Analytics Capabilities: The Importance Of Good User Experience For Applications

Integrating analytics into applications pays off. A survey of product developers by Product-Led Alliance shows that 55 percent are already embedding analysis functions in products and applications.

• According to the Product-Led Alliance survey, the barriers to embedding analytics include limited budgets (47 percent), long time-to-market, and the challenge of keeping up with feature requirements post-market (39 percent each).
• The user experience for embedded analytics is more important than ever, according to 53 percent of respondents. Nearly 80 percent of respondents also felt the need for better customization to specific business needs.
• Products and applications with embedded analytics drive 60 percent more engagement and 57 percent more revenue.

A new embedded analytics study by Product-Led Alliance in partnership with ThoughtSpot shows that embedding easy-to-use analytics delivers multiple values, including improved customer satisfaction, increased usage, increased ROI, and more innovation. Successful companies rely on software, applications, and services that use data in the background and increasingly enable user data insights.

In-app data exploration is increasingly becoming necessary for B2B and B2C applications. While embedding analytics is not new, the extent to which end-users analyse the data has increased. Companies know the value of their data. About half of the product developers surveyed (55 percent) said they offer embedded analytics capabilities in their products. Of these, 57 percent have seen a direct impact on sales.

Obstacles To Embedding Analytics

Despite the benefits of embedded analytics, this is still expensive and difficult. Almost half (47 percent) of those surveyed are hampered by budget constraints when adopting an embedded analytics solution, and 39 percent are concerned about long time-to-market. And 39 percent see a challenge in post-launch maintenance of the offering and keeping up with feature requirements. Added to this are the low adoption rates of many difficult-to-use legacy systems. More than half of respondents (53 percent) said user experience is more important than ever for embedded analytics solutions. Nearly 80 percent of respondents believe better customization is needed to meet specific business needs, and more than half think users should be able to analyse the data themselves.

User Experience Must Go Beyond The Application

Nearly two-thirds of the product developers surveyed pointed to the need for operationalization by feeding insights gained from one application’s data into other workflows. Less than a third of respondents do so. For the data architecture, a modern, cloud-based data stack offers a lot of potential for better data and analysis. Sixty-five percent of those surveyed classified analysis tools as the essential component of the modern data stack, and 73 percent plan extensive investments in this area.

“The study clearly shows that the rules for product development have changed. Today, embedded analytics’s user experience is critical to applications’ long-term success. Yesterday it was ‘software eats the world’ today, it’s ‘data eats the world.’ “Companies can’t help but think about how to make this data available to end-users,” said Sumeet Arora, chief development officer at ThoughtSpot.

ThoughtSpot is a provider of an easy-to-use analytics platform. With it, users can gain data insights thanks to natural language and AI and take advantage of the latest innovations in the cloud data ecosystem. Organisations can put the power of their modern data stack in employees’ hands, extend their data’s value to partners and customers, and automate entire business processes.

Also Read: Analytics The Strategic Alliance Against Business Growth