Whiteboard Pro: Collaborative Drawing Statistics

I received this email from Hayley (edited for grammar):

I think that Whiteboard costs too much. It should only be .99 at the most because it doesn’t come with anything. Well, at least that’s my opinion. Please email back if you can. If you won’t, I guess I’ll have to use my iTunes card.

Hayley, use that iTunes card; Whiteboard won’t be getting cheaper anytime soon

In the Productivity category of the App Store, there are currently four apps ranked above Whiteboard that are at the $2.99 price point. There is only one app ranked above Whiteboard that is priced at $3.99, the same price as Whiteboard.

Meanwhile, I’ve also been exploring some of the numbers returned by the analytics library included in Whiteboard.

My primary question is this: to what extent does the user interface affect user behavior?

In Whiteboard Lite, the users you can connect to are front-and-center, right in your face. There’s a list of the devices you can connect to, and if someone becomes available on your network, you can’t miss them. It’s always visible, whenever you have the Tools screen up.

In Whiteboard Pro, things are different. There’s a Connect button, which you need to explicitly tap in order to see who’s around you. It’s not immediately obvious what the button does. If you’re familiar with Whiteboard Lite, I imagine you’d understand the idea quite easily. But if you’re new to the Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing concept, you’re less likely to grasp it.

Whiteboard Lite has had a total of 2.89 million unique users to date. Out of those users, 360,440 of them used the collaborative feature and connected to another Whiteboard (notice that the Lite and Pro versions are compatible with each other). Some simple math indicates that 12.46% of users used the connection feature at least once.

So out of those who used the feature at least once, how many connections did they make in their lifetime so far? 1.34 million, or about 3.71 connections per connecting user. Note that connections are symmetric, but statistics are not completely accurate. Sometimes beacons fail to get sent, or are sent at a later time. The number of connections is currently an odd number.

Whiteboard Pro has had a total of 31,751 unique users to date. Out of those users, 2,193 have connected to another Whiteboard. That’s 6.91%, or 5.55% less than the % that did so with the Lite version. Now, these are likely to be different user bases, and perhaps those who upgraded to Whiteboard Pro were more likely to want the better drawing tools for their own purposes, but I think UI is probably a major factor as well. If we were to assume that UI is the main cause, then if Whiteboard Lite had a similar UI as Pro, more unique users would have used the connection feature. How many more? .055*31751 = 1,746 more users. Conclusion: the UI made a major difference, to the tune of 5.55/12.46 = 44.5% fewer users using the Connect feature of the app.

How many connections made so far with Whiteboard Pro? 10,645, or about 4.85 connections per connecting user. Note that while the fraction of people who ever used the connecting feature is much smaller with Pro, the number of connections made by that fraction of people is greater (on a per-person basis). More than 1 connection per person greater, in fact. From this, my hypothesis is that the users who discovered the Connect feature in Whiteboard Pro used it more. (I did not measure discovery, in that I am not currently tracking raw clicks on the Connect button.)

One note for those of you using Pinch Media Analytics: downloading the lifetime reports in CSV can result in some misleading indicators. In particular, there’s a “% of Unique Users” column for Actions (aka sub beacons), but it’s certainly wrong (or at least very misleading). It’s not the % of the total unique users; AFAICT, it’s the % of unique users who have transmitted at least 1 sub beacon. (But I’m not even sure about this guess.) It’s best to avoid this number altogether, and do your own math where necessary.

What statistics would you like to know? I’ll consider your suggestions for future posts on this blog.