User Flows in practice

Think about the last time you attended a concert, show, or other live event. You likely had a ticket that loaded in your browser, or had to be in the event host’s mobile app to give proof of purchase.

Imagine if you created that app, and it didn’t work! Worse yet, what if it was a roadside assistance call in an insurance app you built? We use apps as part of our daily lives, and ensuring that they “just work” is a key part of reliability.

With client issues, users certainly would be frustrated, but would you know based on API endpoint metrics? User Flows are an ideal use case for this kind of issue, where users are trying to accomplish a goal in the real world that only makes sense from a client perspective.

Using the instrumentation you already gather in Embrace, you can start and end the User Flow from the user’s perspective to determine how reliable the performance is. Maybe the flow starts when the ticket is visible to the user on-screen. Maybe it ends when the success signal from a tap-to-pay scanner completes a span.

By envisioning what can go wrong for a user trying to perform an everyday task, you can determine what signals from the web or mobile app to use and find out what happened to them.

Think about how you buy things: likely through an app. If you’re building that app, don’t you want to know what might have gotten in the way of that purchase? It’s your revenue, after all.

User Flows can break the purchase flow down into distinct areas to measure for reliability purposes. Why break it down? App users don’t always proceed from “I want it” to “I bought it” in a linear manner. Don’t you want to connect the entire journey?

Here, note that it’s important to have separate User Flows that measure segments of activity, like everything involved in adding an item to a cart, or loading previously-stored shipping information, or setting payment details.

Then, when product and engineering teams are sorting through critical questions like

• “Why are users who check out from a product page less-successful than users who check out directly from their cart?” or
• “Does a payment detail caching issue affect user success?”

you have the technical details to find out exactly what happened.

Other apps have core functions that exist neither to assist in real-life nor to buy things, but are still vital parts of our lives. Think about messaging apps, or social media interactions. Can you plan vacations if you aren’t able to put images together in folders for inspiration?

For apps like these, where app activity is itself the measure of business success, client-side performance drives all key performance indicators. Being able to ensure a reliable messaging experience keeps users in a messaging app, so measure and dissect that experience!

User Flows let you break down the dimensions that affect your user experience, whether those are device operating systems, active A/B tests, or just how network conditions interrupted a user’s ability to like a picture.

User Journeys are Embrace’s highly-opinionated approach to client-side observability, focusing on what happened to users from the deepest technical level.

User Flows are the building blocks of User Journeys, creating meaning out of signals from thousands or even millions of sessions.  If you’re looking to get started with User Flows, ask yourself:

“What’s the most important question I have about our app that affects users?”