Exploring Everyday Features

Recently, the design team at Pendo has been looking into our filtering functionality and the user behavior around finding and organizing data in Pendo. Filtering is critical across three main pages of our UI, and it’s heavily used by our customers daily. While we sat around our desks discussing the current feature and asking each other questions about importance, we remembered we can just pull up Pendo for insights to help our discussion. By tagging features in Pendo, I was able to turn on the heat map for any page and get a general sense for how users interact with our filter bar.

While filtering currently persists across a variety of our pages, I decided to focus on the ‘Guides List’ page, as this was the main topic of our discussion. I created a trend report with our secondary filters to better compare the overall usage. At first glance, it clearly looks like one filter is being used significantly more than the others.

But the more I thought about this page, I realized I hadn’t added search to my report. This feature had yet to be tagged specifically on the guides page . Using retroactive analytics, I easily tagged that feature and added it to my trend chart.

What I quickly learned was that search was actually the most commonly used feature. And while it makes sense that it is heavily used, I didn’t anticipate in context the high usage over other filtering.

As we move forward with design conversations and eventually talk to customers, this insight arms me with some great questions and a starting point for who to reach out to — with trends, I’m able to click into a chart and identify high usage users. One of my top goals with user interviews will be to better understand the high search behavior and why it’s successful in comparison to other filters. I also hope to learn of any current pain points.