that come from iOS users who’ve clicked (or not clicked) a specific button as a filter for a targeted engagement experiment.

     

    3. Run tooltips, tours or inApp help (or push notification campaign) to measure the uplift on an inApp behavior.

     

    Iteration & Experiments

    You can’t improve what you don’t measure and so the goal was to make measurement implicit. If your roadmap and App release cycle is the bottleneck in running growth experiments, its not possible to learn fast enough what your users respond positively to.

    Contextual doesn’t try to be an analytics product and we don’t recommend you use us to replace it, but getting the data to do your growth jobs is critical and we think we’ve helped a lot there.

  • iPad, Tablets coming or going in workplace Apps?

    iPad and Tablet apps are going strong in Retail POS, Retail Shop Assistants, Field Service Applications, Healthcare and design niches.

    There are many great examples doing well, just to name a few:

    Retail https://tulip.com/
    https://myagi.com/
    Field/Workforce https://happy.co/ (Inspections)
    https://www.handshake.com/ (Sales Orders)
    https://safetyculture.com/ (Safety/Quality Audits)
    https://www.deputy.com/ (Rostering and Tasks)
    Health vitalpac (now systemc) (Clinical Patient Care)
    POS many, many including
    http://kounta.com/
    http://vend.com/

    One compelling reason for success is once you put an app on a customer device you get lockin. Its psychologically more compelling than a mere web SaaS App.

    SOE vs BYOD

    Tablet Apps are being deployed because of the benefits of:

    1. the aforementioned “lockin”
    2. Better UI and input models
    3. UI speed
    4. Offline capabilities
    5. Shared viewing experience with the customer

    Problem is….this has practical BYOD vs SOE challenges:

    1. This requires a hardware investment and a commitment to administration of company property (SOE).
    2. Employees would prefer to just carry one device…their own device (BYOD).
    3. Practically, for many other use-cases, if it won’t fit in your pocket, then it won’t be used.

    The result is: most of these Apps have to support both Portrait Phones and Landscape tablets.

    Fat Apps and Feature Onboarding

    Tablet Apps have a form-factor that allows them the “feature richness” of Desktop Web Apps.

    More features are possible on the form-factor but don’t really work on the phone – things get cramped.  Luckily responsive design methods, tools are widespread for developers – particularly for Native Apps but also for React Native.

    When an App is in Tablet Landscape mode, you can show more features and let the user know they are available. This is a good reason to to do “Progressive Onboarding” to introduce feature when a user is ready.

    Enterprise Apps

    One of the largest under-reported growth areas in Apps is the enterprise “intranet”. This ancient term was popular in the ’90s and early 2000s because companies were rolling out more solutions around their own business processes that were accessed via browser rather than proprietary Windows Apps or Terminal sessions.

    History now repeats and splits into two types:

    • Internal Apps (written by or for the company)
    • SaaS Apps (written by a vendor that solves a broad business application – e.g Salesforce, Jira, Workday etc)

    Both classes also split again into three types:

    • Web Only
    • Web and Mobile (like the examples at the top)
    • Mobile Only

    A whole class of development agencies have emerged that primarily monetize the “Mobile Only” model – as consumer Mobile Apps proved notoriously difficult to make money on and retain users, developers earned their place providing business solutions for enterprise Apps.

    Existing web development shops have mostly tried to deliver mobile-web and hybrid apps, that is getting a lot better as React Native gives a better Javascript coded experience than Cordovea/Phonegap.

    My expectation is that we will see a lot more Tablet enabled applications with React Native under the hood, Contextual is well-progressed to support that. I’m not sure what is happening with Xamarin, its still active but a lot of developers must be thinking that React Native is going to look better on their CV and companies will see more support options from the market. Visual Studio (Microsoft’s development environment/IDE) has some support for React Native and a community supplied bundle here.

    Product Managers should keep tabs on React Native support and do some small test projects to see where the gaps are. One of the gaps is broad SDK support for tools already being used in their native deployments.

    Phablet vs Tablet

    However, in 2017, developers and customers tell me they saw a drop as Phone screens (iPhone 8+, iPhone X, Nexus 6 ‘phablet’ etc) got larger and higher resolution.

    Consumers love tablets but they already have one at home where they use it for lean-back use-cases like Video and News.

    Tablet sales dropped 8.5% in the first quarter of 2017 compared to last year. Apple’s iPad dropped 13.5% in sales compared to 2016.

    Because of the SOE vs BYOD tension in the workplace, many employers don’t have a compelling need to hand out iPads in the workplace because the Phablets are doing a pretty-good-job for most intranet applications and tablet form-factor retreats to the use-cases showcased in the first paragraph.

    I’ve also heard Microsoft Surface increasing in popularity in the enterprise as many companies undergo the generational change from Windows desktops/laptops to the Surface hybrid experience.

    So I expect that:

    1. iPads and  tablets in the workplace will be niche applications and
    2. ReactNative will be a dominant emerging enterprise development platform. This becomes even more true if the Windows trend gets traction – and why wouldn’t it?

    The elephant in the room is that Apple is merging iOS and OS/X and the iPad Mini didn’t get refreshed in 2017. You’d have to expect that Apple wants to counter Microsoft Surface with something unified for all enterprise Applications. Something like an iPad Pro with detachable keyboard.

  • Does anyone own your App’s onboarding?

    Mel from Canva posted this week about their journey to a $1B valuation. It’s a long but faniscating read that overrides any myth about being an overnight success.

    One mind-bending takeaway from the post is this quote:

    “In order for Canva to take off — we had to get every person who came into our product to have a great experience in a couple of minutes.”

    OK, nothing mind-blowing about that on the surface, but

    “…So we spent months perfecting the onboarding experience paying particular attention to users’ emotional journey.”

    The whole post is on Medium, check it out here.

  • Open Source Onboarding Carousel

    Using Open Source components is a great way to get beautiful code elements into your App. We extended the Contextual platform to allow the popular “Paper Onboarding” carousel – it’s attractive and had a decent amount of flexibility.

    The cool thing about Paper Onboarding is that it’s material design slider. Here is how Ramotion (its authors) describe it:

    Paper Onboarding is a simple and easy to use onboarding slider for your app. bottom.

    By allowing this to be added in our point-and-click dashboard where you can preview on the web and on your devices.

    We made one initial thing even easier:

    You just need to provide content for each slider page – a main icon, text, and small round icon for the bottom

    We made this so you didn’t need any extra developer code.

    Ramotion's Paper Onboarding Example

    We had some additional goals that we thought would be super awesome for our customers

    1. Be able to use images that are hosted remotely
    2. Allow changes to the carousel without needing to do an Appstore release.
    3. Target different carousels at different users
    4. Have carousels in different parts of an App (not just the home screen).

    Here is how it looks in the Contextual Dashboard.

     

    On Android, its automatically built in – nice.

    On iOS, to add the open source Paper Onboarding to Contextual and get all the above benefits you just need to add:

    platform :ios, '8.0'
    use_frameworks!
    pod "pointzi"
    pod "paper-onboarding-pointzi"
    end

    So its, super-easy to get started and then have all the dynamic benefits.

    To learn more about the open-source checkout the awesome work from the folks at Ramotion on Github.

    https://github.com/Ramotion/paper-onboarding

    and

    https://github.com/Ramotion/paper-onboarding-android

  • Medium’s Tips for teaching new user habits

    When Medium replaced “Recommend” with “Claps” great confusion ensued. Here’s how Medium attempts to train us to understand the new feature.

    Whats the deal? Medium wanted to reward great stories more than good stories. But we’ve all been trained to Heart, Upvote, Like, and with a simple tap “Un-Like” – but that was too restricted for Medium’s goal.

    Medium's inApp tooltip to educate users on clapping more for more points

    Medium’s inApp tooltip to educate users on clapping more for more points is a simple cue to get users over the confusion factor about “claps”.

    In Contextual this is a very quick process – here is how its done.

    1. Add the SDK
    2. Screenshot your page
    3. Pick the page and select Tip tool, pick a style
    4. point at the placement of your tip. Add your own content and style. (colors, fonts, round corners etc)
    5. Target at an audience, Save. Set it live – EASY!

    If you’ve got a feature that is not getting uplift:

    1. consider how user’s might be a little confused about it.
    2. check with users to confirm.
    3. your tip should describe/or imply the action. Medium hijacks the long-press gesture and explains it: “Press and how to…”
    4. your tip should describe the value to the user. In Medium’s case: “show your support.”. Its crisp, clear.

    Its easy to under-estimate the power of simple tips to get uplift. Results vary and Contextual allows you to measure the uplift based on your stated “Success Metric” (Goal).