Exec summary
Appfire is a global provider of software that enhances, extends, and connects the world’s leading platforms, such as Atlassian, Microsoft, monday.com, and Salesforce.
Appfire’s Growth Ops team supports many apps from Appfire’s portfolio, with goals including improving the user experience, workflows, activation, and conversion. When Rachel Miner, Senior Product Manager, started her role, Appfire needed a better way of understanding the success of their apps. Her team started using LogRocket to improve their understanding of customers.
LogRocket automatically surfaced customer-facing issues to engineering and product teams, enabling discovery without needing to know where to look. For Appfire, LogRocket became a platform that Rachel and her teams rely on and use to identify user friction, gather user insights, and analyze session data.
Intro
With many apps for her team to manage, Rachel was looking for better UX insights and technical data than their existing, patchwork issue discovery process provided. Any solution needed to be specific enough to address user friction at the individual app level, but be configurable enough to enable issue discovery across product, engineering, and design.
Rachel found that LogRocket could serve all of her teams individually with struggle detection and configurable alerting via Issues Digests. This enabled a unified process for communicating priorities and scaling data collection and analysis across her teams.
Going wide and going deep
For Rachel’s team, any tools they chose to implement had to be flexible enough to address each app’s unique challenges, but still structured enough to help Rachel create processes to improve digital experiences overall.
Rachel set up LogRocket for a few teams initially as a test. LogRocket Issues surfaced the highest impact UX and technical issues for each team, alerting them via Issue Digests - summaries customized and disseminated on a team-by-team basis.
Going deep into these issues was easy, as LogRocket’s autocapture meant each team had the data they needed without additional instrumentation per application.
“I wanted my teams to be able to go into one place, look at a dashboard, get high-level insights, and drill down if they wanted or needed to, without watching hundreds of user sessions,” Rachel explained.
These digests allowed her teams to identify and fix the most important problems rapidly. Issues were ranked by severity of user impact, with example sessions provided for product managers and UX designers to understand user experience visually. Engineering used these same sessions to drill into the technical details necessary to pinpoint the issues in the code and resolve them. This allowed teams to quickly prioritize and fix issues, without lengthy discussion and inefficient extra processes.
“LogRocket gives you color and detail you wouldn’t know to look for because you wouldn’t know it was an issue in other analytics platforms.”
LogRocket provided a more scalable approach to gathering and organizing digital experience data for teams than Rachel had hoped for. With only minimal configuration changes needed for each app, Appfire was able to see success from this test and quickly expand their use of LogRocket across their apps.
Enabling easy, comprehensive discovery
One of the biggest challenges Appfire faced before using LogRocket was with issue discovery: it was inherently difficult to find issues and opportunities in places that aren't instrumented directly into Appfire’s KPIs.
But shortly after implementing LogRocket, Appfire identified and fixed an issue with column sizing without waiting for it to become a problem.
One of Rachel’s product management colleagues noticed in one heatmap that users were spending a lot of time in an unexpected location on a central page of their app. They linked Rachel to the heatmap for her opinion on why users might be spending time in a place where no actions could be taken, and together they dove in.
Within minutes, Rachel’s colleague saw that when the user returned to or reloaded the expected page, their columns resized. The user then had to resize every column on their page to read the information on it, which created a bad user experience.
“You don’t have to know what an issue is or looks like before you go into LogRocket.”
Rachel and her product manager managed to resolve the issue before its impact reached their customer support teams.
Pinpointing areas for improvement — fast
LogRocket’s Inspect feature was another differentiator for Appfire. After a release intended to improve their UX, Appfire got an Issues Digest alert flagging a spike in rage clicks.
The code had passed testing, the page was not particularly high-value, and there wasn’t a spike in errors or network issues, leaving everyone confused about what was causing the rage clicks.
“In some analytics platforms, you have to be very intentional about what you’re looking for,” Rachel explained. But with LogRocket, Rachel could begin piecing together the issue’s root cause using rage click data and the Inspect tool.
Rage click data helped Rachel locate the area of the page where users were getting stuck, and she then used Inspect to highlight the affected area she identified. With Inspect, Rachel set a new definition to retroactively gather data and collect more information about how users interacted with these elements.
Without needing to ask engineering to provide selector information or set up a new definition, Rachel found the root cause of the problem within hours: “We had recently released a dark mode, and the text color on this one section of the website hadn’t been flipped,” she said. “So, folks were rage-clicking to get the text to pop up to be able to read it.”
“When we finally found the UX issue, we found that the code that needed to be fixed was buried a few layers deep in the style sheet.” Resolving this issue entirely eliminated rage clicks on that page.
Towards a data-informed future
As Appfire approaches its third year of using LogRocket, Rachel sees a bright future for their product data strategy. “LogRocket has data we can’t get anywhere else, which helps us identify issues and opportunities we wouldn’t otherwise have noticed or found,” Rachel said.
With many apps using LogRocket, and more on the way, finding common patterns through data analysis is key to taking action.
“LogRocket is lovely because we have so many apps using it, but we can manage them all on a more granular level, which is something I’ve appreciated a lot,” Rachel explained. “We’ve looked at many different solutions, but in the end, LogRocket beats them all.”
