See How Users Move Through Your App: User Flow Analysis

Your analytics can already tell you which screens are busy. What they usually can't tell you is how people get to those screens and where they go next — the actual route through your app. Do users reach checkout from the product list or from search? After onboarding, do they land on the home screen or bounce? Those are questions about movement, not counts, and counts alone don't answer them.

Vexo's new User Flow view answers them directly. It renders the top navigation paths through your app as a flow diagram — one bar per screen-to-screen transition — right on the mobile dashboard. This post covers what it shows and how to read it.

How it works: screens, transitions, and drop-offs

Vexo already records which screen a user is on as they move through your app. User Flow reads that stream and counts every transition — each time a user goes from one screen to the next. A single transition is a source screen, a target screen, and a count of how many times that hop happened. The view surfaces the top transitions across your app, so the paths people actually take rise to the top and the long tail stays out of the way.

Each transition is drawn as a horizontal bar labeled Source → Target with its count on the right. The bar's width is proportional to how often that move happened relative to the busiest transition on screen, so the heaviest paths are literally the widest — you read volume at a glance instead of comparing numbers row by row.

Anchor on a screen: what leads in, where people go

By default the view shows the top transitions across the whole app. But the more useful question is usually about one screen: how do people reach checkout, and what do they do after? Pick a screen from the selector and the flow splits into two columns:

• Into {screen} — every transition that lands on the screen you picked. This is where your traffic comes from.
• Out of {screen} — every transition that leaves it, including the Drop-off edge. This is where people go next — or where they leave.

Anchoring turns User Flow from an overview into an investigation. Set the anchor to a screen you care about and you see its inbound and outbound paths side by side: the routes feeding it on the left, the routes leaving it on the right, each still sized by volume. Switch back to All screens to zoom out to the whole map again.

Why it matters

A funnel tells you whether a fixed sequence converts — home, to cart, to purchase. It can't tell you the sequence you didn't think to draw. User Flow starts from the actual routes people take, which is how you discover the paths worth turning into funnels in the first place.

It's also how you spot the unintended detours: users looping back to a screen they should have left, an onboarding step that funnels straight into a Drop-off instead of the home screen, a search-heavy path that a simpler layout was supposed to make unnecessary. Screen counts hide all of that because the totals look fine — the problem only shows up in the movement between screens.

And because User Flow sits next to your session replays, a surprising edge is one click from the recordings behind it. See an unexpected transition or a heavy drop-off, then watch a handful of the sessions that took that path to learn why.

How to read a flow

A quick reading guide:

• Wide bars are your highways. The widest transitions are the routes most of your users actually take — the paths worth optimizing first.
• Red bars are exits. A Drop-off edge marks where sessions end. A little is normal; a wide one on a screen that's supposed to lead somewhere is a leak.
• Anchor to investigate. Pick a screen to compare what feeds it (Into) against where it sends people (Out of). A screen whose biggest outbound bar is Drop-off is a dead end.
• Follow the surprise. An edge you didn't expect is the whole point — open the session replays behind it before you theorize.

Getting it

User Flow is built entirely on the screen views Vexo tracks automatically, so there's nothing new to instrument. If you're already sending screens, it's populated — open your app's mobile dashboard and look for the User Flow panel. New to Vexo? Install the Vexo React Native SDK, or create a free account and connect your app in a few minutes. For where flow fits alongside segments, funnels, and retention, see the product analytics overview.

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