19 Jan 2024
Belle
Exist annual survey 2023
It's the start of a new year, so it's time to summarise the results of our annual user survey for Exist.
Top ways to find Exist include search, related services, and Reddit. 24% of survey responders found Exist through searching for something like it, 13% from a related service like RescueTime or Todoist, and 11% from Reddit. Articles and blog posts also accounted for 11%.
User numbers were stable across platforms. 44% of survey responders use Exist for Android, 46% use Exist for iOS, and 6% use both—almost exactly the same numbers as last year. Just 9 people said they don't use any of our mobile apps.
Reasons for using Exist were also stable, with 56% choosing "Seeking insights to understand orchange my behaviour" and 30% choosing "Keeping all my data in one place". These numbers are very close to last year's survey.
The most popular use for manual tracking and custom tags was tracking emotions, mental health, or social interactions on 63%. 57% of respondents use these features to track "data relating to illness, symptoms, medications, or physical health", and 48% track "data relating to work, productivity, or other output (e.g. hobbies)". Less popular ways to use manual tracking included food and diet data on 33%, activity and exercise data on 29%, and sleep data on 22%.
The biggest problem respondents have with Exist is wanting more data analysis. 35% of people chose this option, which is very similar to last year.
23% of people chose "Too much effort to track tags, mood, or manual attributes, or trouble remembering to do so", which is up from 15% last year. In previous years, this option (sans manual tracking) came in at 21% and 25%, so either last year was an anomaly or something's changed recently to make this option grow again.
"Not enough integrations that I personally use" dropped from 19% last year to 16% this year, and "Nothing! All is fine" went from 17% to 14%. The free-form answers to this question mostly related to data analysis, as well.
If we could only focus on one thing for the next year, 37% of users would choose longer-term data analysis. "More features for custom tags" (such as sub-groups and merging tags) came in second with 20%, "More ways to view data in mobile apps" had 14%, and 13% chose "More personalisation" (such as choosing what's on your dashboard and setting your own goals). This question didn't feature on last year's survey.
The user survey helps us get direct feedback from our users about what's working well and where we can improve Exist. This year's survey had few surprises, with a lot of the results stable across the past couple of surveys. We confirmed that we should focus on going deeper on analysing the data we have, and finding new ways to display your data and surface trends and insights.
We also want to focus on improving the usability of Exist over the next year, making it easier to find what you're looking for and to understand how Exist works.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey this year! We also got lots of useful feedback in the free-form notes section, as always.
And thanks to all our Exist users for supporting us for another year.