Forty Percent More Time

Forty Percent More Time — Volume I, Understanding Humans Before Products · Attention · Investigation · Core. Time in app rises 40 percent after a redesign and the team celebrates, until Maya finds the rise is concentrated on the screen where a one-click action became a three-click hunt

1. 01 · Opening

   Forty Percent More Time

   A month after the redesign, time in app is up forty percent. Sam is telling everyone.

2. 02 · The setup

   The redesign has been live a month and the headline number is the best anyone has seen.

   Sam: Forty percent more time in app. Engagement is up and I am telling everyone.

3. 03 · The setup

   Session duration, month over month — Before redesign: 6m 20s; After redesign: 8m 52s; Change: up 40%; Sessions per user: unchanged

4. 04 · The evidence

   Maya: Sessions per user did not move. They are not coming back more, they are staying longer.

   Dev: Which is good if they are enjoying it.

5. 05 · You make the call

   Time in app is up 40 percent and sessions per user have not changed. Sam is calling it engagement. What would you check before agreeing?

   The story does not tell you first.

   A. Which screens the extra time is on, and whether their outcomes moved

   B. It was measured over too short a period

   C. Time in app is a vanity metric and should not be tracked

6. 06 · What happened

   Maya splits the extra two and a half minutes by where it is being spent.

   Maya thinks: A number this big is never spread evenly. It is sitting on one screen.

7. 07 · What happened

   Where the extra time went — Reading dashboards: up 4s; Composing reports: up 11s; Finding the export button: up 2m 17s; Exports completed: down 22%

8. 08 · What happened

   Maya: Nearly all of it is people looking for a button that used to be on the first screen.

   Sam: And I have been calling that engagement for a month.

9. 09 · What happened

   Priya: It is under Reports now. I get there eventually. It used to take one click.

10. 10 · What happened

    Two screens, both showing more time. On one of them that is the product working and on the other it is the product failing.

    Maya thinks: The number cannot tell me which. It never could.

11. 11 · What happened

    Duration Needs A Partner (v1.0)

    Pair it with an outcome on the same screen — Time on a reading screen goes with articles finished. Time on an action screen goes with the action completed. Duration alone is uninterpretable in both cases.

    Ask which direction is good here — Longer is better on a screen built for reading and worse on a screen built for one click. Write down the intended direction before you look, or you will accept whichever way it moved.

    Split before you celebrate — A headline duration averages every screen together. A 40 percent rise sitting entirely on one screen is a different fact from the same rise spread evenly, and only the split distinguishes them.

12. 12 · What happened

    Export returns to the first screen. Time in app falls back to six and a half minutes and exports recover, and nobody reports the fall as bad news.

    Maya thinks: The best week we have had, and the engagement number went down.

13. 13 · Complete

    Forty Percent More Time

    A duration is uninterpretable until it is paired with the outcome its screen exists to produce. Next: the feature people refuse to switch on because of what switching it on says about them.