How to Further Improve the User Experience with Fiori Analytics
Would you like to know how fit you are? When, where, and for how long you exercised, and how you’ve performed compared to your last few workouts? Many people wear fitness trackers or have installed a running app on their phone. This smart piece of technology constantly measures and analyzes your activity, providing you with insights and an overview.
Analytics
In our work, we use a variety of apps and applications on a daily basis. Some of these applications are off-the-shelf software, while others may be custom-developed software within the company. Additionally, new apps may be in development, or changes may be being implemented in existing apps. In any case, the user experience of these apps is important. During application development, it’s important to ask UX-related questions such as: How satisfied are users with the app? How does the application streamline daily tasks? Can users actually perform tasks using this app? Or are they still avoiding it and trying to find alternative ways to accomplish the same tasks? Do they get stuck in certain areas? What is the impact and usage of our new feature implemented in the app? From a user experience perspective, it would be very interesting to gather all this information.
Key Data Insights
What we would need to measure is analytics data from our apps. Ideally, this analytics data and the possibilities it offers would include:
- Measuring a metric per page
, for example: the number of visitors, unique visitors, marketing channel results, time on page, exit rates, error messages, geographic data, screen resolutions, devices used, and many more. - Click paths
: Zooming in on users’ navigation paths to identify anomalies. - Segmentation/Filtering
User segments can be created to compare behavior over time, by technology, demographics, and geography. - Easy report creation and sharing
. Drag-and-drop functionality for creating reports. Scheduled report sharing included. - A/B testing
Different versions of applications can be shown to end users to determine which version performs best.
All of these metrics provide valuable insights for continuous improvement and for supporting 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 in your web application or mobile app. This allows the app to collect various data elements related to any use of the app.
Most of the time, this implicit feedback is not available for your various business applications. We need to add it. There are various ways to gather feedback. Some apps have built-in analytics capabilities. But the easiest way is to use an enterprise solution, which allows you to combine reports from different apps, create comprehensive reports, and enjoy ease of use.
One example is Adobe Analytics, but Hotjar and Google Analytics are also well-known cloud-based solutions for collecting this implicit feedback. Obviously, they comply with GDPR and are able to track usage but not personal data: for example, a user’s department might be identified, but not an individual’s first and last name. Please note that if you do have access to the application’s code and are able to insert a few extra lines of scripting, analytics is possible with these enterprise solutions. If you do not have access to the code and cannot add any additional code, you are “stuck” with the app’s vendor-provided solution. This could be a vendor-specific solution, no analytics at all, or an option to configure a default enterprise solution such as Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics.
Analytics and Fiori
Analytics tools are definitely well-suited for integration within an enterprise environment, alongside one or more Fiori Launchpads and the various apps they contain. Adobe Analytics, for example, can be launched when a user opens the launchpad by developing a simple launchpad plugin to do so. This establishes the connection with Adobe and can be used to track clicks on the various tiles on the launchpad. The data can be aggregated in a report by launchpad group, by user role, or by department. To collect additional analytics within an app, you could use enterprise templates you’ve developed to gather basic metrics when the application starts and as users navigate through it. However, there are usually specific scenarios that a product owner is particularly interested in. These scenarios require additional custom code to be implemented in various components of the Fiori application. Since the connection with Adobe is already established (and remember: the Fiori launchpad and its apps all run within a single module), we can leverage this by sending additional data to Adobe and feeding it into a so-called report suite. In this case, since data is being collected from different apps and from the launchpad itself, we would use a virtual report suite, which would be ideal for our needs.
Also, for standard SAP Fiori apps, we would be able to add this. We don’t need to change the standard; instead, by implementing a small extension to the app, we leverage an extension point. This extension point connects to the analytics report that was already initialized earlier, when the launchpad started.
Conclusion
Collecting analytics data can be helpful for both enterprise applications and the SAP Fiori launchpad. In the next blog post, we’ll share more details about explicit feedback and discuss a few new components, such as a tag manager. Stay tuned!
