ServiceNow Inc. today announced that it has acquired Appsee Ltd., an analytics startup focused on helping developers understand how users interact with their mobile apps.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. ServiceNow expects to complete the acquisition by the end of the quarter, at which point Appsee’s two co-founders and engineering team will join the company to support product development efforts.

The Tel Aviv-based startup has built an analytics platform that can provide a play-by-play view of what consumers do inside an app. Appsee’s tentpole feature is User Recordings, a tool that visualizes every page, menu and button that a consumer interacts with during an app session in the form of a chronological timeline. It also shows the number of seconds that the user spends on each step.

Another capability, Touch Heatmaps, allows developers to see if consumers interact with certain parts of an app more frequently than others. This feature can be used to identify sections of the interface that may be lacking in the design department and require further optimization.

On top of enabling developers to analyze individual app sessions, Appsee provides a high-level dashboard that displays trends and usage statistics across an app’s entire user base. An e-commerce company, for instance, could use this part of the platform to identify the most common reasons for cart abandonment. Developers can also set up alerts to notify them when key usage metrics change.

ServiceNow plans to use Appsee to find ways of improving the interface of its flagship Now Platform. The offering is comprised of cloud-based tools that help enterprises automate their technical support operations, related information technology tasks and certain other workflows such as managing field technicians. Companies can also build custom services atop the Now Platform to apply its automation features to additional use cases. 

“With Appsee, ServiceNow will be able to optimize its own mobile apps and desktop web experiences to bring consumer grade mobile experiences to our customers,” Boaz Hecht, a senior director of product management at ServiceNow, said in a statement. “Over time, customers using the Now Platform will be able to better analyze how their end users are using the Now Platform to make their work simpler and easier.”

Image: ServiceNow