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Introducing User Journeys: Now user engagement is a reliability signal

Virna Sekuj
user flows
22 July 2025 • 4 min read

Engineers have historically faced the challenge of connecting performance and reliability work to real user engagement and business outcomes. While web frontend and mobile engineers have gotten a bigger toolset to track errors and exceptions, resolve crashes, or understand Core Web Vitals, teams often struggle to understand what to prioritize, or what small improvements they should make to help their apps meet user standards. 

That’s why we’re so excited to announce User Journeys, with our User Flows capability launching today.

Just last month we introduced a bold new vision for user-focused observability, and we hinted at the end user journey as being core to our innovation roadmap. This new release represents the first of many platform capabilities that will bring this vision to life. 

Get a closer look at User Flows in our product walkthrough
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User-focused observability starts with a simple question: Can your team confidently measure how performance impacts real user engagement?

Traditional monitoring tools like crash reports, service data, and product funnels offer proxies but rarely show the full user experience. Since the frontend is where people engage directly with technology, observability must evolve to capture the spectrum of interactions that happen there.  

Only with purpose-built, user-focused solutions can teams truly connect technical insights to real human outcomes.

Engineering teams should be asking: 

  • “Do any of our key flows show degraded user engagement since our last release?”
  • “If performance or adoption is poor, is it due to technical issues we introduced, like rendering delays or regressions, or is it usability problems like a confusing UI?”
  • “How can we create a bridge between product analytics and performance data to help us solve reliability issues?
  • “Which exceptions should we prioritize to resolve, based on the ones that actually affect users?”
  • “Does an improvement in content load time help decrease my bounce rate?”

Let’s unpack how you can take advantage of our most powerful platform update to-date:

Understanding Embrace’s User Flows feature

Embrace’s User Flows provides unprecedented visibility into how end user actions correlate with application performance and reliability, bridging the gap between engineering effort and real-world user experience. Instead of a parallel set of instrumentation, User Flows measures completion in the context of actual observability telemetry emitted by your apps, allowing correlation to the specific signals or session attributes that signals users will disengage.

What are User Flows?

User Flows represent segments of application activity that engineers define themselves with totally arbitrary start and end points. They allow you to track sequences of user events (e.g., clicking a search box, reaching a results page) and correlate them to specific outcomes, such as completion or abandonment.

The connection between technical performance and user behaviors

User Flows are designed to solve reliability problems by measuring user activity and engagement as a direct reliability metric, allowing you to understand why users abandon a task. 

Traditional conversion funnels just show completion rates, but User Flows take that a few steps further to actually help with decision-making and troubleshooting. This feature can correlate issues like JavaScript errors, content shifts, or slow API calls to user abandonment, showing if code releases are the root cause of user disengagement. 

This is an entirely new way to integrate two traditionally disparate sources of data and schools of thought – the “product / UX” approach, which hinges completely on behavior and design choices; and the “reliability / observability approach” which focuses only on solving technical performance issues.

The two are inherently connected, as poor performance impacts behavioral choices, often resulting in a search for alternative paths, and vice versa – unexpected patterns of behavior can cause systems to react in suboptimal ways. 

The benefits across the engineering team

User Flows, and the broader User Journeys platform initiative, brings value to teams across the organization, from engineers working on feature development and debugging to operational teams working on system-wide software optimization. 

For engineers:

  • Prioritize performance with confidence: User Flows provide the data to prove how performance improvements directly impact key business metrics, allowing engineering teams to advocate for their work and secure resources.
  • Clearer root cause analysis: Helps reduce the problem space, linking specific technical issues (like a slow trace or a JavaScript error) to the broader context of user behavior and abandonment.
  • A seat at the strategy table: Engineers can now engage in product initiatives and optimization discussions from a value-driven stance, contributing directly to business objectives.
  • Better collaboration across engineering and product: Engineers can articulate to product teams exactly when critical app flows are being abandoned due to user preference vs. technical issues, leading to less guesswork and finger-pointing as to why conversion is down or certain features are not being adopted. 

For operations & business leaders:

  • Accurate reliability metrics: Shift from proxy metrics (like API endpoints) to user-focused reliability signals that reflect actual user experience and success/failure rates.
  • Understand software change impact: See the direct effect of code releases on user engagement and business-critical actions.

Learn more and try it for yourself

User Flows are just the beginning of a wider platform initiative to help engineers monitor, analyze, and optimize the entire end user journey across their products. 

Learn more about User Flows by checking out our docs site, and keep an eye out as we announce additional features and capabilities. 

If you’d like to try User Flows for yourself, start a free trial today!

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Author
Virna Sekuj
Virna Sekuj
Virna Sekuj is a product marketer at Embrace. She has nearly ten years of experience in product management, marketing, and research analysis. Prior to working at Embrace, Virna worked at Bose, Onside Sponsorship, and GWI. In her time with Embrace, she’s used her insight and analysis expertise to lead two research studies polling engineers that have produced two reports — The State of Mobile Experience and The Mobile Developers Pain Points report.
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