Some time ago I worked for a casual games firm on a fairly extensive consultancy project.  One of the particular lessons which stuck with me from this engagement was the way that firms can use existing data to improve usability (UX) and then turn that into cash.

The work I initiated involved data mining to get the ‘hardness’ of levels from their existing data.  The metrics were simple: players entering level minus players leaving level = players who died on level.  This is a vital piece of information to know, because it shows when former customers got bored, gave up, and stopped playing (or paying!)

We graphed the data resulting, and showed an exponential decay, as you’d expect.  Earlier levels lost more players than later levels, as the most established players were more committed.  However, we identified several ‘spikes’ where the ‘hardness’ of a level was out of kilter with those before or after.  By amending these levels to make them a bit easier, we killed off the bottlenecks which were killing the players, and the revenue stream.

I’ve used this approach in later work with games firms, but it’s applicable elsewhere.  Metrics are gold dust, and you need to mine them for all they’re worth.