Learn from app leaders: How Doodle redesigned their app using Fabric & Firebase

By Todd Burner, Developer Advocate

In this new series, we feature customers that have used our platform in an innovative way. For this installment, we chatted with the app team at Doodle who used the Fabric and Firebase platforms together to redesign their app to be more user-centric. If you want to participate in this series, please email support@fabric.io.

Recently, we sat down with Alexander Thiele who is a senior Android engineer at Doodle, a company that helps you find the best date and time to meet other people. As early adopters of Fabric’s Crashlytics and Firebase Remote Config, his team has expert familiarity with our platforms. The focus of our conversation was on how they redesigned their mobile app using analytics and crash data from their Fabric and Firebase dashboards.

Q. How did you approach the redesign?

“The redesign is a complete overhaul of our app. We started by updating our onboarding flow to help people understand the best ways to use Doodle. We wanted to show users how they can poll each other to quickly find the best meeting time. We divided the redesign into three phases, first improving stability with Fabric’s Crashlytics, then A/B testing our poll creation feature with Firebase Remote Config, and finally measuring the results of our tests and production rollout by monitoring our app metrics in Fabric and Firebase analytics."

Phase 1: Finding tricky crashes

The team at Doodle wanted to understand how stability was impacting their app quality. That’s why they first focused on getting their crash-free user rate as close to 100% as possible.

Fabric’s Crashlytics helped them track crashes and prioritize them so they could improve their crash-free user rate. One feature they found particularly useful is adding logs and keys to crash reports.

Q. How did Fabric’s Crashlytics help you improve your app stability? 

“Crashlytics saved us a ton of time by surfacing crashes and helping us pinpoint their cause. I remember one really rare crash which we couldn't find the source of ourselves. We also don't have many crashes so we were really eager to find it. We then started to log everything that could be related to this crash, like page visits and the current internal database size. We also recorded those instances when our database couldn’t find something. After a few releases with custom logs, we found the bug. It happened in a really rare case where the user went to specific screens and used some specific features. Without custom logs, we wouldn’t have been able to find this bug.”

The team at Doodle also logs all crashes that they manually catch in the code to Crashlytics as non-fatals. This gives them more insight about what's going on in the app. By taking advantage of these unique Crashlytics features, Doodle has been able to move faster and add new features into production with less anxiety.

Phase 2: User-centric design

 The second phase of the app redesign was focused on updating the user experience and design. The goal of this phase was to refresh the look and feel of the app and introduce streamlined flows so users could accomplish their tasks faster (and with fewer screens/steps).

Q. What types of UI changes did you make in the redesign?

“The changes we made during this stage included everything from changing the color palette to introducing new screens and adding new app functionality. By monitoring the 7 day retention metrics in Fabric and Firebase, we saw that some new users didn’t understand the concept of Doodle immediately - so they didn’t return to our app. That’s why we changed the whole onboarding process to make Doodle easier to understand and use from the first time it’s installed.”

Q. How did you test your changes?

“We used Firebase Remote Config. We tested our user onboarding and the flow users go through when creating a poll. We tried 4 different kinds of flows, which we tested using Remote Config. In the end, the data showed that one flow resulted in more polls being created than the others. Our key performance indicator for the A/B test was the numbers of polls created by users, and we tracked this KPI with Google Analytics for Firebase.“

Q. Did you use Remote Config for other things? 

“We also used Remote Config to test feature switches. For example a few months ago, we implemented banner ads on our scheduling screen and enabled them through Remote Config. We noticed that these ads didn’t perform well so we turned them off easily with Remote Config. Then, we tried inserting native ads into a few other places in our app. Through Remote Config, we were able to discover the right placement for ads in our app without disrupting our users or requiring them to update their app to see the changes.”

By tracking crashes and non-fatals with Fabric and deploying changes with Firebase Remote Config, the team at Doodle didn’t have to depend on the app store release cycles to understand their users and update their app accordingly. They could see user behavior change in real-time and make appropriate changes to their app before problems arose.

Phase 3: Measuring and going forward with Firebase and Fabric

The team at Doodle plans to keep using both the Fabric and Firebase platforms to monitor and improve their app - and display their metrics throughout every stage! 

Q. Now that the redesign is live, what dashboards do you find yourself using the most?

 “Our most important metrics are how many polls a user creates and how many people participate in a poll. We monitor these in the Fabric events dashboard and in Google Analytics for Firebase by logging events.

I’m also a big fan of the new TV Mode for Fabric, we have a big conference room and we put up our dashboard on the TV during launches so the whole team can see how we’re doing. The new Crashlytics dashboard looks nice too, especially device and OS filtering. We keep an eye on most of the dashboards daily.”

Q. What Fabric and Firebase features do you plan to adopt next?

“Over the next few weeks, we have plans to adopt Firebase Dynamic Links and to set up more in-depth Fabric custom events. By using Dynamic Links, we’ll be able to make it even easier to share polls. For example, our users will be able to invite other people to participate in polls via SMS and deep link right to the relevant app screen (even if the people they are inviting to the poll haven’t installed the app yet). We’ll track more events, like content views, to understand where our users find value in our app.”

Q. What advice do you have for other app teams who are considering redesigning their app?

“Two things: test ideas constantly and put your app users first. By combining Crashlytics’ real-time crash reporting with the ability to deploy remote changes to a subset of users through Firebase Remote Config, you can learn how valuable a new feature is, identify potential issues, and take action immediately.”

Q. Can you share some results of the redesign?

“This redesign greatly improved our in-app poll creation process so users could create polls faster and more easily. We measured the success of this redesign by looking at our daily active users (DAUs) in Fabric and our retention numbers in Firebase/Fabric, which have risen beyond our expectations!”

Fabric + Firebase: Building momentum together

By Rich Paret, GM, Fabric

It’s been an exciting four months since we joined Google to work alongside our friends at Firebase. We teamed up for two reasons: 1) By joining forces, we can combine our unique strengths and give you access to better tools and infrastructure. 2) We’re driven by the same mission, to help teams build apps, understand their users, and grow their business.  

So, what have we been up to in our new home, with our new teammates?

Continuing to improve Fabric

As always, our customers are our top priority. Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work shipping awesome improvements for Fabric. For example, we recently introduced the new Fabric dashboard to align your app’s data with your top goals. We also made it easier to monitor retention in Fabric, added new sharing functionality to Fabric’s iOS and Android app, and launched a beta version of crash insights. Insights surfaces underlying problems causing your crashes and gives you resources to solve them faster. Plus, we traveled all over the world to show you how to supercharge your app release process with fastlane.

Integrating with Firebase

Many of you have asked us how the integration with Firebase is going. The short answer is: it’s going great! We’re learning a ton from each other and we’re marching towards the same goal, which is to bring the best of our platforms together, in a thoughtful and seamless way.

Today, you can start to see some of the fruits of this labor. We’re going to make Crashlytics the flagship stability solution for Firebase, so if you don’t already use it, we recommend installing it and checking it out. In addition, Digits is being upgraded to Firebase phone authentication, which is the next evolution of phone number identity and authentication.

Better together

Fabric and Firebase are stronger together, so we encourage you to use both of our platforms. In due time, we’ll bridge the gap and give you one place to build, understand, and grow your app.

We’re working on solving the biggest mobile challenges so you have more time to innovate and do what you love.

You can count on us to make app success simple.

Join us at I/O and WWDC

As we go forward, fueled by the same mission, we also want to celebrate with our passionate community.

If you’re at I/O, join us on May 18th at 10:30 am PST for a fireside chat with myself (Rich Paret, GM, Fabric), Andrew Lee (Co-founder, Firebase), and Jason Titus (VP of Engineering, Google Developer Platform) as we discuss joining Google, recent launches, and talk more about what’s next. Throughout I/O, we’ll also be hanging out at the sandbox area - ready to listen to your feedback and answer any questions you have.

Next month, we’re co-hosting a party with Firebase at WWDC and we’d love to see you there. Request an invite on our event website.

Come say hello, we can’t wait to see you!

-

Announcing the Firebase + Fabric party at WWDC17

by Brian Lynn, Product Marketing Manager

Heading to WWDC this year? Join us at the Fabric + Firebase party on June 5th as we celebrate with the top iOS developers from around the world. 

For those of you who attended past Fabric parties, you’ll feel right at home at this year’s event. You can expect the same amazing experience - co-hosted by our teammates at Firebase who’re also deeply passionate about mobile development. If this is your first time at WWDC, join us for a night to mingle with other developers, showcase your latest app, or whatever strikes your mood.

We can’t wait to see you and toast to another exciting summer of mobile development. Request your invite today!

• When: June 5, 2017

• Time: 8:00-11:00 p.m.

• Where: Forager Tasting Room & Eatery

• Price: Free

(act quickly - tickets are limited!)

How to monitor your app retention in Fabric

By Shobhit Chugh, Product Manager

A common misconception in the mobile world is that number of app downloads is the strongest indicator of success. But what if you have a ton of users, yet they rarely interact with your app? What if people download your app and then churn the next day? Looking at your total number of app users or installs in isolation doesn’t paint an accurate picture of your app’s health - you also need to pay attention to retention. Retention helps you understand how often people return to your app. It’s important to measure retention because if your hard-earned users aren’t sticking around and regularly engaging with your app, you cannot build a sustainable mobile business.

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to track your retention over time through Fabric’s new retention page (which is part of our new dashboard).

Measuring retention from three angles

To give you a holistic view of how strong your app retention is, we focus on three things: active users, activity segments, and new user retention.

Let’s review how each angle helps you better understand retention.

1. Fluctuations in active users

The first sign of how well you’re retaining users is the number of active users you have on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis - and if these numbers are trending up or down over time.

When you navigate to the retention page, you’ll see these metrics in the top two graphs:

• Daily active users (DAUs - how many people have had at least one session with your app today)

• Weekly active users (WAUs - how many people have had at least one session with your app in the last seven days)

• Monthly active users (MAUs - how many people have had at least one session with your app in the last 30 days)

The pulsating DAUs graph gives you real-time insight into how many people have used your app so far today, compared to this time last week. The second graph provides an additional lens by highlighting changes in weekly and monthly active users.

Steady, consistent growth in active users is a good signal that your retention is strong.

2. Changes in activity segments

The middle section of the retention page is centered around activity segments. Based on session data, activity segments groups users into buckets, ranging from inactive users (people who have not launched your app in more than a week) all the way to high activity users (people who have used your app almost every single day in the past seven days).

Activity segments provide a deeper look at your retention by revealing how engaged your active users are, how many are at risk of abandoning your app, and how people flow from one segment to another.

This graph can tell you a few interesting things about retention. First off, look at how people are transitioning between states. For example, if you see a large and healthy flow of users moving from “low activity” to “medium or high activity”, their engagement level is changing in a positive way - meaning that retention is improving.

Another interesting thing to monitor is the correlation between the number of new users and the growth in each segment. For instance, if you’re earning thousands of new users every week, but you’re only seeing a corresponding bump in the low activity segment - this means your new users are not deeply committed to your app. In this case, consider improving your onboarding flow to showcase the value of your app to new users.

Pro Tip: Move the slider at the bottom of this graph to see your activity segments at different times during the last 30 days. You can also use this slider to compare how active your users are during the weekday versus the weekend.

3. New user retention rate

Finally, the last graph on the retention page shows you what percent of new users are continuing to interact with your app after one day, seven days, and thirty days. This graph helps you see whether or not new users are still active after their first session at key time intervals. For instance, the day one metric means that X% of people who installed and used your app for the first time yesterday, also used it today.

The higher these percentages are, the stronger your app retention is because it means that a large amount of new users are turning into loyal, habitual users. If we notice any irregularities (i.e. an unusual increase or decrease in your new user retention), we’ll flag it so you can dig into what happened on that day.

 

From understanding retention to improving it

Fabric’s new retention page helps you measure retention from three different angles: active users (how many people are using my app?), activity segments (how engaged are my users?), and new user retention rate (how often do new users come back to my app?).

Armed with this insight, you’ll develop a baseline understanding of your retention, be able to recognize when it becomes a problem, and act quickly to combat churn. 

If you’re already a Fabric customer, click here to check out your retention page.

If you’re not currently a Fabric customer, get started by signing up and installing Crashlytics.

The new Fabric dashboard: all the analytics you love, reimagined

By Shobhit Chugh, Product Manager & Marc Richards, Engineering Manager

When we launched Fabric’s Answers three years ago, our mission was to provide app teams with analytics they didn’t need to spend hours analyzing. Just as the name implied, Answers made sense of your data by organizing it into insightful, real-time graphs of user behavior. But as our platform evolved to better serve you, two things became apparent:

1. Our customers used Fabric to accomplish a set of goals, but our dashboard was structured around our tools rather than your needs. Consequently, information about each goal was scattered, which meant that you had to jump between different graphs and screens.

2. As we built deeper integrations between Fabric’s different components, analytics became the heart of our platform, so it no longer made sense to keep Answers as a separate, siloed brand.

In an effort to provide more clarity and bring data together in a more meaningful way, we’re excited to introduce the new Fabric dashboard! Centered around your top app goals, this dashboard gives you a holistic view of your app’s performance in one place. All the metrics you know and love are still there, now grouped more intuitively by the business impact they have.

Fabric’s new dashboard gives me a bird’s eye view of the areas of my app that need attention, which helps me make smart decisions and spend my time wisely.

- Morten Slott Hansen, Lead Android Developer,  

Monitor your app from every critical business angle

Over the last year, we spent time listening to your feedback on how you use Fabric, which key  things you measure, and what your top business priorities are. We found that all app teams, regardless of the type of app they develop and manage, have a set of core goals that are vital to their mobile success. They are:

“I want to build a stable app and monitor my latest release.”
“I want to understand what users are doing inside my app so I can engage and retain them.”
“I want to grow my business by acquiring new users and earning revenue.”

Armed with this insight, we updated our dashboard so it’s easier to understand how your app is doing from each of those business-critical angles. Here’s a quick overview of how your brand new Fabric dashboard is organized, and what you can learn from each section.

At the top, you’ll see a real-time graph of your active users. These are people who are using your app right now.

The first row of charts shows you how often people return to your app (retention), how many new users you’re acquiring each day (growth), and how many users are completing your most important in-app action (the KPI - key performance indicator).

The second row of graphs will help you monitor your app quality and gauge the success of your latest release.

As you scroll to the bottom of the dashboard, you’ll see how engaged your users are around the world and what actions they are taking. And if you sell physical or virtual goods in your app, the revenue chart will show you how much money you’re making.

Pro Tip: The new Fabric dashboard compares your data week over week, in real-time. This means that each delta shows you how that metric has changed from what it was at the same time last week.

Dedicated pages provide more context about each app goal

While the main Fabric dashboard gives you a bird’s eye view of what’s happening in your app right now, you can also zoom in on each app goal to get more information by simply clicking on it.

For example, let’s say you recently launched a mobile ad campaign and you notice a corresponding bump in your Daily New Users. Does this mean that your new user acquisition campaign was a success? Maybe at first glance - but you need more information on the caliber of these new users. Are they sticking around and engaging with your app? Are they completing key in-app actions? To get the answer, just click on the growth section.

Now, you’ll be taken to a new growth-focused page that sheds light on the quality and activity level of your new users. We unveiled this growth page back in December, and today, it’s fully integrated into the new Fabric dashboard!

In the next few weeks, we’ll go through each page of the Fabric dashboard in more detail and share best practices on how to make the most of it. Stay tuned!

• Growth
• Retention
• KPI
• Crashlytics
• Latest Release
• Engagement
• Audience Insights
• Revenue
• Events

Iterating for clarity in a chaotic world

As the mobile industry matures, complexity ensues. Our mission is to always provide opinionated, real-time analytics that help you focus on the areas of your app that need attention - without overwhelming you with data.

We enhanced Fabric’s dashboard for clarity to make it easier, and faster, to find the information you need on your most important app goals and business priorities. In the immortal words of the great Leonardo Da Vinci, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

If you’re already a Fabric customer, click here to check out your new dashboard.

If you’re not currently a Fabric customer, get started by signing up and installing Crashlytics.