I joined Mixpanel to continue making delightful tools that empower teams with data superpowers. In the core experiences team, I researched, concepted and designed new ways for Consumers (nontechnical audiences) to engage with their data intuitively.
Over the years, Mixpanel has become more challenging for non technical Consumers to traverse. At Mixpanel, the Consumer segment represents product teams, executives and even designers who don’t have a background in SQL to write fancy queries. When something catches their eye on a dashboard and they want want to dig deeper, they hit a roadblock. Where they see patterns is not the same place where they can learn about customer. This context is necesary to design better marketing campaigns and/or tailor A/B test experiments.
Unlike data scientists, Consumers expect a seamless experience when diving into their data. Ideally: no query and no mazes. After testing multiple concepts from delivering curated reports on Slack to surfacing interesting patterns across an organization (questions teams are asking), I moved forward to experiment with interactive charts in Insights because most teams already have rich content (reports) set up within Mixpanel.
In the midst of this project, our design systems team was evolving the product layout. I worked with our team to proposed a flexible side panel and new chart components that would also scale to other product areas. Our brand designer helped us create a set of delightful avatars to humanize profiles and pique Consumers’ curiosity.
The new consolidated workflow in Insights helped Consumers understand the depth of user engagement in seconds. No more tedious hours trying to write a SQL query. Or waiting on someone to do it for them.
Gathering insights from an audience that doesn’t use the product often presented a new opportunities.
I found myself with limited data unable to answer questions like why/how this new segment will use or want to use Mixpanel. Mixpanel was designed for data scientists who understood well how to write queries to get answers to their questions.
I introduced the team to attitudinal and qualitative methods with the goal of expanding our repetoire of methods when data doesn’t exist. I ran workshops, interviews and co-design sessions with customers. These examples helped the Engineering, Product and Design organization understand better the role of user research in the design process, influenced designers to think broader in terms of approaches and fruitful discussions on sharing insights across the organization.
I’m proud that this work inspired our team to hire a full-time user researcher to complement our quantitative methods.
