
Introducing Flow from Mixpanel - suhail
http://flow.mixpanel.com
======
JangoSteve
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.

~~~
moe
_As I move my mouse around the circle, the popover follows along on the
perimeter of the circle_

Seconded, this is a terrible design. Scrap the popovers and just display those
4 figures right inside the circle. Save the eye-candy for where it doesn't get
in the way.

~~~
SpiderX
Exactly. I shouldn't have to hover my mouse over everything to see all the
data. Also those tick marks on the outer edge of the circle signify nothing. I
thought perhaps the '6' visitors would be signified by 6 ticks... nope. And
why does the dropoffs have to fade out? That just is confusing. It would be
nice if the dots on the flowchart arrows were proportionally sized to the
traffic flow.

It's like "mystery meat navigation" of statistics. If I care about statistics,
I'm probably comfortable looking at a page full of numbers. Give them to me,
don't make me hover everything.

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masukomi
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.

~~~
martian
This is free because to install it, you must put a link on your page back to
MixPanel. MixPanel likes links because Google likes links: it increases the
domain authority and PageRank for MixPanel. You'll notice that alt text in the
link back to www.pixpanel.com is "Real Time Web Analytics", surely a set of
keywords that MixPanel is aiming to own in search.

This is a very clever and subtle SEO move that provides real benefit to users
at the same time.

~~~
notknifescience
Adding the badge to your site is not at all required to use Flow. We would
like it if you did, so we will give you 4x the page views if you do, but it's
not necessary at all.

------
physcab
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.

~~~
JangoSteve
The Google Analytics version of this feature does let you do this. In case my
other comment mentioning it gets buried, it's called Visitor Flow:
[http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1709395).

In the Google Analytics version, you can view and interact with the flow graph
based on different segments, including "Visits with conversions", "Visits with
transactions", and a bunch of other metrics.

------
shimon
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.

------
immad
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.

~~~
JangoSteve
Not sure how many are unaware, but Google Analytics has had this same feature
for at least a few months (I think) with a different, slightly more fancy, UI.
From the new Analytics dashboard, if you go to Standard Reporting => Audience
=> Visitors Flow, you'll see it.

[http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1709395)

~~~
creamyhorror
I've been using GA's visitor flow for a few months and I still think its
presentation is really neat. It only shows the first 3 pages viewed, at least
on my free account.

I suspect many people still don't know about it, since it wasn't featured
upfront like Mixpanel is featuring Flow here. One of those low-profile
upgrades that is really quite useful but left unmarketed.

edit: Another thing is that GA's flow presents the actual size of flows
visually, whereas Mixpanel's doesn't - the sizes of the circles are based on
step number, and you have to mouseover the small points to see the traffic
flow percentages. I have to say Google's is superior, at this point.

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

~~~
ladon86
It does. Using the new Mixpanel JS library you would call:

mixpanel.track_pageview(window.location.href);

------
kijin
> _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).

------
ROFISH
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.

~~~
faborio
You should try foretaster, it's very close to what you've just described -
<http://www.foretaster.com>

------
ryanglasgow
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>

------
evlapix
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...](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>

------
jazzychad
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?

------
tsunamifury
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.

------
hedgehog
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).

~~~
raylu
Allowing cycles in your graph is confusing. If a user visits pages A -> B -> C
-> A, what is the dropoff between A and B?

------
rubynerd
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

~~~
creamyhorror
Your idea is pretty much exactly what Google Analytics' Visitor Flow does,
complete with 'waste' flow dropping off downwards:

[http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1709395)

Good that you had the idea, though :) Maybe you can apply it profitably in
some other domain.

------
hopeless
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.

~~~
trefn
You can click through on any node to drill down - that might not be as clear
as it could be.

------
guiseppecalzone
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.

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

~~~
suhail
It's separate and free, however the JavaScript you paste is the same for
regular Mixpanel and Flow. So if you already are using Mixpanel then you can
just login.

------
kstenerud
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.

------
Tim-Boss
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!

~~~
trefn
It will be free forever, and integration is almost zero effort - just paste a
snippet of code.

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

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

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

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

