Doodle increases user engagement 42% with Crashlytics and Firebase
Introduction
Doodle helps you find the best date and time to meet people, with apps on Android, iOS, and the web. They decided to redesign their native app, as part of an effort to increase engagement and retention. The team divided the redesign into two phases. They first improved the app's stability with Crashlytics, then ran A/B tests on their onboarding and poll creation feature with Firebase Remote Config.
Challenge
Before overhauling the flow and aesthetic of their mobile app, Doodle wanted to improve app quality and bring their crash-free user rate close to 100%. But manually tracking and resolving crashes takes time.
Additionally, their seven-day retention metrics were lower than the team wanted. Suspecting that they were losing users during onboarding, Doodle sought to update the onboarding process and streamline the signup flow, so users could understand Doodle's value and accomplish tasks more quickly. But how could Doodle test interface changes without disrupting users?
Solution
"Crashlytics saved us time by surfacing crashes and helping us pinpoint their root cause," says Alexander Thiele, a senior Android engineer at Doodle. "One feature we find particularly useful is adding logs and keys to our crash reports to help us troubleshoot tricky crashes. We also record non-fatal issues, which gives us more insight into what's going on in our app." After improving app stability, the Doodle team shifted their focus to making design updates.
"We used Firebase Remote Config to test both our user onboarding and the poll-creation flow," Thiele says. "In the end, one flow created over 42% more polls, a major increase in our most important user engagement metric."
With Firebase Remote Config, Doodle was able to test UI changes before widely implementing them, and with Crashlytics, they had confidence that they would immediately know about any stability issues that arose. Redesigning an app isn't easy, but having the right developer tools ensured Doodle had a smooth experience.
Results
42% increase in poll creation
6% better 7-day retention
15% more daily active users
"By combining Crashlytics' real-time crash reporting with the ability to deploy remote changes to a subset of users through Remote Config, we were able to grow our daily active users beyond our expectations!"
- Alexander Thiele, Senior Android Engineer, Doodle
