Real-time web and mobile analytics provider Mixpanel has just released its new service, Flow. If you were looking for a beautiful and easy to read presentation of user activity on your site, this one is for you.
Flow is a way for customers to find out where visitors to their site are going, what they click on and where they go next within a page. It also shows where people drop off so user engagement can be improved.
“The most striking thing about flow is how beautiful it is,” says SuhailDoshi, Co-Founder of Mixpanel. In comparison with Google Analytics, Flow does appear to be easier to read. Displaying the ‘funnels’ of user interaction in a downward scroll is somewhat easier to navigate than the left to right scroll on the Google page.
All of the Flow results are in-real time and as you browse, you can highlight the nodes for extra information and click through the stream to the next step for even more detail.
Revealing site problems
“We discovered an issue which is an epidemic across the web,” says Doshi. “It wasn’t something we anticipated we’d use Flow for, but it’s something we learned along the way. It’s the log in page.”
In Doshi’s example, Flow displayed user movement that repeatedly returned to the log in page of Mixpanel. This pointed to a problem for users trying to get in, repeatedly.
“We see a section of that traffic go to the log in page again and again,” says Doshi. “It’s not that surprising when you think about it, it means that a large portion of users are having trouble logging in. They’re relentless, users will try up to thirteen times before they give up and then realise they need to recheck their password. Through this process, you’re losing engagement.”
Mixpanel sees this is a big problem for companies at the moment and have observed the same activity within the flow of their customers.
“Facebook have a really good solution for this,” observes Doshi. “They notice the activity and send you an email saying, ‘we are see you are having trouble logging in” and in that email, the one you signed up with, they provide a button to log you in without that password. They’re very pro-active about it.”
As a result, of looking at Mixpanel’s own data on Flow, Doshi had his engineers also provide a solution to the log in problem so that it is less likely to lose engagement.
Flow is free for everyone to use and has been added to the tool-kit for existing Mixpanel customers. Just sign in, add the code to your site and you can start to play with the data. It’s a testament to Mixpanel’s focus on design and user experience that Flow may have you playing with your data for hours.
➤Flow
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