User experience is a reliability signal: User Journeys webinar recap

For too long, frontend observability has been a struggle for engineering and product teams. Developers often grapple with a laundry list of problems, such as crashes, network failures, and error logs, that are difficult to connect to specific app features or user intention. 

There simply hasn’t been the right tool for the job. Traditional backend reliability tools offer limited insight into the actual user experience. Product analytics tools offer high-level context on user engagement, but lack the technical granularity to explain why users might be dropping off. 

This disconnect puts teams in silos, making product decisions based on assumptions rather than data, and ultimately leading to wasted engineering effort.

User Journeys are designed to solve this problem by being opinionated about mobile and web telemetry. They create a shared language between Product and Engineering by directly connecting frontend telemetry, like Core Web Vitals and exceptions, to real user behavior and business KPIs.

The building blocks of User Journeys are User Flows. A User Flow is defined as a specific task a user completes, such as “Product Search” or “Checkout.” By tracking completion rates, error rates, and abandon rates for these flows, teams can measure business value starting from the technical layer. This approach abstracts away the raw signal granularity, allowing teams to see performance through the user’s eyes. It’s about making engagement a primary reliability signal.

By contextualizing, correlating, segmenting, and discovering issues within the User Journey framework, teams can move from managing a mountain of disparate data to having high-level knowledge that directs them to the problem’s root cause. The future of the product is driven by engineers with the best tools to drive product engagement through technical data.

User Journeys empower the entire organization to focus resources where they matter most, improving completion rates of critical user tasks. User Journeys give a shared understanding of the user experience to all stakeholders: product teams, frontend engineers, SREs, and engineering management. 

By looking at the same key indicators, teams can have meaningful conversations describing the link between high-level business impact and technical details.

All teams speaking the same language, with the same data, which makes engagement a shared reliability signal:

• Product Managers (PM): They can connect user drop-offs directly to a technical issue, not just a bad UX pattern, enabling them to go to the engineering team with data to investigate the issue, rather than pointing fingers or making assumptions.
• Engineering Managers (EM): They can track the features their teams own (like “checkout”) and use User Flows to distinguish when abandonment is due to a technical problem (error) versus a user-chosen abandonment, improving their accountability and collaboration with the PM.
• Individual Developers (IC): They can easily isolate issues relevant to their limited part of the app (e.g., “product search”) and get the full context (technical and behavioral) in one tool, allowing them to troubleshoot efficiently and gauge performance.
• Site Reliability Engineers (SRE): They can move beyond proxy metrics and quickly understand how a performance issue (like a slow search suggestion endpoint) is impacting real users and prioritize triaging based on actual user impact and business value.

Upcoming features for User Journeys focus on richer insights, broader tool integration, and enhanced visualization. Already, we’ve made a great deal of progress in making User Journeys easier for everyone in the Embrace dashboard.

Since the posting of this webinar, we’ve added more ergonomy to User Journeys, so teams can use User Flows in all the places they expect to: 

• we’ve added more start and end events for dashboard users when defining User Flows, so that the definitions of a User Flow fits the conception that teams have.
• User Flows are available in alerts and metrics, so you can get direct notification about performance dips and form higher-level opinions about the reliability of your user experience.
• teams can filter telemetry across our product by the User Flow that an issue or session occurs in.

In future development, we are focusing on a few key ideas:

• Stitching Flows into Journeys: Adding a visual builder to stitch together multiple User Flows into longer, multi-step User JourneysJourneys, letting teams look at dropoffs across a complete process.
• Issue Heatmaps: Provides issue-by-event heatmaps and profiling to help find common problems quickly.
• Pattern Analysis: Introduction of ML-backed pattern analysis, attribute, and issue clustering for richer insights into temporal patterns and correlations.

We’re excited for the opportunities User Journeys create for engineering, product, and design organizations all working together. To learn a little more about how User Journeys work, read our documentation or follow along in our walkthrough video. To watch the webinar, you can view it on Youtube.