Ask HN: How do you track “flow-breakers” in your application?

3 points·james-revisoai··2 comments

It's easy to track metrics like registrations and key user actions - but when you want to track the path of a user through your app and/or somehow summarize that data into clear points of difficulty (e.g. "after uploading a file and swiping twice, most users leave"), how do you do that?

Is there any open source tooling?

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A lot of analytics funnels do this. You don't always want to just track sales in a funnel. You want to track how many downloaded but don't sign up (acquisition vs activation). Or signing up and logging in vs what they call a golden moment.

Also there's a reason people pay for referring a friend - it's easy to track who cares enough that they'd tell friends.

In the domain of survey design, we refer to these as points where people "drop" out. Surveys are likely more linear in design than an app, even with branching sections, but you might be able to chart out a general flow of actions that you need a user to go through and their linear sequence.

Then summarize the number of users for whom each action was the last one that they completed of the full sequence. You'd then infer that the user dropped out due to something between doing the actions with the highest numbers and the very next action(s) in the chain.

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