How to define an experiment for first time users in Firebase?

Defining Experiments for First-Time Users in Firebase

Firebase Experiments allows you to run A/B tests and feature flags to optimize your app for user engagement and conversion. When targeting first-time users, you can leverage Firebase Experiments to personalize their initial experience, guide them towards desired actions, and gather valuable insights.

Understanding the Basics

What are Firebase Experiments?

Firebase Experiments is a powerful tool for conducting controlled experiments on your app. You can define variations of your app’s UI, functionality, or behavior and test them against a control group. Based on the experiment results, you can decide which variation performs better and roll it out to all your users.

Why Target First-Time Users?

First-time users are critical for app success. By providing them with a seamless and engaging onboarding experience, you can increase the likelihood of them becoming loyal users. Experiments help you understand what works best for this crucial user segment.

Steps to Define an Experiment for First-Time Users

1. Identify Your Goal: Clearly define the objective you want to achieve. Do you want to increase user signup rates, improve app tutorial completion, or encourage specific actions?
2. Choose Your Target Audience: Define your experiment’s target audience as “First Time Users” by using user properties or custom events in your experiment setup. This ensures your experiment focuses on the desired user segment.
3. Create Variations: Design different variations of your app’s UI, features, or logic to test. These variations should be tailored to address your specific goal.
4. Define Metrics: Select the key metrics that will measure the success of your experiment. Common metrics include:
   • Signup rate
   • Tutorial completion rate
   • Time spent in the app
   • Number of specific actions performed
5. Set Up Your Experiment in Firebase:
   • Go to the Firebase console.
   • Navigate to “Experiments” in the left sidebar.
   • Create a new experiment and provide a descriptive name.
   • Select “First Time Users” as the targeting criteria.
   • Define your experiment’s variations.
   • Set your experiment’s duration.
   • Select your primary and secondary metrics.
6. Run and Monitor Your Experiment: Start your experiment and monitor its progress in the Firebase console. Observe the data and determine if your variations are performing well against the control group.
7. Analyze Results: When your experiment ends, analyze the collected data. Focus on your primary metric to understand the winner (if any). Use the data to refine your understanding of what works best for first-time users.
8. Make Decisions: Based on your analysis, decide whether to roll out the winning variation to all users, make adjustments to your initial variations, or try new experiment iterations.

Example: Experimenting with Onboarding

Let’s say you want to improve the onboarding experience for first-time users of a fitness tracking app. Your goal is to increase the percentage of users who complete the app tutorial.

Variations:

• Control: The default onboarding experience.
• Variation A: A more interactive tutorial with animated illustrations.
• Variation B: A simplified tutorial with fewer steps.

Experiment Setup in Firebase:

Analyzing the Results:

After your experiment runs, you’ll see the tutorial completion rates for each variation. If Variation A has a significantly higher completion rate than the control group, you might choose to roll out Variation A to all users. If both variations perform similarly, you might decide to experiment further to refine the onboarding experience.

Code Example (Firebase Experiments API)

The following code snippet illustrates how to use the Firebase Experiments API to set up your experiment:

// Import the necessary Firebase library.
import firebase from 'firebase/app';
import 'firebase/experiments';

// Initialize Firebase.
const firebaseApp = firebase.initializeApp({
  // Your Firebase configuration.
});

// Get the Experiments instance.
const experiments = firebase.experiments();

// Define your experiment.
const onboardingExperiment = experiments.createExperiment({
  name: 'First-Time User Onboarding',
  experimentVersion: 1,
  variation: 'control', // This will be the default variation.
  audience: {
    condition: 'FIRST_TIME_USER',
    values: ['true']
  },
  metrics: [
    {
      name: 'tutorial_completion_rate',
      type: 'EVENT_COUNT',
      event: 'tutorial_completed'
    }
  ]
});

// Define your variations.
const onboardingExperimentVariations = [
  {
    name: 'variation_a',
    condition: 'user_property',
    values: ['interactive_tutorial']
  },
  {
    name: 'variation_b',
    condition: 'user_property',
    values: ['simplified_tutorial']
  }
];

// Add variations to the experiment.
onboardingExperiment.addVariations(onboardingExperimentVariations);

// Start the experiment.
onboardingExperiment.start();

Conclusion

Defining experiments for first-time users in Firebase is a powerful approach to optimize your app’s onboarding and maximize user engagement. By leveraging the Firebase Experiments platform, you can conduct A/B tests, personalize user experiences, and gain valuable insights into what resonates most with your new users. Remember to clearly define your goals, target the right audience, and analyze the results thoroughly to continuously improve your app’s success.