Analytics and product design

Analytics is an important part of two critical phases of the design process: discovery and measurement.

By reviewing analytics at the beginning of a project, we can discover areas of the product our design can impact goals.

Measurement plays a role in design because decisions we make every day can be subjective. Additionally, user testing with smaller sets of users is often not sufficient to surface issues. By setting goals and reviewing how our designs perform against those goals, we can remove some of this uncertainty and spot problems early.

A practical example of using discovery and measurement to improve an OKR:

Improving retention is a key OKR. The search product team included a video in a recent homepage update. While reviewing the events correlated with high retention, it is discovered that users who view the video are more likely to retain, but that the overall views of the video (and thus retained users) are small.

From this discovery, a designer could place greater importance on the video or include it in various segments of the onboarding flow to elicit more views and thus improve retention.