Navigation paths enable you to quickly understand and isolate users' journeys through your web or mobile application. Assess the most and least common navigation paths your users take and how you can improve them.

Navigation paths give insights into the paths users follow from a root screen. These can help you:
  • Identify user journeys that show user confusion, for example, navigation back and forth between two screens.
  • Identify critical journeys that end prematurely.
  • Understand the effect of pop-ups on user navigation.

Differences between a users flow and a navigation path

A users flow shows inbound and outbound traffic for each screen in the app, enabling you to understand navigation trends to and from each screen. In a flow visualization, each screen appears only once. These flows help answer the question of where users navigate to after a specific screen.

A navigation path shows the frequency of specific, ordered navigations in the app, enabling you to see the most common paths that users take in the app. Each screen can appear multiple times within a navigation path. For example, A > B > A > C.

Navigation path visualization

Viewing and interacting with a navigation path

The Navigation Paths screen shows an initial visualization which contains data for all screens contained in your app. Each circle on the visualization represents a navigation level, and shows the numbers of navigations from the previous screen, up to five levels. You can choose whether to display the visualization with analytics for All Users, New users, or Returning users.

The bottom charts show aggregations of the first and second navigations across all paths.

You can interact with a navigation path in these ways.
Action Step
Hide or show pop-ups in the visualization. Check or uncheck the Hide Popups & Menus box to hide or show them.
Change the root screen to see navigation paths from that screen onward, regardless of previous navigations to the screen. Change the root screen several ways:
  • Point to an applicable screen and click the Show Navigation Paths icon to view paths from the selected screen as the root.
  • Enter a screen name in the search field and select it from the list.
Navigating to a screen to see UI analytics. Point to a screen and click its screen title.