---
# System prepended metadata

title: Motif Notes

---

# Motif Notes

## User session with TJ

- In his head, he segments what he sees into different categories / cohorts. It’d be great if either:
    - he could annotate the chart to point out those segments
    - Motif could automatically extract and highlight those segments
- He sees many “bouncebacks”/cycles in the data. He wants to know how good his recommendation system is. Duration between events is a really important variable here. 
    - One idea: be able to add a “time elapsed” event that shows up in the Sunburst. E.g. “Add 2 minute spacers”, where everywhere there’s a pause for 2 minutes, there’s another event that shows in the Sunburst.
- He **frequently** compares metrics he finds against his baselines. 
    - It’d be pretty cool to somehow have different cuts of the metric in a corner, so you can see how your current view of it compares.
- It’s clear he should be able to save charts. Though I worry a bit about a “dashboard hell” where people add a bunch of views, then never look at them, and the insights don’t truly get operationalized. 
    - One next step would be saving specific metrics and exposing an API so people can truly integrate with the results.
- Playing with dimensions, he knows his categories by heart. But it’d be great to profile the data and have a dropdown list of the unique categories.


## First time playing with Motif
I played around with Motif with the first dataset I created, and I figured it’d help to write down things I found counter-intuitive. They’re mostly small design concerns at the surface level of the product, but I didn’t want my first impression to be lost.

- Putting the event legend to the left of the Filter bar would make it more clear that you’re supposed to drag the event types into the filter. Dragging upwards is a confusing flow.
- Tooltip explainers for Include / Exclude / Diff / Split.
- I don’t love how the “truncate everything before” / “can have preceding events” / “must be the first event” is a cycle. I’d prefer a dropdown so I can see all the options. I had to cycle through it a few times to see the full picture.
- I was expecting the filter to be applied automatically, then I realized I had to “Apply” it. Moving the “Apply” to underneath the filter bar, or to the right of it, could be more logical.
- I’d like a “Remove filter” button. “Clear items” doesn’t remove the bar (when you have >1 filters).
- Slider to control depth of subsequent events. Or at least display “chart is limited to 5 subsequent events.”
- It’d be helpful to know how many more events there are past the displayed depth. Show a range to tell how deep it goes?
- Onboarding idea: challenge people to complete a small quiz to find the insights hidden in a demo dataset. E.g. for product analysis: “Q: What is the most common user behavior immediately prior to exiting the app? Play >5 songs to completion, skip 3 songs, or view the help page?”