Report active users

App Feedback
1

This is not an idea for the product itself, but for the bi-weekly updates.

Such updates usually include plots like these [can’t embed media in posts :frowning: ]

But I think it would be much interesting to report how many active users are in the platform in a given time period. I know this basically depends on what you consider “active”, but settling on any useful definition and then adhering to it is already helpful.

Why is this important? For example, there might be lots of users registering that then “bounce” because they don’t know how to use the platform. Or they know, but they can’t find what they want/need. Or there’s just lots of spam signups.

I don’t know what visualization/reporting/analytics tools you folks use, but if you think this is useful I’ll be happy to help.

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I like the idea, it would be interesting to see. How would you define “active”?

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What I do at $DAY_JOB is to define a “WAU = Weekly Active User” metric, that goes like this:

  • Weekly: Numbered Monday-to-Sunday periods
  • Active: Has logged in to the site, and visited >= 2 pages (2 is arbitrary)
  • User: A “User” as understood in the web application

I clarify “Weekly” because one could potentially refer to “the last seven days”, but that depends on the day of the week and is not very handy in my opinion.

Any other time period could be used, like Daily, Monthly, etc.

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4

“Monthly” seems about right for a platform like this.
Logged in plus 2 or more page visits seems fine unless someone has a better idea.

In the biweekly emails it could go right under the “Platform Progress” header.
15,483 sign-ups in total
xxxx used the site last month

Let’s make it happen.

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5

How can we make it happen? :slight_smile:

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6

@aapeli Do you know? (Unless there is some objection to doing this.)

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7

I agree that this might be interesting, and also in a way it’s sort of a posterity log to allow stats to track potential activity growth. :slight_smile:

This also could be something different than the content. Honestly with the newsletters I’ve seen, I haven’t noticed a lot of changes version to version, so this is something at least that could be “new” every time.

Further idea, from these active users, perhaps reaching out to a few of them to ask for interview or something to feature to help show the activity of the community?

1 Like