I have a hard time explaining this idea, so please bear with me.
As a founder and hacker, I want to know how my users use my web and mobile apps. But I haven't found an intuitive and dead-simple way to do it.
Mixpanel and google analytic are way more complex than what I have in mind.
What I would like to have is more similar to Facebook, but instead of looking at my friends activity, I'd like to see what's happening with my users.
I like the idea of a feed, or more specifically an exploratory object graph.
I'd like to open my phone and see a feed of what's happening, similar to a cat | tail but where I could click on a verb (Joined the website) or a noun (10 users) and it would direct me to that specific page.
So, for instance, it would tell me:
15 users joined <My service>.
Bob And Alice got a new highscore of 2500.
Marie played level 3 10 times.
I could change the Zoom ratio.. I.e. see the feed of the last minute or the last year, and it would sum up the actions to one statement.. "1541 users upgrated to premium", etc.
Basically, I don't want to look at graphes or stats or parse log files, I just want a beautiful and simple feed of what's happening. And when I see something that I'm curious about, I can just click and learn more. Just a dead simple way to understand how my users use my apps.
I faced the same problem while I was building a SaaS product. It became difficult to understand what users were doing on the app and then easily reach out to them with help/feedback emails. We realized that there are other people building SaaS products who are facing the same problems. So, we have pivoted to building an analytics + messaging tool for SaaS products.
These are the problems that we are working on:
- quickly check out the feed of any user's actions on your product
- click on a action and see the recent / most-frequent users for that action
- segment users by their 'journey', e.g. case: how many users have integrated their Google Analytics account but have never seen the generated reports? (user 'hasdone' and 'hasnotdone' queries)
- auto segmenting users based on their engagement/frequency/plan (by assigning a karma score to each user)
- lifecycle emails / notifications : send emails to your users based on where they got stuck while using the product etc
This is the philosophy behind http://spinnakr.com. It is still a work in progress, as getting the thresholds right and making sure events are the important ones across a whole range of different sites is on ongoing effort, but I totally agree this is the way analytics should work. Right now we're just focused on traditional web analytcics but you should see user focused data soon as well.
I like it. It is like Mixpanel, the implementation on the page would be similar, but without data aggregation.
There are open-source Mixpanel-like backends out there, some will not come with a frontend full of charts, you should just get one of these and build a frontend full of feeds.
I believe KISSmetrics is what you may be interested in. You send in events, and then are able to see who has done which event, create graphs, and do more powerful analysis.
Seconded. I've used KISSmetrics for this exact use case. There's a bit of groundwork required to setup 'events' but once that's done they will track every user and you can see how the user ended up using your app.
As a founder and hacker, I want to know how my users use my web and mobile apps. But I haven't found an intuitive and dead-simple way to do it.
Mixpanel and google analytic are way more complex than what I have in mind.
What I would like to have is more similar to Facebook, but instead of looking at my friends activity, I'd like to see what's happening with my users.
I like the idea of a feed, or more specifically an exploratory object graph.
I'd like to open my phone and see a feed of what's happening, similar to a cat | tail but where I could click on a verb (Joined the website) or a noun (10 users) and it would direct me to that specific page.
So, for instance, it would tell me:
15 users joined <My service>. Bob And Alice got a new highscore of 2500. Marie played level 3 10 times.
I could change the Zoom ratio.. I.e. see the feed of the last minute or the last year, and it would sum up the actions to one statement.. "1541 users upgrated to premium", etc.
Basically, I don't want to look at graphes or stats or parse log files, I just want a beautiful and simple feed of what's happening. And when I see something that I'm curious about, I can just click and learn more. Just a dead simple way to understand how my users use my apps.