Devlog #002: Analytics

Many decisions go into creating products or games that users enjoy, and a good analytics system is often behind them. In a nutshell, analytics itself is the process of collecting and interpreting data in order to make better decisions. For a mobile word game like Hexicon, we use analytics to learn about gameplay stats and user behaviors in our app, and then we use what we learn to add new features or redesign existing ones. Working with stats and analytics is also a lot of fun, especially when we can watch the growth of our game over time with real data! Here's one examples of data collected from Hexicon and the resulting changes we decided to make. All data and graphs come from Amplitude, an analytics tool we use along with React Native. 

Invalid Words 

We keep a list of all invalid words that people try to play in Hexicon, including entertaining words such as “BEARSCREAMING” and “HANDTREES” to name a couple of our favorites! More importantly, this list helps us discover words that were incorrectly flagged as invalid. For instance, we saw that “MAGE,” “TOON,” “LEAR,” and “LIER” were each attempted to be played by at least 15 different players in the last month. These words all turned out to be Scrabble Official, so we added them to Hexicon’s dictionary. While this process starts off slowly, we hope that it will scale and become more efficient as Hexicon’s playerbase grows. 

Read the full article on our Medium blog for a couple other examples about analytics for our different game modes and shop!