Designing with Data: Using Analytics to Improve Web and Mobile Applications

This thesis looks at the ways in which software analytics can be used to gather data on web and mobile application usage. The main goals of the study were to find out how the data collected with analytics can help in improving these types of applications and to place analytics into the group of user research methods available to an HCI researcher. The first five chapters form the theoretical part of the thesis. These chapters discuss the methodological foundations of analytics in sociological and psychological research, place analytics into the automated data collection tradition in HCI research, chart the technical and strategic details of how the data is best collected, and compare the strengths and limitations of analytics data with those of other user research methods. The research part of the thesis is based on work done on three applications, two of which were mobile applications and one a web application. These three applications were treated as case studies that exemplify the ways in which analytics can be used to improve software applications. The results showed analytics to be an extremely useful research method for an array of research questions. The collected data revealed several potential points of improvement in the studied applications. Furthermore, the low cost and good availability of different analytics solutions was found to make it a method that any HCI researcher or designer with an access to a publicly deployed application can add to their toolbox