Mixpanel Now Funnels Into The Past | Hacker News Reader

Mixpanel Now Funnels Into The Past

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34 pointslightcatcher20 comments

Bridging the gap between good data and good UI is a massive challenge. I'm genuinely impressed by what they built here.

Funny, and kissmetrics added cohort analysis this past week. Glad to see the competition between kissmetrics and mixpanel creating better products for us!

This is a really good point outside the UI argument. Even the big players don't offer true cohort analysis without all sorts of data manipulation/

They're getting close to completely solving my problems. I just need "aggregate" or "meta" events.

On Hacker News for example you could do:

"Vote" OR "Submit URL" OR "Comment" = "User Contribution"

Does Segmentation solve this problem for you? http://blog.mixpanel.com/2011/07/20/introducing-much-better-...

I don't think so. I want to treat any of N events as one virtual event and still treated like just one step on the funnel.

Don't think I can do that with segmentation, can I?

Ah, our backend supports that but our UI does not.

I hope you add it! I think KISSmetrics has it (which I don't like for other reasons).

What's the business need for tunneling into past data?

Today's conversion may be the result of an ad click 2 months ago. Now you can create the funnel that starts at that ad click and see that. The new report looks identical to KISSMetrics' funnels.

And that's a shame. I'd love to see a different way to look at funnels. It looks more like a feature added to remove objections from using mixpanel vs. kissmetrics rather than one that was more organically grown.

Nope, we surveyed around and 10 out of 11 of are big funnel analysis customers liked a greyscale version of the horizontal funnels.

This had nothing to do with removing objections =)

There might be emergent funnels that you didn't instrument, but appear after seeing an app in the wild. You also sometimes get funnels that emerge off of deep-link referrals that you didn't predict for.

Anyhow: this is super smart, and having been on the side of the table where we were trying to get Omniture to do things like this, I'd much prefer a light and agile product like this than that behemoth.

Would it be cool if the tool could detect/suggest/visualize such emerging funnels based on aggregation of all clickpaths?

Self organization is always cool. I imagine if you fed click paths into a Kohonen algorithm as different dimensions you'd get some interesting maps.

Is it just me or does this look EXACTLY like Kissmetrics? It seems like it is a complete replica down to minute details, like how it's shaded, where dropdowns are placed, etc.

For reference: Kissmetrics UI (this is slightly old, mixpanel actually looks more like it now): http://s3.amazonaws.com/entp-tender-production/assets/0a7aa9...

Mixpanel: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3446069/Screenshots/7o.png

EDIT: wow, thanks for the downvotes... care to explain?

I didn't downvote you, but it's not EXACTLY alike in any way... just clearly inspired, and I don't think there's anything wrong with offering the same report as another reporting tool.

Design is always about the details.

Email me suhail@mixpanel.com and I'll be happy to give you a run down of 10 things that make our UI substantially different. Alternatively, feel free to play with both products and get a sense of it yourself.

It turns out that certain elements just work best for certain things. A bar chart is probably just the best way of showcasing that kind of data.

This happens all the time. People like standards (like logo on the top left). It makes the user feel more comfortable = win for UX!

I know founders of both companies. I don't think they mind the similarity if it means their users are better off.

This was the first thing that came to my mind after reading about it. I guess has to do more with the particular format working best.

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