Community Tip Jar: Keeping Up With Your Users

My Tip for Keeping Up With Your Users

I'll start off with a few tips I use pretty regularly in my own apps (and used quite a bit back in my Care days) to help keep my app users organized. Sometimes the best place to start is familiarizing yourself with who is using your app today, and luckily your app's user table is a great place to start. 

Your App's User Table

The User table of your app serves as a current roster of all users who you have invited to the app or set specific statuses for (this can include users who you added at some point but gave a role of 'none' or changed their access to 'none'). This way you can see who is accessing your data and in what role they are in the app. In that report you can even sort those users by a few handy fields like "Last Visited" or "Access via" so you can learn more about when a user last accessed the app or if they received an invite directly or because they are part of a group you invited to the app.

There are even some handy filters along the side that can let you narrow your search down to just users in a specific role (great for figuring out who your fellow app admins are) or finding users who have a certain status. If you haven't given them a try yet now might be a great time to get familiar with the options available to you since I've only highlighted a few.

Identifying Users That Haven't Been Active

For a lot of apps that grow over time their user list can grow very quickly for a few users to tens or hundreds of users. That can make user management a bit more daunting, especially as more time passes.

One best practice is to periodically pull up your users table and for any of your users who have "Access via" the option Individual sort them based on their Last Visit day and identify your users who haven't been on (for a really active app maybe in the last 3 months or the last year for an app that doesn't get used every day). This can help you identify users who aren't actually using the app or who have left your company and could be removed. Once you have that list you can touch base with your team and see if some of these users need to be removed to help simplify managing your users and also to help keep your data secure in Quick Base by making sure users who have moved on from your team get removed. 

To go along with this tip you might notice that your users who have "Access Via" Membership in a group don't show their last access, this is because they are using the groups permissions to access the app so it isn't tracked in the same way. If you are curious about your groups activity you would want to get in touch with the members of that group and the admin of that group to make sure it is up to date if you are seeing names that shouldn't be in your app any more. This way you can be sure you are staying up to date with who is using the app and make sure your roster doesn't get so big it is out of control. 

I can't wait to hear your tips on how you stay connected with your users and manage the users for your app!