Amplitude — A Data Analytics Tool
A couple of weeks ago, Lex Roman, formerly a Product Designer from Invision, conducted an interactive workshop on “The UX of Data.” During her workshop, she mentioned a tool called Amplitude, which is an analytics tool that she uses to track data at her company. Amplitude’s purpose is to help companies understand user behaviors, drive business outcomes, and build better products.
Product teams rely on data every day to help make design decisions and measure success. They often run into problems of distrust, clarity, and confusion in data. By using this powerful tool, along with a good understanding of how to work with data, they can overcome these challenges and make better informed, more useful decisions.
I’ve had my own share of personal experiences with data distrust during my UX internship in Summer 2018.
In one case, I was working on improving an update stream experience, and I wanted to track who was clicking the event. I saw many different naming conventions on the same event that were being tracked (for instance, “Home_update” versus “hoem_update”). My initial thoughts were:
“Okay, there are two different events that are overlapping and tracking the same thing. I do not know what these events mean. Without knowing who named, implemented and analyzed these events, how can I trust this data? I am just going to create my own event, and I will track it myself. Tracking my own event will give me better, more accurate results because I own it.”
There was unclear ownership and poor organization of data on the team. I assumed everyone owned and tracked their own events. As a result, our team suffered from inconsistencies, vagueness, and inaccurate data.
Data must be clearly organized and easily understood to allow teams to make data-driven decisions. Without meaningful data to back up our decisions, we cannot make the impact we want to make.
Lex’s material on Amplitude introduced one particular feature that could have helped solve this problem before it began.
Taxonomy
What we needed from the beginning was a central place in which data and event tracking can be easily accessible for everyone on the team.
Lex introduced Taxonomy, a product built within Amplitude that addresses the problem of organization in event taxonomy. Event taxonomy is defined as the structure of the events and properties you use to define the actions that users take in your product. Maintaining a clear and consistent event taxonomy is key when working with data — just like how naming convention in event taxonomy is crucial in coding. Challenges arise when we make mistakes in event names or in tracking the wrong events. This can lead to small setbacks, wasted time in reorganizing our events, and distrust in the data.
Think of this product as the design system for data — the single source of truth where you can view all of the event names, properties, definitions, and documentation. In addition, Amplitude’s Taxonomy can instantly help identify duplicated mistakes in event naming and merge them. This creates coherence, consistency, and trust in crucial data.
There is no right way for naming conventions, but it is a good idea to get the whole team to come up with the naming conventions together, or at least actively agree on them so everyone is in sync. In order for the team to make informed decisions, we need to consistency, trust, and clarity in our data. Amplitude’s Taxonomy product provides a solution for a more better way to organize data so that teams are 100% confident in the insights they are generating.
You can check out a demo of Amplitude here.
Thank you, LAUX Meetup and Lex Roman, for such an insightful event. I enjoyed learning more about how teams could better organize data to make more informed data-driven decisions.
** This article was originally written for LAUX Meetup’s October Newsletter 2018.
If you have any questions or just want to chat, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn.
