Introducing Flow from Mixpanel

I like the simplicity of the UI overall, but I'm always surprised when people go through the trouble to make certain interactions really fancy when the less fancy version would be both better for the user and easier to implement.

In this case, the little popover when I hover over a circle. As I move my mouse around the circle, the popover follows along on the perimeter of the circle, and I must hover over the (hopefully) tiny red piece to get the dropoff stats.

Given the small amount of data being shown in the popover, why not show me the stats for "continued" + "dropoff" in the same popover and just place it to the right of the circle? No fanciness needed, and it'd be more usable.

Why is this free?

Is this a loss-leader to get people to sign up for the full Mixpanel service?

These days I just don't trust free services. I don't think there's anything nefarious about them, I just don't trust that they're going to be around in a year (why keep running a service that has costs but no revenue), or that they won't get bought for their talent and promptly shut down.

If it uses resources to any significant degree (a JS on every page load can definitely do that when used at scale) there should either be a fee or a damn good reason why I should put my faith in it, especially if you're asking me to base business decisions / process on it.

This is neat looking, but I'm not sure how actionable it is. Of course there is going to be a drop-off of users as they drill down. That happens in almost every funnel situation. Also, this doesn't seem to account for other factors that may be to blame. What happens if you stop your marketing? What if you pushed a new version the night before?

What is most illuminating for a chart like this is seeing these numbers as a total % of activations/daily users/daily visitors over time. That way, you can see if a particular change you made (such as doing some landing page optimization) actually increased conversions which is ultimately what you're trying to look at in something like this.

I'm a paying customer of Mixpanel. I like Flow. My biggest request is the same as the biggest request for the rest of Mixpanel: remove the wall between page views and other events. A flow of pages is nice but a flow of events might really teach me something new about my users.

This is the coolest thing I have seen in Analytics for a long time. This really gets to the heart of most of the information you need on user flows and its fast and clear.

Can't wait till they add events to this.

Does this work for single-page javascript applications using html5 pushStates or hash-bang URLs?

> Follow your users every step of the way

Cyberstalking at its finest!

As analytics tools get more and more sophisticated, one question keeps bugging me. Are companies lying when they say in their privacy policy that they will not share user data with anyone except when compelled to do so by law, and then paste a couple of lines of third-party analytics code in their footers?

It's not uncommon for Ghostery to alert me about 5-10 third-party tracking tools on a single page. Some companies mention analytics explicitly in their privacy policy. But many websites don't. Privacy paranoia aside, I'm curious about the legal aspect of using analytics tools, and whether Mixpanel makes any effort to help its customers comply with relevant regulations (if necessary).

Flow looks nice but it doesn't show what I want out of analytics, which is link sources and conversions. What I would like to see is flows like:

CPC ad click -> Product Page (secondary goal: email signup) -> Cart -> (time passes) -> Googled "product" -> Product Page -> (time passes) -> email click -> Product Page -> Cart Page -> Payment (primary goal)

I want to see is where people come from, where they went, and why it works. In the example above, the thing that worked was email reminder. It gets even worse when referers are involved, and blog posts don't remove the utm_campaign=email link.

Basically, I'd like a backwards flow from individual conversions.

Overall the visual design is nice but this doesn't seem very practical.

Issues:

1) Requires too much effort (rolling over hover states) to dig out information.

2) Pairing circles and rectangles as a node make it hard to parse when your eyes are scanning the page. These shapes don't naturally go together.

3) URL's are truncated too short. On the bottom left of the live demo, you see "/account/listi..." twice, and they're actually different URL's. For some websites I can see this becoming a major issue.

4) The rounded circular graphs with the blue and red look nice, but doesn't convey the information very well. Any type of circular chart (pie chart, tachometer graphs, etc.) is not recommended.

Suggestions: I would consolidate the information for each node and show all of the visible and rollover data into a single box. Use varying font sizes, colors, and weights for necessary emphasis. Instead of the circular graphs, use a horizontal bullet graph[1] along the top of each node. Use the bullet graph to display the historical high and low as the bar, and the daily range as the background (or vice versa). This way, the user can scan the page looking at the bullet graphs along the top, and then if something strikes there eye as unusual look below and examine the data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_graph

Awesome. I've been wanting to see this in analytics for a long time. Not because I would use it, but because I thought it made the most sense. I came across this article on HN a while back that seems to hint at the same thing: http://www.contrast.ie/blog/the-future-of-analytics-products...

I believed it was such a necessity that I worked on building a MVP for about a year, but then gave it up a few months ago. The project was way outside my technical ability even after all that I learned and I had absolutely no experience with analytics in general. It was a bad decision to work on it for any period of time, let alone a year. Especially since I had other ideas that I was better suited to build and believed more in.

Now all that's left of the project is a demo video I put together for a job application. This isn't really what I had in mind then, but what the hell...

Show HN: Real-time, visual, click-path, analytics (pathtrends.com) http://vimeo.com/27327367

Feature request: Please let me have multiple simultaneous URL Groups (or if this is already possible, I can't figure out how to do it). It also wasn't very clear that the URL Groups aren't stored, so I have to re-enter them each time depending on what data I'm viewing? Or am I mixed up there, too?

Well this sure looks really cool, but it strikes me as really over designed. Getting at information requires a large number of clicks and hovers over very specific areas.

It is also hard to get a sense of any 'big picture' data. Datapoints are trapped in hover interactions and you have a limited view of your site due to the canvas.

While line graphs are bar charts aren't very cool looking, they provide an enormous amount of visual economy. I care more about the speed of which I can consume big picture and detailed information than my ability to visualize my site map.

This is beautiful. It would be nice to be able to collapse pages together or somehow view cycles. On sites where users tend to have long sessions the graph of site traversal has cycles which may themselves be as interesting as how users exit a given page. For example if you have a group of desirable actions (say you have a site with shopping and user-user messaging) and you want to roll up the exits (collapse the above pages together and find out how much in users are falling out of those pages into help).

It looks pretty, the example looks pretty slick, but, it's not all that easy to use in a hurry, and I'm not even sure history exists

It shows a very good 'State of the Machine' at the current moment in time, but it does feel slightly like candy

One major, major thing I would add to convert this into something I would use for my 'strtup' is time, and the ability to see what happened at a time, or event

I am basing this on the 'live demo', but it seems like a report on what's happening now, which isn't really that useful in the grand scheme of things. For instance, if I drop a new feature or blog post on HN, I want to see what effect that will have on my application, and what users do and where they go after first opening that email or clicking on that link

This may seem insane, but I promise I am going somewhere. In my GCSE Physics exam, we were given energy diagrams, and told to do things with them like fill in the blanks. On the left, there was a kind of 'origin', which represented the energy given out by an object. So say a lightbulb gives out 80% light, and 20% heat energy, that would be represented by a 10cm wide arrow on the left hand side, which then breaks into a 8cm wide arrow pointing right, and a 2cm wide arrow breaking off from the main chunk and pointing downwards, to represent waste energy.

This loops back into analysis, say when Flow was first posted onto HN. You could break that down into signups, showing where people dropped off, what pages they viewed and where they went from there, and then render that in a pretty diagram, hopefully showing you where the friction points are

I do also have two minor issues I picked up on from Flow, and I suppose Mixpanel

Given it's a free product, which may or may not have the aim of pushing users into Mixpanl, I could not find any obvious links to https://mixpanel.com on the main page. Which was kind of sad, I wanted to read more about Mixpanel and what the bread-making product does, and how it sustains this free app

Secondly, I emailed Mixpanel back in January asking about details for an internship. Since then, I have received a grand total of nothing from them. Which is sad, metrics and user statistics are two things I thoroughly enjoy, and I would love to work with Mixpanel to build things like this

I found the UI very pretty (I had to check it wasn't Flash) but a bit confusing and limited:

- Only shows 3 flow destinations at a time (and I nearly missed the scroll buttons)

- Had to mouseover to get percentages. I don't know why why percentages seem more useful to me than actual numbers

- It didn't feel very "actionable". I can't put my finger on why, but I wasn't sure what I'd do with this diagram.

It's really difficult to get a good sense of how a user moves throughout your site. So, I think this could be amazing.

As a next step, they should allow you to click on one of the nodes and turn that page into a cohort. Then, we could analyze the impact of our improvements. That'd be sick.

Is this a part of complete Mixpanel service or is it something separate?

Very difficult to use on iPad. You end up drilling down when you try to touch the circle for the pop-up. It's also hard to hit the red part of the circle.

How long is this going to be free for? Hate to convert a some websites to it, only to have to move on again in a few months!

Awesome UI - Nicely done. Fancy UX always has its limitations but also serve as exploration into future trends, etc.

This is very intuitive! Graphical representations are always better than data in such use cases, IMHO.

Interesting, they just mask listia.com's data for their example.

It'd be great to be able to segment logged in/out users.