Heap allows you to see how a feature is used and how it influences other actions, enabling you to decide whether to prioritize a feature or nix it.

Check if the feature is being used

Heap’s Event Visualizer allows you to see what percent of users are using a feature on a weekly basis with a simple click. No need to include all features on a tracking plan – with Heap’s retroactivity, you can decide to define an event on the spot and immediately get access to complete historical data for that event. To ensure you are correctly targeting an element, check out our guide for creating and managing events.

Gathering this information gives you an overview on what actions are important to users within the product. If you see no one is using an element, you can safely make the decision to get rid of it and reduce the codebase you have to maintain.

Who is using the feature?

A good way to look at an element’s use is to Graph it. You can view event counts and unique users over time by adjusting the date range, granularity, and toggling the unique checkbox. You can adjust your analysis to focus on properties captured automatically or any custom event properties you’ve defined by either filtering for or grouping by the property name. For example, if you defined a Search event, and captured the search term using Snapshots, you can view the most frequently searched words by:

Step 1: Graphing the Count of the Search Event

Step 2: Grouping by search_term

Step 3: Adjusting your view to a table

Once you build out a cohort based on behaviors, you can also analyze an event for a specific subset of users by applying a filter for In Segment X. Explore this segment of users further by including a Group by In Segment X statement to your graph. This will allow you to compare the actions of a particular group of users with the actions of others.

You can also analyze who a feature is important to based on user-level properties. For example, you can pass unique user-level properties such as plan type via our addUserProperties API. Group by plan type in the graph to see how many of your highest-paying customers are interacting with an element. If your largest customers are using a feature, it might make sense to bump the priority.

How do events compare?

Once you know what features are being used, you can compare event counts to prioritize using a multigraph. Simply click on the plus sign next to the event to compare different interactions. You can add filters to a multigraph to look at a certain segment of users.

For more information, check out our blog post on how we used Heap to define our own product roadmap!