Flex Application Optimization
Data Analytics and Tracking User-Behavior in Flex Applications
by Mark Piller
Application analytics is not something you think about when developing a Flex application. However, the importance of being able to analyze user- behavior should not underestimated.
extracting this data in the form of analytics and business intelligence. This article reviews the offerings by Google – Google Analytics and Midnight Coders – RIA Analytics. Both solutions can natively integrate with Flex at the ActionScript level and provide different features for tracking application events and user behavior. User Activity Tracking Monitoring and tracking user activity can be divided into the following three categories: • Tracking UI events – these are the events emitted by various user interface components. They typically represent a user action on a component (clicking, scrolling, typing, etc.). Tracking activity for these events produces results indicating the number of the percentage of users carrying out a particular action. • Tracking non-UI (application logic) events – as an application executes various workflows, it can emit events directly
What you will learn… • Challenges of user behavior tracking in Flex apps • Benefits of analytics for Flex applications • Available solutions for integrating Analytics into Flex • Sample integration ActionScript code
What you should know… • Have an idea about analytics • How to create a Flex application • How to add a 3rd party component to a Flex application project • Understand Flex events
Overview When compared with the traditional HTML- based sites, Flex applications run in a black box. Indeed, once an application is loaded into the browser, users have access to all the facilities without a need for additional page refreshes. As a result, traditional mechanisms for tracking user actions or navigation through an application are no longer applicable as there is no corresponding page fetching. The problem poses a technological as well as a business opportunity and several vendors launched solutions for tracking key metrics within Flex applications and
Level of difficulty
T he number of Flex applications going into production is quickly rising. A well-recognized, Flex- animated download progress bar can now be seen everywhere (unless it has been masterfully skinned RIAs have entered many areas from the enterprise, line-of-business applications to consumer-facing applications that solve productivity problems or add entertainment value. A common thread between all well- done RIAs is the User eXperience (UX) which adds excitement to either the same old boring tasks or introduces completely new approaches for visualizing or working with data. As exciting as production deployment is, it comes with its own challenges. For decision- makers and other managerial types, it is now less important to know that the application IS out there and IS working, but critical to know how well the application runs, if the users can navigate through, if after all the application is generating revenue or succeeds in new user registrations. This article reviews the strategies and technologies used to extract and visualize that kind of information. Welcome to Flex Analytics.
Listing 1. Reporting analytics data using Google Analytics API
xmlns:analytics="com.google.analytics.components.*" id="tracker" account="UA-111-222" mode="AS3" visualDebug="false" /> 03/2009 (5) 16
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