Case

Qt

Design, cloud technology, and data analysis – implementing Qt Insight

A global software house expands its software development solution portfolio on a user analytics platform. Qt Insight helps product owners and developers gain new insights into application and smart device users.

The customer

Based in Finland, Qt Group is a global software company whose main product is the Qt software library and development environment. It is used by more than 1.5 million users around the world to create apps and smart devices to meet user needs. Among other things, Qt is used in the cabs of vehicles and earth-moving machinery, entertainment systems, equipment user interfaces in the pharmaceutical industry, home electronics, and as a digital TV platform.

The challenge

To develop apps and smart devices, you need an insight of how the customers will use them. And so, obtaining continuous user data is an important part of the development process. It enables product owners and developers to gain better insights of their customers as well as the ways the products are actually used. It makes it possible to optimize the UX, identify factors that influence service user commitment, reduce the maintenance workload, and cut costs. 

Listening to customers’ wishes gave birth to the idea of Qt’s own analytics platform that enables the scalable collection of user data from millions of apps and smart devices. The collected data is presented to the users in a clear and intuitive way. 

The solution

From the outset, the purpose of the solution was to provide an analytics platform to collect user data from apps and smart devices that use Qt’s software libraries. Monad joined the project already at the specification stage.

Qt Insight is designed from the ground up with a user-centric approach. The goal has been to provide users with relevant information and present it in a clear and understandable manner.

 

Better UX using customer-engaging methods

According to Tapio Haantie, Qt’s Product Business Line Director, Mobile and Desktop, Monad showed a good understanding of the design required for the project. Engaging Qt’s customers made it possible to gain better insights regarding the expectations pertaining to the project. The service and its UX were designed on the basis of data collected from customers to meet their requirements. 

 “From beginning on, it was important for us to have the insight to measure relevant factors and present the collected data in a way that makes daily life easier for the users of our app,” says Haantie. 

Strong knowledge of cloud technologies and data analysis

Qt’s software libraries and software development environment are used globally. For this reason, the analytics solution needs to be able to scale to the data produced by tens of millions of apps and smart devices as well as a high number of simultaneous users. 

The implementation of the solution utilizes cloud service resources as well as open source solutions, making it possible to collect and manage high-quality, detailed, behavioral data. Monad was selected for the project thanks to its cloud competence supported by both solid know-how and proof of data pipelines and platforms as well as data analysis. Monad also had a view on what it takes to build a global, easy-to-scale SaaS solution.

“Monad understood our needs and had the know-how to complement our team, both in terms of design and technical implementation. The nature of our collaboration enabled us to work in an agile way throughout the project. We consciously started to build the collaboration in a way that included the Monad team in our extended team,” says Haantie. 

The results

The result of the collaboration was the Qt Insight analytics solution, designed to provide information on the ways users utilize an app or a smart device. The solution collects data on the performance, use, and user data of the app or device. Qt Insight is Qt’s first SaaS product in the company’s software development solution range.

Via dashboards, reports, and user flow views, Qt Insight provides users with analytics to increase awareness of the ways apps and devices are used. The platform shows how users navigate on devices, helps identify potential pain spots, and provides information about the performance of the app or device. The data produced by Qt Insight helps development teams make decisions related to product development optimization, cutting operating costs, and removing superfluous features.

“Initially, we try to keep the number of features in the solution at a moderate level and strongly invest in the UX. By developing new features for the platform, we can meet the needs of our customers and the industries they represent while simultaneously ensuring the availability of the product. Together with Monad, we have managed to create a user-oriented solution users are always happy to revisit,” says Tapio Haantie. 

Significance 

Demand for solutions like Qt Insight is high; a survey commissioned by the company revealed that the biggest technical hurdle to an innovative UX or UI is a lack of insight regarding the way products are used in daily life. The survey interviewed 250 manufacturers of solutions for the auto industry, health care, consumer electronics, and industrial automation sectors. 

Next Steps

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Antti Riikonen, CEO
+358 50 480 2426
[email protected]

About the company

Qt Group (Nasdaq Helsinki: QTCOM) is a global software company. With the Qt software library and development environment, industry leaders and over 1.5 million developers worldwide are able to create apps and smart devices. The company helps increase productivity throughout the entire product development life cycle from UI design and software development to QA and deployment. Qt’s customers operate in over 70 different sectors in over 180 countries. Qt Group has approximately 700 employees. In 2022, the group had a revenue of EUR 155.3 million. Read more: www.qt.io.