How to even further improve the user experience with Fiori analytics

Do you like to know how fit you are? When, where, for how long you exercised and how you’ve done compared to the last several times? Many people are wearing fitness trackers or installed a running app on their phone. This smart piece of technology is constantly measuring and analyzing, and gives us insights and an overview.

Analytics

During our work we use a variety of apps and applications on a daily basis. Some of those applications are standard software, other ones could be custom-developed software within the enterprise. Also, new apps might be in development or changes are being implemented into existing apps. In any case, the user experience of these apps is important. During application development it is important to ask UX-related question such as: How satisfied are users with the app? How does the application accelerate daily tasks? Can they actually perform tasks by using this app? Or are they still avoiding using it, and trying to find alternative ways to do the same? Do they get stuck in certain areas? What is the effect and usage of our new feature implemented in the app? From a user experience perspective it would be very interesting to collect all these types of information.

Important data insights

What we would need to measure is analytics data from our apps. This analytic data and possibilities with these analytics would ideally consist of:

• Measuring a metric per page
  for example: the number of visitors, unique visitors, marketing channel results, time on page, exit rates, error messages, geographical data, screen resolutions, used devices, and many more.
• Click paths
  Zooming in on the navigation paths of users to find anomalies.
• Segmenting/filtering
  User segments can be created to compare behavior over time, technology, demographics, and geographics.
• Easy report building & sharing
  Drag & drop functionality to create reports. Scheduled sharing of reports included.
• A/B testing
  Different versions of applications can be displayed to end-users to test which version performs best.

All of these metrics give great insights to continuously improve and to support optimal User Efficiency, User Effectiveness, User Satisfaction, and User Adoption of applications.

A glimpse of how an analytics report or dashboard would be created and used:

Different ways to gather useful feedback

All solutions use a simple script that needs to be embedded into your web application or mobile app. This allows the app to collect various data elements of any usage of the app.

This implicit feedback is most of the time not available for your different business applications. We need to add this. There are different solutions to gather feedback. Some apps have built-in capabilities for analytics. But the easiest way is an enterprise solution so you are be able to combine reports from different apps, build comprehensive reports, and have the simplicity of use.

A solution for example is Adobe Analytics, but also Hotjar or Google Analytics are well-known cloud solutions to collect this implicit feedback. Obviously, they do take care of GDPR and are able to track usage but not personal data: for example, a user department could be known but not the first and last name of an individual. Please note, if you do have access to the code of the application and are able to insert a few extra lines of scripting in here, analytics is possible with these enterprise solutions. If you don’t have access to the code and cannot add any additional coding, you’re ‘stuck’ with the vendor-solution of the app. Which could be either a vendor-specific solution, none, or it has an option to configure a default enterprise solution like Adobe Analytics or Google analytics.

Analytics and Fiori

Analytic tooling are definitely well suitable for combining them within an enterprise landscape, with one or more Fiori Launchpads and the different apps on it. Adobe Analytics for example can be initialized at the start of the launchpad for a user by developing a simple launchpad plugin to do so. This will initiate the connection with Adobe and can be used to track the clicks on the various tiles on the launchpad. Added in a report per launchpad group, per user role or, per department. Further collecting analytics inside an app, could be using enterprise templates you’ve developed, collecting some basic metrics at the start of an application and when navigating through the app. But usually, there are specific scenarios a product owner is highly interested in. These scenarios require further custom lines of coding in several assets of the Fiori application. Since the connection with Adobe is already initialized (and remember; the Fiori launchpad and its apps all run in one module) we can leverage this, sending extra data to Adobe and feed data into a so-called report suite. In this case, since it’s gathering from different apps and from the launchpad itself, we would use a virtual report suite. Which would be great to our needs.

Also, for standard SAP Fiori apps, we would be able to add this. We not need to change the standard, but by implementing a small extension of the app, we leverage an extension point. This extension point connects to the analytics report which was already initialized earlier, when the launchpad started.

Conclusion

Collecting analytics data can be helpful as well for enterprise applications as for the SAP Fiori launchpad. In the next blog, we will share more details on explicit feedback and we will discuss a few new components, for instance, a tag manager. Stay tuned!