Comment by crowdhailer
5 years ago
Very much so. It's something we're trying to push back on at https://sendmemo.app
But how do you measure success, we're a messaging app. - Total messages sent - Number of conversations.
Measuring any of this will mean we optimise keeping users on the platform.
We're trying active conversations, where to be active means only at least one message per week. We'd love to find a metric which went up as each individual user spent less time on memo. A "time to solution" metric
I quite like the idea of measuring "time to solution" somehow, particularly for more business- or productivity-oriented software. I guess that doesn't make sense if you're making a video game or a social network, though.
Or even "effort to solution".
The "time to solution" metric sounds a lot like SRE's mantra; automate ourselves out of a job. This is often measured in how many hours of human labor we can save for better use elsewhere.
The optimal app requires zero interaction time from the user but still provides tangible benefits. Aside from entertainment, most people don't really want to interact with software.
Why not just ask every now and then "did you enjoy interacting with our service?" Or "are you finding value here?" and have people rate it.
I've often thought how different facebook would look like if they asked that and optimized for that metric