Enabling custom Content Management

Increased engagement across 4 core products by empowering content creators with custom segmentation

To build deeper customer relationships, businesses want to understand their customers across the entire lifecycle. Mixpanel saves the day! Businesses can get answers to all their questions in one place. But getting to those powerful insights sometimes needs some fine-tuning. Not all data is perfect.

I led design from research to launch to remove friction in our core product. I focused on content creators who are responsible for bringing data into Mixpanel and setting up content for their teams to monitor. By empowering businesses with custom segmentation, they got more value from Mixpanel without incurring more costs using their existing data. With this solution, we also strengthen Mixpanel’s brand as a trusted, reliable and flexible analytics product.

Team

Services

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ROLE

Why Segmentation Matters

Although Mixpanel offers out-of-the-box segments like age, browser, city…etc, these are pretty generic. Businesses want to be able to define the segment in their own language so its more readable to stakeholders in the organization and actionable for teams. Instead of showing all customers by estimated time of arrival (eta) in minutes, it’s more powerful to see this in 3 categories like early, on-time and late.

From Directions to Beta

From concept testing potential solutions, I learned that businesses want efficiency when a managing data. With this principle in mind, I narrowed down direction to a universal interaction that can be accessible in the same place across all reports in the product: the segmentation menu.

In our beta release, we tested 2 variations. Approach 1 was a 2-step breakdown where customers first define what they wanted to use then typed the transformation. While approach 2 allowed customers to just write freeely the transformation. Abstraction made custom segmentation less intimadating for novice users but for technical users, it was not flexible for complex transformations. For the final version, we moved forward with freeform since the users who create content or implement data were often data scientists with knowledge of SQL.

Sharing Content

It was critical for the right team in the organization to have access to the right segments without overwhelming them with too much custom content. And for administrators to keep visibility of this new content in the Mixpanel Data Management library so they had full transperancy during maintenance and billing discussions.

Custom Segmentation Across Mixpanel

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With custom segmentation, the Mixpanel reports offered more value to teams across an organization. Teams were able to discuss and dissect engagement, rentention and customer journeys in the language unique to the company.

A Lesson in Designing with Data

At Mixpanel, I became more confident in leveraging data to shape direction and to evaluate the impact of design.
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Through retention data, I discovered the patterns leading to friction and value. Engagement data also helped me narrow down which customers to reach out to for concept and usability testing experiments.
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The beauty of using our own product to make decisions is that it also kept me accountable on success and failure. When we launched our beta, I use what I designed to observe engagement, impact and eventually drive decisions with stakeholders. Dogfooding while seeing the data patterns in real time across our suite of products became a new design superpower.
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I can’t wait to apply the power of data to a new epic challenge.