PUBLISHED
6 August, 2023
Growth Lead
Convincing users to stick around for the long haul is tough.
On average, 90+ day retention rates for mobile apps sit somewhere around 25%—not ideal when acquisition and marketing funds are limited.
Happy path testing is a powerful tool in your arsenal when it comes to building stickier apps and products—but you’re going to need the right tools. So, in this UXCam guide, we’ll be introducing you to a few of the best happy path testing tools on the market.
Let’s dive in.
There are tons of user flows that lead to long-term adoption—and tons more that lead to churn.
The “happy path” is the user flow with the highest success rate. It takes the greatest percentage of users who enter it to the desired outcome.
Happy path testing is a two-part process that involves:
Figuring out which user flow is the happy path.
Making sure that user flow is as frictionless as possible.
Happy path testing tools allow you to take a data-driven approach to both parts of this process by determining the effectiveness of different user flows and identifying friction points that can be addressed.
Before we dive into our list, here’s a quick introduction to the tools we’ll be covering:
UXCam: Best for Understanding the User Journey.
LogRocket: Best for Identifying Bugs and Workflow Issues.
Heap: Best for Friction Scoring.
Contentsquare: Best for Prioritizing Fixes.
Looking for the details? Read on.
UXCam is an all-in-one UX research tool that offers deep insights into the user journey.
Start by identifying key user flows through your app with user journey analytics. Then use funnels to identify which user flows lead the most users to conversion. From there, frustration signals and session replays offer deep insights into the causes of drop-offs along this happy path—perfect for optimization and UX improvement.
User Journey Mapping: Visualize the many ways new and existing users navigate your app and identify happy path candidates.
Funnels: Compare the effectiveness of different user flows by looking at drop-off rates along your funnel.
Frustration Signals: Track frustration signals like dead taps, rage quits, and more to get insight into user dissatisfaction.
Session Replays: Zoom in on interesting sessions to identify potential friction points and bottlenecks.
UXCam has a free tier that supports unlimited user seats and 3,000 tracked sessions per month.
Beyond that, we have two paid plans—both with fully customizable session and data retention limits. Growth is designed for scaling businesses while Enterprise offers advanced features like SSO and compliant security.
Check out all of our plans for free with a free trial or demo.
LogRocket is a product analytics tool that makes happy path optimization much simpler by calculating the severity and impact of bugs and issues.
Galileo (LogRocket’s ML layer) is trained to identify your product’s most pressing issues by analyzing frustration signals, issue frequencies, and user patterns. It will also recommend specific sessions that exhibit these issues for you to check out—no need to go searching.
Galileo: Surface your app's most pressing issues using machine learning.
Frustration Signals: Zero in on the issues that cause frustration (and churn) using a range of reliable signals.
Session Replay: Replay session that experienced issues to understand what happened from the user’s perspective.
LogRocket offers a free plan that supports 1,000 sessions tracked per month and 3 user seats.
Need higher limits? You have three paid options—Team ($139/month), Professional ($350/month), and Enterprise (custom). Most businesses will probably need to go with Professional right out of the gate for access to Galileo and advanced analytics.
Heap is a digital insights platform that allows SaaS companies to optimize their happy paths with powerful metrics and reports.
An example? Heap’s Effort Analysis tool gives you a simple, universal friction score for different parts of your happy path. This allows you to quickly identify and prioritize weaknesses that need to be addressed.
Journeys: See a visual representation of your happy path along with contextual data like drop-off rates, key events, and frustration signals.
Effort Analysis: Get generalized friction scores for stages in your happy path that make prioritization easy.
Targeted Suggestions: View recommendations about things you can do to optimize different in-app journeys.
Heap offers a free plan that supports tracking for up to 10,000 sessions monthly.
Looking for more? You have three paid plans to choose from—Growth, Pro, and Premier. All of these plans feature custom pricing, so you’ll need to contact sales for a quote.
Contentsquare is a popular experience analytics platform with a huge selection of tools for understanding users and optimizing their journeys.
For happy path testing, Contentsquare offers the CS Insights product, which automatically prioritizes issues and fixes based on business impacts like lost revenue and churn. This allows you to quickly identify issues that are worth your time.
CS Insights: View insights based on business impacts like lost revenue and churn.
CS Digital: Track metrics that help you understand the user journey and optimize your happy path.
CS Find & Fix: identify pressing issues like bugs and broken experiences.
Contentsquare keeps its pricing private—you’ll need to contact sales for a quote.
Understanding and optimizing your happy path is the key to sustainable growth. It’s a lifeline for businesses that don’t have the kind of bankroll needed to blindly throw money at acquisition.
At UXCam, we empower mobile product teams to make data-driven decisions that enhance UX and build strong relationships with mobile users. From identifying your happy path to optimizing it, UXCam is with you every step of the way.
Get started with a 14-day free trial and see for yourself.
AUTHOR
Growth Lead
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