Paths Deprecation & Journeys Adoption

Challenge

In Sept 2022, Heap launched Journeys as a replacement to Paths. It was a better way to visualize user flow through one’s app/website. My challenge was to first deprecate Paths, then successfully enable users of Paths to adopt Journeys.

My Role

I propose voice and tone for the deprecation comms, conducted research to understand the workflow needs of Paths users so as to establish parity in Journeys. I also led strategy and prioritization of Journeys enhancements

Outcomes

  • Successfully curbed any churn from users of Paths.

  • Journeys was well adopted - # of users running 2 or more Journeys queries in a single session increased from 21% to 40%

Final Product

The most significant improvement we made as part of this project, was the introduction of a feature called Show Common Paths which lets users visualize - with a single click - the 2 most common paths users take through the product after starting a session.

 
 
 

Context

In September 2022, Heap launched the MVP of Journeys, a way to visualize user paths through your product. It was launched with the intention of fully replacing Paths, an older less robust and more visually “noisy” tool.

In January 2023, Heap started migration to a new data platform, which wouldn’t support the older Paths. However, we couldn’t pull the plug on Paths until we had ensured that users of Paths were able to do their jobs elsewhere in Heap - specifically within Journeys.

An example of the Journeys visualization

An example of the Paths visualization

 

Goals

Our goals here were twofold:

  • Complete deprecating Paths by Oct 2023 with 0 churn from those users

    • 41% of paying accounts that were regular Paths users, and it was only fair to assume that they would be a churn risk.

  • Support workflows of Paths users in Journeys

    • We knew we had to build capability for one feature present in Paths and not in Journeys, and that was measuring user flows into a conversion event.

    • 24% of all Paths queries were user flows into a conversion event

 

Milestones

This is what those goals meant for me in terms of design milestones (M#):

  • M1: Ownership of in-app deprecation comms

  • M2: Build support for “reverse” Journeys (i.e. users flowing into a conversion event)

  • M3: Enable workflow parity for Paths users, in Journeys:

    • I launched a user research study to understand HMW (how might we) build workflow parity in Journeys

    • A few ideas came out of that study, which I proceeded to work with an engineer to do design “spikes” on

    • Together with the product manager, I prioritized these “spikes”, determined which one we will work on in order to deliver workflow parity.

 

M1 - Deprecation Comms

A big part of designing digital experiences has to do with writing thoughtful and intentional in-app copy. When it comes to feature deprecation, the tone and timing of our messaging plays a crucial role in the experience we eventually give our customers. We should try to mitigate the pain of the change we’re introducing, while gently protecting our relationship with our users. Here’s where we landed on the final in-app notice:

Deprecation notice on the component level

Deprecation notice when a user visits a Paths chart

 

M2 - Supporting “Reverse” Journeys

This was already known as Paths into and Paths out of in the erstwhile Paths visualization tool. Calling this feature in the UI as Journeys Into and Journeys Out Of would’ve been the easy solution, but would have made little sense to newer, less data mature users of Heap.

The challenges for me here were to address:

  • How might we help users understand which event is being used as the frame of reference (i.e. kept constant) when you switch between visualizing a Journeys into or out of?

  • How can we remove choice paralysis and help them decide when they should be using into vs. out of?

I made the case for a different dropdown style - one that would help users visualize both what the outcome of their choice would be and give them the context necessary to make that choice.

 

M3 - Enabling Workflow Parity

We spoke to 14 paying customers and users of Paths, to undersatnd what they liked and disliked about Paths and Journeys, and how we could help them replicate those workflows in Paths, within Journeys.

Show Common Paths

The main pain point users had was Journeys didn’t provide a meaningful starting point. It was a blank canvas, inspired nothing, and was a stark contrast to our whole product positioning - Illuminating data insights. I sought to challenge that by asking how we can leverage data science to lower the barrier of entry to do a Journeys analysis, while simultaneously giving users a valuable look at their data:

What you see above is the result of the following design choices, intentionally made to help users get started more easily within Journeys:

  • The built-in “Session” prefilled: if a user lands in an empty journeys. If they were already doing some analysis and switch between tabs, then we will prefil with the 1st event in any of those analysis modules

  • The “View results” call-to-action will read as “Show common paths” and function slightly differently when there’s only a single input in the journey. Clicking it will generate a visualization that shows 3 - 5 of the most common paths a user took from or into an event of interest. 

  • Power users’ workflows are not expected to be affected by any of these changes because there’s a near net zero change on the number of clicks or cognitive load on this screen. Very nuanced, but hopefully powerful in helping users with their hesitation in using journeys.

 
 

Results

The introduction of Show Common Paths generated the most visible, significant improvement in the adoption of Journeys.

The metric for adoption was how many users run 2+ Journeys queries in a single session - excluding any queries run after clicking “Show Common Paths”- because that would be cheating!

Also, no customers churned because of us deprecating Paths, so that was also an additional win.