The circular economy aims to help the environment by reducing waste, mainly by keeping goods and services in circulation for as long as possible. Unlike the traditional linear economy, in which things are produced, consumed, and then discarded, a circular economy ensures that resources are shared, repaired, reused, and recycled, over and over.

What does this have to do with your digital platform? In a nutshell: everything.

From tackling climate change to creating more resilient markets, the circular economy is a systems-level solution for global environmental and economic issues. By building digital platforms for the circular economy, your business will be better prepared for whatever the future brings.

The Circular Economy isn’t Coming. It’s Here.

With environmental challenges growing day by day, businesses all over the world are going circular. Here are a few examples:

One area where nearly every business could adopt a circular model is the creation and use of digital platforms. The process of building websites and apps, along with their use over time, consumes precious resources (both people and energy). That’s why Oomph joined 1% For the Planet earlier this year. Our membership reflects our commitment to do more collective good — and to hold ourselves accountable for our collective impact on the environment.

But, we’re not just donating profits to environmental causes. We’re helping companies build sustainable digital platforms for the circular economy.

Curious about your platform’s environmental impact? Enter your URL into this tool to get an estimate of your digital platform’s carbon footprint.

Changing Your Platform From Linear to Circular

If protecting the environment and promoting sustainability is a priority for your business, it’s time to change the way you build and operate your websites and apps. Here’s what switching to a platform for the circular economy could look like.

From a linear mindset…

When building new sites or apps, many companies fail to focus on longevity or performance. Within just a few years, their platforms become obsolete, either as a result of business changes or a desire to keep up with rapidly evolving technologies.

So, every few years, they have to start all over again — with all the associated resource costs of building a new platform and migrating content from the old one.

Platforms that aren’t built with performance in mind tend to waste a ton of energy (and money) in their daily operation. As these platforms grow in complexity and slow down in performance, one unfortunate solution is to just increase computing power. That means you need new hardware to power the computing cycles, which leads to more e-waste, more mining for metals and more pollution from manufacturing, and more electricity to power the entire supply chain.

Enter the circular economy.

…to a circular approach.

Building a platform for the circular economy is about reducing harmful impacts and wasteful resource use, and increasing the longevity of systems and components. There are three main areas you can address:

1. Design out waste and pollution from the start.

At Oomph, we begin every project with a thorough and thoughtful discovery process that gets to the heart of what we’re building, and why. By identifying what your business truly needs in a platform — today and potentially tomorrow — you’ll minimize the need to rebuild again later.

It’s also crucial to build efficiencies into your backend code. Clean, efficient code makes things load faster and run more quickly, with fewer energy cycles required per output.

Look for existing frameworks, tools, and third-party services that provide the functions you need and will continue to stay in service for years or decades to come. And, instead of building a monolith platform that has to be upgraded every few years or requires massive computing power, consider switching to a more nimble and efficient microservices architecture.

2. Keep products and services in use.

Regular maintenance and timely patching is key to prolonging the life of your platform. So is proactively looking for performance issues. Be sure to regularly test and assess your platform’s speed and efficiency, so you can address problems early on.

While we’re advocating for using products and services for as long as possible, if your platform is built on microservices, don’t be afraid to replace an existing service with a new one. Just make sure the new service provides a benefit that outweighs the resource costs of implementing it.

3. Aim to regenerate natural systems.

The term “regenerate” describes a process that mimics the cycles of nature by restoring or renewing sources of energy and materials. It might seem like the natural world is far removed from your in-house tech, but there are a number of ways that your IT choices impact the environment.

For starters, you can factor sustainability into your decisions around vendors and equipment. Look for digital hosting companies and data centers that are green or LEED-certified. Power your hardware with renewable energy sources. Ultimately, the goal is to consider not just how to reduce your platform’s impact on the environment, but how you can create a net-positive effect by doing better with less.

Get Ready for the Future

We’ve long seen that the ways in which businesses and societies use resources can transform local and global communities. And we know that environmental quality is inextricably linked to human wellbeing and prosperity. The circular economy, then, provides a way to improve our future readiness.

Companies that invest in sustainability generally experience better resilience, improved operational performance, and longer-lasting growth. They’re also better suited to meet the new business landscape, as governments incentivize sustainable activities, customers prefer sustainable products, and employees demand sustainable leadership.

Interested in exploring how you can join the new circular economy with your digital platforms? We’d love to help you explore your options, just contact us.

In our previous post we broadly discussed the mindset of composable business. While “composable” can be a long term company-wide strategy for the future, companies shouldn’t overlook smaller-scale opportunities that exist at every level to introduce more flexibility, longevity, and reduce costs of technology investments.

For maximum ROI, think big, then start small

Many organizations are daunted by the concept of shifting a legacy application or monolith to a microservices architecture. This is exacerbated when an application is nearing end of life.

Don’t discount the fact that a move to a microservices architecture can be done progressively over time, unlike the replatform of a monolith which is a huge investment in both time and money that may not be realized for years until the new application is ready to deploy.

A progressive approach allows organizations to:

Prioritizing the approach by aligning technical architecture with business objectives

As with any application development initiative, aligning business objectives with technology decisions is essential. Unlike replatforming a monolith, however, prioritizing and planning the order of development and deployments is crucial to the success of the initiative.

Start with clearly defining your application with a requirements and feature matrix. Then evaluate each using three lenses to see priorities begin to emerge:

  1. With a current state lens, evaluate each item. Is it broken? Is it costly to maintain? Is it leveraged by multiple business units or external applications?
  2. Then with a future state lens, evaluate each item. Could it be significantly improved? Could it be leveraged by other business units? Could it be leveraged outside the organization (partners, etc…)? Could it be leveraged in other applications, devices, or locations?
  3. Lastly, evaluate the emerging priority items with a cost and effort lense. What is the level of effort to develop the feature as a service? What is the likely duration of the effort?

Key considerations when planning a progressive approach

Planning is critical to any successful application development initiative, and architecting a microservices based architecture is no different. Be sure to consider the following key items as part of your planning exercises:

  1. Remember that rearchitecting a monolith feature as a service can open the door to new opportunities and new ways of thinking. It is helpful to ask “If this feature was a stand alone service, we could __
  2. Be careful of designing services that are too big in scope. Work diligently to break down the application into the smallest possible parts, even if it is later determined that some should be grouped together
  3. Keep security front of mind. Where a monolith may have allowed for a straightforward security management policy with everything under one roof, a services architecture provides the opportunity for a more customized security policy, and the need to define how separate services are allowed to communicate with each other and the outside world

In summary

A microservices architecture is an approach that can help organizations move faster, be more flexible and agile, and reduce costs on development and maintenance of software applications. By taking a progressive approach when architecting a monolith application, businesses can move quickly, reduce risk, improve quality, and reduce costs.

If you’re interested in introducing composability to your organization, we’d love to help! Contact us today to talk about your options.

Digital customer experience (DCX) is fast becoming a key factor in how consumers choose whom to do business with. Every digital interaction contributes to an overall feeling about your brand — which means digital touchpoints like apps and chatbots can play a big part in what customers think of your company.

What story do you want those interactions to tell? What kind of experiences do you want people to share with others?

This article covers five ways to assess and improve your digital customer experience so you can attract, delight, and retain your target customers.

But First – What IS Digital Customer Experience?

Customer experience, or CX, is the perception that customers form based on all of their interactions, in-person or online, with your brand. If CX is about carefully and consistently meeting your customers’ needs, Digital Customer Experience is the online expression of those efforts.

Digital customer experience is the part of your CX journey that involves digital interactions via your website, mobile app, social media accounts, digital kiosks, etc. Wherever your customers are engaging with your people, products, or services through the internet, it’s a digital experience.

DCX is their perception of those moments.

Brands with a great DCX provide a personalized and consistent online experience throughout the customer journey. Whether someone is considering becoming a client, placing an order, or searching for information, every digital interaction has to be easy and enjoyable.

5 Ways to Improve Your Digital Customer Experience

Technology is a wonderful tool for improving the customer experience, whether mining data for customer insights or leveraging AI for personalization. But technology alone can’t deliver an exceptional digital customer experience. Your DCX strategy must include a human component — one that focuses on customer care through empathy and authenticity. Here’s how to ensure your digital customer experience lives up to your users’ expectations.

Know your target audience

To deliver the kind of digital experience your customers will love, you have to know what they want. Who’s buying your product, and why? When they visit your website or app, what are they hoping to accomplish?

Delighting your customers requires knowing their goals, understanding their pain points, and providing interactions that meet their specific needs. The upshot? 68% of customers will spend more money with a brand that understands and treats them like an individual.

Here are three crucial steps:

  1. Use qualitative and quantitative analyses to learn about your audience. The more you understand their preferences and behaviors, the better you can create an experience that meets their needs.
  2. Apply a user-centered design process, which relies on deeply understanding your audience to craft usable, accessible digital interfaces.
  3. Incorporate personalization techniques to adapt the digital experience for individual users. More than anything else, this will help make the customer journey smooth and enjoyable.

Adopt an omnichannel mindset

Customers expect seamless interactions from brands throughout their journey, whether through digital or non-digital channels. In fact, brands with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, in comparison to 33% of companies with weak strategies.

Knowing that today’s consumers often jump from channel to channel as they browse, buy, or get in touch, DCX leaders embrace an omnichannel strategy. Note that this is different from a multichannel approach, where customers access multiple channels in separate interactions. An omnichannel approach integrates all digital touchpoints to create a seamless, personalized experience.

Multichannel: Some or all channels available but no data syncing between chgannels causing a disconnected customer experience. Omnichannel: All channels available with data syncing between channels providing a seamless customer experience.
Image sourced from Zingle.com

Here are a few key ways to create personalized experiences that resonate across all your digital channels:

Get help from experts

Expert assessments can remove the guesswork around optimizing your digital customer experience. A digital CX audit, for instance, will show you what’s working and what could be better, as well as providing actionable insights and a prioritized roadmap.

CX specialists will look beyond the basic digital experience (clunky design, system bugs, etc…) to assess whether your digital channels are effectively serving your customers’ needs. A professional audit can help determine things like:

Make customer feedback easy

Most companies know that customer feedback is crucial for improving the customer experience. But many fall short in providing easy, effective options for people to reach them.

Offering multiple, easy-to-use communication options across your digital channels is one more way to delight your customers. Help people engage with you via the medium of their choice, so they can communicate through the interface they’re most comfortable with.

That could be a chat function or contact form on your website, or the commenting and messaging features on your social profiles. Or, maybe it’s good old-fashioned phone calls and emails. Whatever the avenue, make it easy to find and intuitive to use.

One more thing: when someone does reach out, respond quickly. The faster a problem is resolved, the better the experience.

Plan for the post-launch reality

You might design and launch an amazing new website, app, or service that delights your customers and sends revenue through the roof. But, without a long-term plan to keep it effective and relevant, your digital CX will likely diminish over time.

To maintain the quality of customer experience across all your digital touchpoints, apply a measurement framework based on the principles above:

Remember, too, that new technological trends are going to keep emerging and influencing consumer expectations. Be prepared to evolve what digital CX looks like for your business, especially if it means extending your digital services to new platforms or devices.

Putting the “C” in Digital CX

Technology has made so many things possible for today’s consumers that, ultimately, the power is in their hands. As digital capabilities continue to evolve, people may become increasingly selective about which brands earn their trust and business — and companies will need to make the digital customer experience more beneficial for both sides.

As you can see from the steps above, the key is putting your customers’ needs above all else.

If you’re not sure where to start, you’re not alone! We’ve helped dozens of clients dive into customer research, omnichannel strategies, and strategic planning for digital platforms. Reaching out to a digital CX expert (like Oomph) can help you do things right the first time, saving you time and money and, most importantly, building a foundation to get results.

Excited about crafting an exceptional DCX? So are we. Check out our DCX audit service to learn how we can help set you up for success.

Google Analytics 4, or GA4, is Google’s fourth iteration of its website analytics platform. This is no ordinary upgrade! Leveraging the power of big data and machine learning, GA4 offers entirely new ways to collect and analyze user activity data across websites and apps.

While GA4 provides access to robust new tools and features for data-driven decision making, it also sheds many of the metrics and reports we’re used to in Google Analytics 3 (a.k.a. Universal Analytics, or UA).

Google will be sunsetting UA properties in July 2023. Here’s what you need to know about GA4’s capabilities — and why you should start the transition sooner rather than later.


Not sure which platform you currently have (UA vs. GA4)? 

Take a look at this cheat sheet.


Key Benefits of Google Analytics 4

We’re living in a more privacy-centric world, and GA4 is Google’s answer to stricter data laws and browser regulations. GA4 is designed to function without third-party cookies, using machine learning and statistical modeling instead to collect data.

This change comes with a range of benefits, from more actionable user insights to enhanced reporting capabilities.

Broader Insights

Unlike UA, GA4 has the ability to track users across devices and platforms, combining all the data into a single property with a unified set of metrics and dimensions. This gives you a more complete picture of how users interact with your brand, whether they’re on your website, your mobile app, or both.

Another major advantage is that you can more effectively track conversions — particularly for users that might visit on their mobile, come back on desktop, and then download/purchase/register through your app. Because GA4 attributes actions to users across devices and platforms, you can see the entire journey a user takes from start to finish.

Predictive Metrics

Using machine learning, GA4 offers powerful new metrics to predict user actions and includes new data buckets like Acquisition, Engagement, Monetization, and Retention. These predictive metrics can help you better understand your audience and make more informed decisions, so you can do things like tailoring your website experience for different users or creating targeted marketing campaigns.

Customized Reporting

UA offers a set of standard reports with some customization options. By contrast, GA4 enables and encourages users to create custom reports with only the data they need.

With greater freedom to create reports, you can declutter your dashboard and make decisions more quickly by drilling down to the data that’s most important to you. You can even create a separate “Audiences” report with custom user definitions, further tailoring the data to support your business needs.

Key Features of Google Analytics 4

With comprehensive user tracking, predictive metrics, customizable reports, and more, GA4 promises to be much more powerful than any previous version of Google Analytics. Here are the core capabilities driving all of those benefits.

Event-Based Tracking

One of the biggest changes in GA4 is how user data is collected. In UA, data is collected via tags placed on each page of a website. Users are tracked via sessions, or set periods that begin and end when a user enters and exits a site.

Instead of relying on pageviews and sessions, GA4 tracks user interactions, known as “events,” as users complete them. This focus on individual user interactions provides a more complete picture of each user’s journey across your website or app.

This event-based model also makes it possible to track interactions that don’t happen on web pages but can be influenced by digital marketing, such as in-store visits or in-app purchases. And, it allows Google to more accurately deduplicate users.

Cross-Platform Data Consolidation

In UA, “properties” are where Analytics data is collected for individual websites and apps. You can then use views to see and report on the data in various ways.

GA4 uses individual data streams to combine data from different platforms into a single property. You can add multiple data streams into a property and create different views based on certain criteria.

For example, you could create a stream for all web traffic, a stream for all app traffic, or a stream for traffic from both that covers a given geographic area. By placing the same tracking code across different digital platforms, you can consolidate data to track users who move between the streams.

Advanced Analytics

Maybe the most exciting feature for data geeks like us, GA4’s Explorations Hub offers a suite of advanced data and analytical techniques that go well beyond standard reports. The Explore section lets you create custom analyses to uncover deeper insights about your website and app performance, with filters and segments so you can drill down even further.

GA4 also integrates with BigQuery, Google’s cloud-based data warehouse, where you can run complex analyses of very large datasets. Bonus: BigQuery offers near-unlimited data storage.

Machine Learning

In an increasingly cookie-less world, Google is attempting to balance privacy limitations with usable insights. Using machine learning, GA4 fills in data gaps and provides predictive insights about user behavior and trends.

Machine learning combines artificial intelligence (AI) and computer science to fill in gaps and make predictions. It essentially looks for patterns of activity that can be fed into an algorithm to understand and predict how users behave online.

As an example, GA4’s AI-powered insights can help identify user actions that are most likely to lead to conversions. Using metrics like purchase probability, churn probability, and revenue prediction, you can customize marketing campaigns or target specific audiences to achieve your conversion goals.

Why You Should Switch to GA4 ASAP

You’ll be able to collect and use platform data in your existing UA property until July 1, 2023. After that, you’ll be able to access historical data for only six months. That’s why we strongly recommend you implement GA4 as soon as possible.

Transitioning now will allow you to:

Feed The Machine

Many of GA4’s core features rely on machine learning, and in order for machine learning to be effective, the algorithm needs time to learn. The sooner you set up and start collecting data in GA4, the more time your models will have to analyze and learn, shaping the insights you’ll need down the road.

Train Your People

Those using GA4 will need time to learn the new terminology, user interface, and capabilities. Switching early gives your team time to get used to the new platform and work out new processes and reporting while you still have UA to fall back on.

Get Year-Over-Year Data

GA4 is forward-facing only, which means your new GA4 property will only collect data from the time of creation; it won’t import past data from UA. Once UA sunsets next year, you’ll be relying solely on GA4 for year-over-year data.

Why does that matter? Here at Oomph, when we launch client projects, we use Google Analytics data to analyze digital platform performance so we can develop the best possible user experience. By examining user flows, page visits, common search terms, engagement metrics, and more, we can very quickly get a picture of where a platform has strengths and weak points. And we need your historical data to do it.

Ready to switch to Google Analytics 4? It’s a relatively simple process. Just follow the steps Google provides, whether you want to switch from UA to GA4 or set up a GA4 property alongside an existing UA property.

If you’re not feeling confident about handling the transition alone, we’d love to help. Get in touch with us today.

Many organizations today, large and small, have a digital asset problem. Companies are amassing huge libraries of images, videos, audio recordings, documents, and other files — while relying on shared folders and email to move them around the organization. As asset libraries explode, digital asset management (DAM) is crucial for keeping things accessible and up to date, so teams can spend more time getting work done and less time hunting for files.

First Things First: DAM isn’t Dropbox

Some folks still equate DAM with basic digital storage solutions, like Dropbox or Google Drive. While those are great for simple sharing needs, they’re essentially just file cabinets in the cloud.

DAM technology is purpose-built to optimize the way you store, maintain, and distribute digital assets. A DAM platform not only streamlines day-to-day content work; it also systematizes the processes and guidelines that govern content quality and use.

Today’s DAMs have sophisticated functionality that offers a host of benefits, including:

Is it time for your business to invest in a DAM? Let’s see if you recognize the pain points below:

The 5 Signs You Need a DAM

There are some things you can’t afford not to invest in if they significantly impact your team’s creativity and productivity and your business’s bottom line. Here are some of the most common signs it’s time to invest in a DAM:

It takes more than a few seconds to find what you need.

As your digital asset library grows, it’s harder to keep sifting through it all to find things — especially if you’re deciphering other people’s folder systems. If you don’t know the exact name of an asset or the folder it’s in, you’re often looking for a needle in a haystack.

Using a DAM, you can tag assets with identifying attributes (titles, keywords, etc.) and then quickly search the entire database for the ones that meet your criteria. DAMs also offer AI- and machine-learning–based tagging, which automatically adds tags based on the content of an image or document. Voila! A searchable database with less manual labor.

You have multiple versions of documents — in multiple places.

Many of our clients, including universities, healthcare systems, libraries, and nonprofits, have large collections of policy documents. These files often live on public websites, intranets, and elsewhere, with the intent that staff can pull them up as needed.

Problem is, if there’s a policy change, you need to be sure that anywhere a document is accessed, it’s the most current version. And you can’t just delete old files on a website, because any previous links to them will go up in smoke.

DAMs are excellent at managing document updates and variations, making it easy to find and replace old versions. They can also perform in-place file swaps without breaking the connections to the pieces of content that refer to a particular file.

You’re still managing assets by email.

With multiple team members or departments relying on the same pool of digital assets for a variety of use cases, some poor souls will spend hours every day answering email requests, managing edits, and transferring files. The more assets and channels you’re dealing with, the more unwieldy this gets.

DAMs facilitate collaboration by providing a single, centralized platform where team members can assign tasks, track changes, and configure permissions and approval processes. As a result, content creators know they’re using the most up-to-date, fully approved assets.

Your website doubles as a dump bin.

If your website is the source of assets for your entire organization, it can be a roadblock for other departments that need to use those assets in other places. They need to know how to find assets, download copies, and obtain sizes or formats that differ from the web-based versions… and there may or may not be a web team to assist.

What’s more, some web hosting providers offer limited storage space. If you have a large and growing digital library, you’ll hit those limits in no time.

A DAM provides a high-capacity, centralized location where staff can easily access current, approved digital assets in various sizes and formats.

You’re duplicating assets you already have.

How many times have you had different teams purchase assets like stock photography and audio tracks, when they could have shared the files instead? Or, maybe your storage folders are overrun with duplicates. Instead of relying on teams to communicate whenever they create or use an asset, you could simplify things with a DAM.

Storing and tagging all your assets, in various sizes and formats, in a DAM enables your teams to:

When Should You Implement a DAM?

You can implement a DAM whether you have an existing website or you’re building a new one. DAM technology easily complements platform builds or redesigns, helping to make websites and intranets even more powerful. Organizing all of your assets in a DAM before launching a web project also makes it easier to migrate them to your new platform and helps ensure that nothing gets lost.

Plus, we’ve seen companies cling to old websites when too many departments are still using assets that are hosted on the site. Moving your assets out of your website and into a DAM frees you up to move on.

If you’re curious about your options for a DAM platform, there are a number of solutions on the market. Our partner Acquia offers an excellent DAM platform with an impressive range of functions for organizing, accessing, publishing, and repurposing assets, automating manual processes, and monitoring content metrics.

Other candidates to consider include Adobe Experience Manager AssetsBynderPictureParkCantoCloudinaryBrandfolder, and MediaValet.

Given the number of DAMs on the market, choosing the right solution is a process. We’re happy to share our experience in DAM use and implementation, to help you find the best one for your needs. Just get in touch with any questions you have.

Since the early days of Oomph, we’ve worked with clients to create a variety of online educational experiences. Platforms to practice Buddhism. Platforms for cardiologists to be better informed. For teachers to be better prepared for the classroom. For high-tech product users to become more proficient.

Here’s the process we’ve seen work:

  1. Define the purpose of the platform.
  2. Identify students’ needs and expectations.
  3. Choose the learning tools that best achieve your objectives.

…and here’s what we’ve seen too many folks do: skip the purpose and dive right into posting videos on something like Teachable. While that might work for some business models, it’s not effective for most others.

By understanding what is at stake for the learner, you can understand how to support their learning

As online learning continues to grow, we need a different way of thinking about how people learn via online systems. By considering what’s at stake in a given situation — in other words, how important is it that students learn the material — we can identify four primary categories of learning purpose. Once you know which category your platform falls into, you can design it with the tools and features that best achieve your learning objectives.

Let’s explore those four purpose categories and how they shape the online learning experience.

1. Entertainment (or “No Stakes”) Learning

Entertainment learning is driven purely by curiosity. Students might see this type of learning as truly fun, maybe even as an alternative to other forms of entertainment (like watching a movie).

In this case, there are no stakes — no real consequences for the student who gives up mid-way through a class. As for the educator, the only risks are related to losing viewers and market share. An example of this type of learning platform is Masterclass, which has mastered the art of marketing entertainment learning. Masterclass doesn’t really care if you learn the material, as long as you’re enjoying the experience.

Most entertainment learning is delivered through polished content designed to sell as many courses to as many people as possible. Neither the platform nor the student are truly invested in the learning.

What’s the purpose?

As an example, let’s say Sam the Student is intrigued by sailing. They may never actually do it, but they wants to know what it involves. In this case, Sam is simply consuming the content.

What’s needed:

Successful entertainment learning platforms focus more on user acquisition and user retention versus how well users absorb and apply the content. Such platforms benefit from:

  1. Good content production quality
  2. Celebrity and well-known “expert” instructors
  3. Effective marketing (like compelling trailers)

2. Student Stakes Learning

Like entertainment learning, student stakes learning is also student-driven. The difference is that there are real consequences, which means the student has a purpose beyond simply consuming the content. But the consequences apply to the student, not the educator. Think about studying for a driver’s license test — if you don’t pass, you don’t get your license. DMV isn’t responsible for helping you learn; they’ll just re-administer the test.

What’s the purpose?

To continue the boating example: by this time, Sam has become a frequent sailor and wants to learn how to forecast off-shore weather without needing a computer. In this case, retaining the content is essential, so they can put it to use.

What’s needed:

Student stakes learning needs to incorporate content retention techniques. It also helps to hold students accountable for their learning. Content should be shorter and focus on comprehension. Student stakes learning platforms benefit from:

3. Educator Stakes Learning

In this kind of learning, there are consequences for the student, but the stakes are higher for the educator. Think of higher education at colleges and universities, where a school’s reputation is at stake. This could also apply to a management training program, which can impact overall company performance, or to a business trying to educate users on a topic in the hopes they’ll buy a related product.

Comprehension and completion are key in educator stakes learning, which is why it often includes a certificate of completion or an accreditation of some kind, so the educator can verify that the student actually learned the material.

What’s the purpose?

Sam has now decided to become a commercial boat captain, and their potential employer wants them to pass a certification course. Here, Sam’s demonstrating knowledge of the material is highly important to the educator.

What’s needed:

Because educator stakes learning hinges on comprehension, it’s important to focus on helping students both retain course material and sufficiently demonstrate their knowledge of it. These kinds of platforms often include:

4. Broad Stakes Learning

Broad stakes learning impacts the student, the educator and often society in general, and knowledge of the material must be refreshed on a regular basis. Consider a warehouse that trains its staff on the proper use of heavy equipment. For an employee, their job is likely on the line; for the company, the safety of their workforce and their reputation is at stake; and for all the company’s employees, there are issues of personal safety and trust.

What’s the purpose?

Sam now aspires to become a ferry boat captain, which means they’ll be responsible for passengers, vehicles, and cargo. The local authority requires that they pass a certification each year to demonstrate current knowledge of the material, to ensure they’ll be a safe and competent captain.

What’s needed:

Ongoing retention of content is critical here, along with staying current on new information. So, broad stakes learning platforms generally use bite-sized material with frequent reviews, quizzes, and feedback. Students learn a topic, review the topic, review it again, and take a quiz; if they missed any questions, they’ll likely get additional help and get tested again. Later on, there may be additional communications and usually a refresher course or two.

Learning platforms that support broad stakes learning often use the tools from educator stakes learning, with some additions:


A Different Way of Thinking

As you can see, there is no one-size-fits-all digital learning experience. That’s why a medical association administering doctor certifications needs a very different platform from, say, an HR department offering manager training. Different industries leverage different kinds of learning, which require different educational tools.

If you’re planning to embark on an online learning initiative, be sure to align your efforts around your core purpose. Without a clear roadmap, well, we’ve seen what happens. Remember how online learning was thrust into the spotlight during the pandemic? One thing became painfully clear: not every online learning platform actually worked.

That’s because many of those platforms were thrown together without regard for basic learning principles. Above all, online learning platforms must be built to serve the purpose behind the educational experience. Like we said earlier: define your purpose, identify your students’ needs, and choose the right tools for the job.

Looking to develop an online learning experience for your organization? We’d love to help you develop the best possible tools. Contact us today to learn more.

When companies merge, successfully combining digital assets like websites, intranets, apps, and other platforms takes more than just squishing things together. Poorly merged digital properties can diminish brand equity, squander years of SEO value, and even drive away customers or employees — ultimately tanking the value the merger was supposed to create.

The challenge is that you’re bringing together two end-user communities with different experiences and expectations. And it’s easy to assume the bigger or faster-growing company has the better digital platform, even when there’s a lot you could learn from the smaller company’s practices.

That’s why we recommend a collaborative, UX-centered approach to combining digital properties, to ensure you’re leveraging the best of both worlds. In this article, we’ll share a sample of UX analyses that can help set up a new combined platform for success.

First, let’s talk about leveraging the right mindset.

A Different Approach

Typically, when combining digital platforms, companies tend to take a top-down approach, meaning there’s a hierarchy of decision-making based on which platform is believed to be better. But the calculus can change a lot when those decisions are made from the end users’ point of view instead.

From a practical standpoint, these companies are usually trying to create efficiencies and add new competencies while carefully messaging the benefits of the merger for their customers. They focus on things like branding, SEO, and consolidating social media — all of which are important, and none of which truly shapes the platform user’s experience.

To be fair, before the merger, both companies were likely focused on trying to create the best possible user experience for their customers. Now that they’re joining forces, each brings a unique set of learnings and techniques to the table. Which begs the question: what if your new partner handles some aspects of UX better than you?

Working collaboratively through in-depth Acquisition Analysis gives you an opportunity to extract the best from all digital properties, as either company’s platforms may have features, functionality, or content that does a better job of meeting business goals. How do you know which elements will be more successful? By auditing both platforms with tools like the ones we’ll talk about next.


When merging, don’t assume the bigger company should swallow the smaller and all its digital assets. There might be many things that the smaller company is doing better.


Conducting UX Audits

To preserve SEO value and cull the best-performing content for the new platform, many companies conduct content and SEO audits, often using free or paid tools. These usually involve flagging duplicate content, comparing performance metrics, and using R.O.T. (redundant/outdated/trivial) analyses.

What many organizations miss, however, is the opportunity to conduct UX and customer audits while directly comparing digital platforms. These can provide invaluable insights about the mental models and behaviors of users.

At a minimum, we recommend comparing both platforms using Nielsen Norman Group’s 10 usability heuristics. Setting the standard for user interface design for almost three decades, these guidelines give you a great baseline for identifying which parts of each platform are the most user-friendly. You can also compare heatmaps and scrollmaps to assess which platform does a better job of engaging users in ways that matter to your business goals.

Here are some other examples of UX analyses we conduct for clients when merging digital platforms:

Five second test

With existing customers or representatives of your target audience, ask users to view a page for five seconds and then answer a few questions about it. You’re looking for gut feelings here, as first impressions can tell you a lot about a page’s effectiveness.

Questions might include:

This test should be done for multiple pages on a website, not just the homepage. It’s especially valuable for product or service pages, where you can assess whether specific features are easily visible and accessible.

Customer interview comparison

For this assessment, enlist 5 to 10 customers for each business. Have the customers of Company A use Company B’s platform and vice versa, asking them to explain the value each company offers. You can also ask users what’s missing when they use the other company’s website. What’s different and better (or worse) than before? The answers can help you determine which brand and functional elements are essential to the user experience for each platform.

This test can also provide insights about the impact of elements you may not have previously considered, like the quality of photography or the order in which information is presented. These elements can set expectations and affect how people use the platform, all of which contributes to building users’ trust.

For a more in-depth analysis of user engagement and preferences, try gathering a combination of quantitative and qualitative data.

Site map analysis

Given that the merging companies are likely in the same or similar industries, there will probably be overlap between the site maps for each company’s website. But there will also be elements that are unique to each site. To successfully blend the information architecture of both properties, you’ll need to determine which elements work best for your target audience.

In addition to comparing analytics for the different websites to see which elements are most effective, here are a few other research methods we recommend:

Cohort analysis

Looking at other websites in your industry, examine their site structures and the language they use (e.g. “Find a doctor” vs. “Find a provider”). This reflects visitors’ expectations of what information they’ll get and where they can find it. You can also identify areas where you should deviate from the norm, including language that’s more authentic and unique to your brand.

Card sort

Card sorting helps you understand how to structure content in a way that makes sense to your users, so they can find what they’re looking for. Participants group labeled notecards according to criteria they would naturally use. For example, if you have a car rental site, you could ask users to organize different vehicle models into groups that make sense to them. While your company might use terms like “family car” or “executive sedan,” your customers might have completely different perceptions.

Tree testing

Tree testing helps you evaluate a proposed site structure by asking users to find items based solely on the menu structure and terminology. Using an online interface (Treejack is a popular one) that displays only navigation links without layout or design, users are asked to complete a series of 10–15 tasks. This can show you how easy it is for site visitors to find and use information. This test is often used after card sorting sessions to confirm that the findings from the card sorting exercise are correct.

Use Information, Not Intuition

Like we said, just because a larger company acquires a smaller one doesn’t mean its digital properties have nothing to learn from the other’s. Better practices could exist in either place, and it would be a shame to lose any unique value the smaller company’s platform might offer.

With so many robust tools available for UX analysis, there’s no reason not to gather the crucial data that will help you decide which features of each platform will best achieve your business goals. When combining digital properties, the “1 + 1 = 3” trope only works if you truly glean the best of both worlds.

Need help laying the groundwork for merging separate digital platforms? Our strategic UX experts can craft a set of research exercises to help your team make the best possible decisions. Contact us today to learn more.

You’ve just rolled out an important new feature on your platform, and it’s time to answer the all-important question: is it getting the results you want? If you’ve set up an analytics tool, you can look at performance indicators like registrations, logins, downloads, or shares. But that kind of quantitative data will only get you so far.

Let’s say that new feature isn’t having the impact you’d hoped for — maybe registrations are lacking or engagement is low. You have a problem you need to solve, but you don’t have any information about why it’s happening. And you may have an entirely different underlying problem you need to address.

Where can you find actionable information? Enter qualitative research.

By answering the why behind what’s happening, qualitative data provides context for problems that surface through quantitative analysis. It helps you uncover the root of the problem you have and can also reveal problems you didn’t even know existed.

In this article, we’ll cover how to use both types of research to inform your platform design.

First, the Numbers: Quantitative Research

When you’re evaluating the performance of a digital platform, a good place to start is the cold, hard numbers. Quantitative research provides numerical data that can indicate, at a glance, whether your platform is meeting your business objectives. It can also show the scale of any problems and help prioritize which ones to address.

One major benefit of quantitative data is benchmarking. Tracking your data over time reveals whether UI changes are producing the results you want — and can help you measure the ROI of your efforts. You can also compare your data to an industry benchmark or a competitor’s stats as a barometer for your own performance.

Here are some examples of quantitative research methods:

Web analytics

This data describes what people are doing with your platform: where they go, what they click on, what features they use. It’s good for finding problems and monitoring the performance of content or features.

A/B testing

Here, you’re using experiments to compare different UI designs. By creating two live versions of the same element, like a call-to-action button, you can see which one performs best. Learn more in our article on A/B testing.

Surveys and questionnaires

Surveys let you gather information about your users’ preferences, attitudes, and behaviors, and they can produce a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. For easy-to-capture numerical data, use techniques like ratings and multiple-choice questions.

Usability testing

By measuring user experience with hard data, you can test how easy (or not) a platform feature is to use. Let’s say you just released a reminder function, and you want to know if users can create a reminder in two minutes or less. You can run a test where you ask participants to set a reminder, and measure what percentage are able to complete the task within two minutes.

Now that you’ve got a sense of what users are doing on your platform, let’s look at ways to learn why and how they’re doing it.

Now for the Words: Qualitative Research

Qualitative research can help you investigate why something is happening, identify ways to fix problems, and even determine whether you should phase out a feature or redesign it. Using detailed, contextual descriptions of users’ experiences, you can dive deeper into exactly which elements are working well and which are problematic.


Quantitative and qualitative research both provide useful data, but they’re more powerful when used together.


Unlike with quantitative research, you don’t need a ton of data points to get usable info. For example, if you see five customers in a row walk into the corner of a display in a retail store’s entrance, you can safely assume that most visitors will do the same thing.

You may be avoiding qualitative data because it seems expensive. And some techniques, like focus groups, require a greater investment than others. But, because you don’t need an enormous amount of data, qualitative research can be very cost-effective. It might even save you money by helping you identify and fix problems faster.

Here are some examples of qualitative research methods:

User Interviews

There are a number of different ways to handle user interviews, depending on the type and specificity of info you’re looking for. Here are a few:

Focus Groups

These are similar to user interviews, but they’re done in a group setting. The advantage of a group is that it can often generate more feedback, as people tend to open up when they hear the experiences of others. Just be sure you have a moderator who gives everyone a chance to speak.

Field Studies

What people say they do… is often not what they actually do. Watching platform users in their natural environment can reveal gaps in your understanding of the user experience. You can use direct observation, interviews, contextual inquiry, and usability tests to learn how people do things and why they do them in particular ways.

Diary Study

This method asks users to document their experiences over time, making it useful for understanding longer-term behaviors. You can learn things like what motivates people to use certain features, what they’re trying to accomplish, how they feel, and what their overall journey looks like.

User Surveys

As opposed to quantitative surveys, qualitative surveys use open-ended questions to learn what users think and feel in their own words. One common pitfall: avoid leading questions. Instead of asking, say, “How easy was it to find the info you needed?”, ask “Describe your experience looking for that information.”

Like Peanut Butter & Jelly

Quantitative and qualitative research both provide useful data, but they’re more powerful when used together. Remember that quantitative data can tell you when there’s a problem with your platform design, but you’ll need qualitative data to know how to fix it.

Chances are, you’ll use them at different times. Qualitative research can be done during the initial design phase, once you have a working product, or during a redesign. It’s especially valuable at the beginning of a design process because it can help you focus on what your users need and why. Quantitative research is generally done only when you have a working product (either at the beginning or end of a design cycle), so you can measure the results of a design or change.

Want to learn more about how data-driven design can improve your platform performance? We’d love to help. Contact us today to schedule a call.

You may have heard the old adage, “A website is never done.” Even the best digital platforms go through multiple rounds of changes, updates, and a complete overhaul now and then. Because even if your platform is already good, there’s always something you can do to improve the user experience and better support your business goals.

The key is figuring out which changes truly result in improvements, and which are a waste of your money and time.

Why You Need A/B Testing

Here are a few use cases where A/B testing can deliver crucial info:

Whatever the business case, you must understand how users interact with your platform and how its features impact their experience, in order to make informed decisions about platform design and content.

Too often, companies evaluate changes with internal stakeholders instead of real users. In the end, you may go through a lot of development work without knowing if the changes you’re making will result in something impactful. Instead, with less time and fewer resources, __you can use A/B testing with your actual audience to find out definitively what’s effective and what’s not. __

How A/B Testing Helps Your Platform

In addition to helping maximize the effectiveness and minimize the resources invested in platform redesign, A/B testing provides invaluable short- and long-term benefits:

Increase Conversions

Probably the number-one goal for most redesign efforts, increasing conversion rate is one of the most robust uses of A/B testing. Rather than guessing at what makes users complete a registration form or take a desired action, you get hard data to confirm whether a change truly produces a lift in conversions.

Improve User Engagement & Retention

Bounce rate is often a key indicator of user experience and can have a significant impact on your conversion goals. Testing multiple elements of a particular page can help you find visitor pain points and improve their overall experience, ultimately getting them to spend more time on your site.

Learn About Your Audience

By progressively testing which elements your users gravitate to (or from), you can learn a little more about your audience at each step, and then use that data to inform future design and content.

Road-Test New Features

Before you introduce a new feature, launching it as an A/B test can show how your audience is likely to react. You’ll get hard and fast data in a real-world environment with less risk.

Personalize User Experiences

You can use A/B testing as a way to identify steps toward platform personalization, to understand which forms of personalization could potentially increase user engagement.

What Should You Test?

A/B testing can be used for everything from full page designs to single content elements. Even small and simple changes can significantly impact the user experience and, consequently, your engagement and conversion rates.

When Humana A/B tested a website banner, the version with pared-down copy and a different photo increased click-throughs by 433 percent! In a second test, changing the call-to-action (CTA) copy increased click-throughs by a further 192 percent, showing that even subtle word changes can boost engagement.

How do you figure out what to test? Examining quantitative or qualitative data will help you identify potential pain points and give you a basis for experimentation. Maybe your homepage has an unusually high bounce rate, or users are providing negative feedback on your sign up process. Once you’ve identified an issue, form a hypothesis to test: define a problem, propose a solution, and identify metrics for success or failure.

Whatever you include in your testing plan, focus on things that are most likely to impact the metric you’re trying to improve. For instance, if you want to increase conversion rate, you might test the design or placement of a CTA.

Here are some commonly tested elements:

One caution: if you’re testing multiple elements simultaneously, make sure they’re distinct enough that they don’t affect each other and impact the results of each test. Your results should be related only to the options you’re presenting, so there’s a clear understanding of what exactly is influencing your audience.

One Last Word of Advice

In the end, one form of testing alone is never a panacea for improving your platform. While A/B testing provides valuable data, it has limitations, too. Most importantly, unlike qualitative analysis, it doesn’t explain the why behind your measured results. Also, the data produced is only relevant to the specific area you’re testing, versus open-ended user testing that could surface other challenges hindering your platform’s performance.

That’s why qualitative feedback is still vitally important for your site — it surfaces things you can’t learn from numbers alone (like a user not finding you trustworthy or credible). A/B testing can give you relatively quick and easy ways to improve your user experience, but it doesn’t give you every answer you need.

Your business never stands still, and your audience is always evolving and changing. We’re here to help you keep looking forward. Contact us today to talk about optimizing your platform experience.

In the age of hyper-personalization by the likes of Amazon and Netflix, customized user experiences are now table stakes for digital platforms. Businesses that invest in personalization are rewarded with loyalty and revenue. Those that don’t, get left behind.

But making that investment isn’t a straightforward affair. Many services that pitch themselves as personalization tools don’t even come close to creating a truly customized experience. And today’s savvy web users aren’t fooled:

Where we’ve seen businesses stumble is in substituting personification for true personalization. While personalization involves tailoring content based on direct personal information, personification is based on categories of consumers, not individual people.

Here’s what you need to know about the difference.

Perils of Personification

Gartner defines personification as “the delivery of relevant digital experiences to individuals based on their inferred membership in a defined customer segment, rather than their personal identity.” It’s the digital equivalent of calling someone “buddy” or “champ” because you can’t remember their name. I know that I know you, but I don’t know who you are.

Personification tools can track user behavior and use AI to place users into, say, one of several marketing personas you’ve developed. But in terms of driving meaningful, personalized interactions with users, personification falls down.

Here are a few critical issues with commonly used personification tools:

User Session Data

Information about a user’s interactions with an application is stored temporarily on the application’s server, not the browser.

EXAMPLE: During this session, I see that you’ve visited a piece of content that falls in a specific category. For the rest of your session, I can serve up other content tagged with the same category (often in Featured, Related, or You May Also Like sections).

PROBLEM 1: As soon as the browser session is closed, the user data is lost.

PROBLEM 2: The moment you switch from one device (e.g. mobile) to another (e.g. tablet) you lose all session data.

Contextual Data

Marketing automation or location intelligence software can use AI to gather environmental data about a user to deliver customized content or services.

EXAMPLE: I see that you’re in Los Angeles, California. Knowing your local weather, time zone, and other regional attributes, I can tailor the content you see to be more specific to your area.

PROBLEM: I have to ask you first if I can track your location, and you might say no.

First Party Cookie Data

By storing information about a user’s behavior directly on a domain, site owners can collect analytics data and remember language settings, among other functions.

EXAMPLE: Last time you visited my website, you commented on a certain piece of content. I may even have asked, “Do you want to see more of this type of content?” Now that you’re back, I can serve up newly published content of the same type. I can even feature it right on the homepage.

PROBLEM 1: I need to ask you if I can use cookies with you, and you can say no.

PROBLEM 2: If you clear the cookies in your browser, I’ll lose that valuable data.

PROBLEM 3: Another family member is using the same application on the same device, and now I’m getting mixed signals. This is completely messing with my AI.

Bottom line: personification is not really personalization. Even worse, you may lose your data and have to start from square one. To deliver true personalization, you need first-party data from authenticated users. Instead of guessing who your customer is, get to know who they really are.

Next-Level Personalization

True personalization is difficult to achieve outside of a digital platform, where people register as users (versus just casually visiting a website). Once someone becomes an authenticated user, it’s easier to learn a number of things about them.

83% of consumers are willing to share their data to enable personalized experiences. Platform users in particular are more open to providing personal information, because they’re specifically looking for a customized experience. With that first-party data, you can track preferences and interactions to improve the user experience. And you’re not going to lose the historical data when a user closes a session or clears their cookies.

Here are some key benefits:

Looking for Middle Ground?

In the end, you’ll deliver the best personalization (and earn the most engagement) by building an interactive platform and leveraging first-party data. But what if you have a decent website, and you’re not ready to shift to a platform?

You could approach it as a testing ground for personalization instead. By creating a series of micro-interactions using personification tools, you can test whether your users actually want a personalized experience, and if so, what they want to personalize.

Let’s say you’re a news outlet. You could just let people come and read your content online. At the next level, you can try to guess who they are through personification (via cookie requests, location prompts, etc.). If users are interacting with your prompts, it’s likely they’re interested in having a personalized experience.

Finally, you could build a platform for registered users and offer true personalization. You’ll not only deliver a better user experience, you’ll increase engagement and return visits — not to mention sales and other revenue.

At whatever level you can, go the extra mile and give your users what they want. We’re happy to help! Contact us today to learn more.

While the terminology was first spotlighted by IBM back in 2014, the concept of a composable business has recently gained much traction, thanks in large part to the global pandemic. Today, organizations are combining more agile business models with flexible digital architecture, to adapt to the ever-evolving needs of their company and their customers.

Here’s a high-level look at building a composable business.

What is a Composable Business?

The term “composable” encompasses a mindset, technology, and processes that enable organizations to innovate and adapt quickly to changing business needs.

A composable business is like a collection of interchangeable building blocks (think: Lego) that can be added, rearranged, and jettisoned as needed. Compare that with an inflexible, monolithic organization that’s slow and difficult to evolve (think: cinderblock). By assembling and reassembling various elements, composable businesses can respond quickly to market shifts.

Gartner offers four principles of composable business:

These four principles shape the business architecture and technology that support composability. From structural capabilities to digital applications, composable businesses rely on tools for today and tomorrow.

So, how do you get there?

Start With a Composable Mindset…

A composable mindset involves thinking about what could happen in the future, predicting what your business may need, and designing a flexible architecture to meet those needs. Essentially, it’s about embracing a modular philosophy and preparing for multiple possible futures.

Where do you begin? Research by Gartner suggests the first step in transitioning to a composable enterprise is to define a longer-term vision of composability for your business. Ask forward-thinking questions, such as:

These kinds of questions provide insights into the market forces that will impact your business, helping you prepare for multiple futures. But you also need to adopt a modular philosophy, thinking about all the assets in your organization — every bit of data, every process, every application — as the building blocks of your composable business.

…Then Leverage Composable Technology

A long-term vision helps create purpose and structure for a composable business. Technology is the tools that bring it to life. Composable technology begets sustainable business architectures, ready to address the challenges of the future, not the past.

For many organizations, the shift to composability means evolving from an inflexible, monolithic digital architecture to a modular application portfolio. The portfolio is made up of packaged business capabilities, or PBCs, which form the foundation of composable technology.

The ABCs of PBCs

PBCs are software components that provide specific business capabilities. Although similar in some respects to microservices, PBCs address more than technological needs. While a specific application may leverage a microservice to provide a feature, when that feature represents a business capability beyond just the application at hand, it is a PBC.

Because PBCs can be curated, assembled, and reassembled as needed, you can adapt your technology practically at the pace of business change. You can also experiment with different services, shed things that aren’t working, and plug in new options without disrupting your entire ecosystem.

When building an application portfolio with PBCs, the key is to identify the capabilities your business needs to be flexible and resilient. What are the foundational elements of your long-term vision? Your target architecture should drive the business outcomes that support your strategic goals.

Build or Buy?

PBCs can either be developed internally or sourced from third parties. Vendors may include traditional packaged-software vendors and nontraditional parties, such as global service integrators or financial services companies.

When deciding whether to build or buy a PBC, consider whether your target capability is unique to your business. For example, a CMS is something many businesses need, and thus it’s a readily available PBC that can be more cost-effective to buy. But if, through vendor selection, you find that your particular needs are unique, you may want to invest in building your own.

Real-World Example

While building a new member retention platform for a large health insurer, we discovered a need to quickly look up member status during the onboarding process. Because the company had a unique way of identifying members, it required building custom software.

Although initially conceived in the context of the platform being created, a composable mindset led to the development of a standalone, API-first service — a true PBC providing member lookup capability to applications across the organization, and waiting to serve the applications of the future.

A Final Word

Disruption is here to stay. While you can’t predict every major shift, innovation, or crisis that will impact your organization, you can (almost) future-proof your business with a composabile approach.

Start with the mindset, lay out a roadmap, and then design a step-by-step program for digital transformation. The beauty of an API-led approach is that you can slowly but surely transform your technology, piece by piece.

If you’re interested in exploring a shift to composability, we’d love to help. Contact us today to talk about your options.

If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. It’s true for your business, and it’s true for your digital platform. Yet we’ve seen organizations from startups to enterprises neglect to incorporate measurement into their platform strategy.

Data shows you what is and isn’t working in your platform. And, unlike most websites, platforms provide detailed information about known users across specific touchpoints — accurate, first-party data that doesn’t rely on cookies or fuzzy analytics. Actionable insights await; you just have to know what you’re measuring for.

Here’s how to take a strategic approach to measuring platform performance.

Start From the Top

Measuring the success of your platform involves the same general principles used in strategic planning. Start from the top and work your way down:

Once you define your platform’s core purpose, you can identify which metrics to track. Just make sure that if you move the needle on those metrics, you’re truly moving the needle for your business.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you run a healthcare system whose primary goal is to save lives. To meet that goal, your employees need speedy access to your procedures for patient care. So, you build an intranet platform in order to provide the fastest possible access to that critical information. Your core purpose is to make sure this information is as easy to find as possible, so employees have critical information at critical moments.

What Should You Measure?

You’ve identified your platform’s core purpose. Next question is, what is the core interaction your platform relies on to achieve that purpose? What’s the single most important thing you need users to do? That action determines how you define an “active” platform user, and it’s the key driver for what you should measure.

Just like with social media, where the term “monthly active users” is widely used but has many different meanings, business platforms often have unique definitions of an active user. A company intranet focused on employee engagement might define an active user as someone who posts content a certain number of times per month. A business platform offering exclusive deals to attract new customers might define an active user as a customer who redeems at least one deal per year.

Whatever your platform’s purpose is, you need to be tracking metrics related to your definition of an active user, in order to optimize the core interaction that drives your business goals.

Examples of Useful Metrics

Before we dive into the list, there’s a caveat: Just because you can measure a ton of metrics doesn’t mean you should. Too much data can be distracting, and paying attention to too many metrics can create confusion and cause analysis paralysis. The goal of measurement isn’t to manage a dashboard; it’s to make decisions and take actions that drive positive business outcomes.

Choose a primary goal, define a core objective and active user, and aim for up to five core metrics to measure success. Here are some examples:

Growth

If your business goals depend on having a large number of platform users, you might use one of the following growth measures:

Reach

This is useful for platforms where you’re looking to engage a certain proportion of a population, such as your employees or your customer base. You might track:

Engagement

Engagement covers a lot of ground, and it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Focus on the metrics that tell you how people are responding to your efforts to engage them at various touchpoints. Here are some examples:

Begin at the Beginning

It’s a mistake to think about measurement only after you’ve built your platform. Remember, platform measurement isn’t as easy as dropping in base Google Analytics code. Platform metrics are deep and nuanced, so you need to think strategically from the start. Plan the key metrics up front, and incorporate measurement into your platform roadmap from the beginning.

Your game plan, in a nutshell:

  1. Decide what to measure
  2. Implement tracking capabilities
  3. Measure platform performance
  4. Analyze the results and find actionable insights
  5. Make decisions: what’s working, and what needs to change?

Establishing measurement practices early on enables you to continually track, analyze, and optimize performance over the life of your platform. Already launched? Fear not. It’s never too late to implement measurement techniques to optimize platform performance.

If you’re thinking about how to be more strategic with platform measurement, we’d love to help. Feel free to reach out with any questions you have.