How New Digital Analytics Funding Will Improve Design
Interface experience analytics technologies get into minute detail about what users are doing, provide visualizations about behavior, and typically offer a prioritized list of issues. The category is sometimes referred to as digital experience analytics or interaction analytics. There have been multiple generations of this technology, but it hadn’t really taken off until recently.
We predicted consolidation three years ago, and it’s happened: Contentsquare bought Clicktale, Glassbox bought SessionCam, and Decibel was just acquired by customer feedback management vendor Medallia.
Now, the category just got another jolt.
Contentsquare announced a new funding round led by SoftBank that will value it at $2.8 billion. This means it will join Quantum Metric, Amplitude, and Pendo with public valuations over $1 billion in the category. Competitor Glassbox also recently filed an IPO at a $350 million valuation. More importantly, all this investment means the category will mature with more and more businesses relying on this kind of insight instead of traditional analytics alone. Competitors like Heap and FullStory will surely also see increased investment from venture capital and eventually an IPO or acquisition.
To me, this is all an extension of the design industry growth I’ve been sharing. Businesses will continue to invest in new, more powerful ways to better understand the problems and opportunities their users face so they can design better solutions. For example, customer experience professionals rely on these tools to avoid over-surveying customers while making results more actionable.
What’s next? First, adoption will grow, as many businesses still don’t have these tools. Second, these vendors will race to make it simpler to consume and act on the insights identified. After that, there’s a whole range of touchpoints beyond the app or site that companies should measure better — notifications and messaging, chatbots, voice interfaces, augmented reality, etc. Maybe most importantly, there is the problem of how well all this insight can be tied together and acted upon. With these investments, expect that these vendors will make rapid improvements in these areas over the next few years, leading to more insight and better design — a great thing for all who want to make experiences better.