Problem to solve

Problem — is a vitally dangerous, huge waste of time and money while building and supporting uninstrumented digital products full of interactive elements, options and features (because most of them are not being used by users and cost a lot to development teams).

If you're not instrumenting your stuff, you don't deserve any investment let me to say that. You're in a big trouble, if you not. You're flying blind...

Now we've got a product that it takes forever to do anything with: it's hard to learn, it's hard to use, it's hard to maintain. Just making a small change takes forever because of so many options and configuration changes we need to test with any possible combination...

Below is a 60 seconds YouTube clip with Jared Spool explaining the nature of eXperience rot at Mind The Product Conference (San Francisco, 2015):

Software Development companies spend so much time and money on designing, building, testing, delivering, supporting their apps and services and yet if they don't instrument them and don't know: (1) which elements, options and features, (2) when, (3) how much and (4) by whom of their users, customers and players are being used.

Why to keep anything on the interface (and spend resources on it's support) if no one actually using it? Why not to replace barely used element with much more wanted one insted to increase satisfaction from UX/CX/PX? Why not to talk about your findings to your customers and not to ask them: why do you use this feature so much or why don't you use it at all?

I'll tell you why: because teams don't have that data because they didn't instrument their apps.

But imagine how things could change if they instrumented their apps and got that data in their hands?

Example

On a simple web app UI screen below there are at least 16 unique interactive web-elements (links, buttons, checkboxes, input fields, etc.):

Do we know: (1) who of users uses (2) which of those web elements, (3) when they used them and (4) how much, (5) which web elements are not being used at all — so we could get rid of them? We don't know. We assume that "evrything is used".

But what if we had such web elements usage analytics for that page:

and could see that:

• "New Ticket" button is the most used UI element;
• "Select item" checkbox is the least used UI element;
• This data is among all categories of users: Visitor, Free trial and Paid;
• This data if only for the last 5 minutes;

and we could filter by:

• User ID(s) — to see what any particular user does;
• User Group ID(s) — to see what particular group of users (for example: Paid, Managers) does;
• Element — to see who and when and how much used an element;
• Page / Screen — to analyse and optimize every single page;
• Time — to limit all of above by time frame.

We could have the data and we could start making data-driven UX/CX/PX decisions for our Digital Products. We could filter what our "Paid" users use and optimize UX of the app for them. We could filter for "Free trial" users and optimize UX for them. And so on...