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What is Motif?

Motif is an interactive analytics tool, built from the ground up to work naturally with any sequences of events, such as user journeys, marketing/sales funnels or order management processes.

Motif's vision is to allow going from raw events to causal analysis in one short session. Such analysis is the cornerstone of all growth and optimization teams, but today it usually takes days or even weeks with uncertain results, so the work often gets deprioritized and teams end up relying on human hunches to make decisions.

We are working on removing all common points of friction from exploratory analysis—we believe with the right tool today it can be done at the speed of thought.

Here are Motif's core principles to support the vision:

  • sequences and sequential patterns as core data and analysis primitives: we believe they are better suited for typical practical causal analyses than traditional dimensional tables
  • building a natural way for asking sequence questions: currently Motif uses a tiny custom-built DSL called Sequence Operations Language (SOL), which we believe is more natural to use than SQL and more powerful than a drag-and-drop interface
  • immediate feedback through real-time querying: we built a custom engine to optimize sequence queries and are also trading off precision, which goes unused in decision-making, for query speed
  • rich and interactive flow visualizations: we believe in "seeing" data patterns with your own eyes and "feeling" data through direct manipulation
  • wrangling data interactively during analysis: removing overhead time involved in data prep and pre-cleaning
  • running locally in the browser: removing overhead time involved in setup and getting corporate approvals

What can I do with Motif?​

  • view common or very specific user paths
  • match and filter event patterns
  • find and work around logging issues
  • define and compute custom behavioral metrics
  • analyze results of experiments and launches
  • segment users based on their behavior
  • explore what product features or prior user behaviors might improve important business outcomes, such as visits, purchases, bad experiences, unsubscribes

Sequence data​

events-to-sequences

Motif ingests events and turns them into sequences through:

  • grouping by actor id (user id, order id, item id, etc)
  • sorting by time (timestamp or numeric field)
  • elevating one event dimension as an event name for displaying prominently in sequence visualizations.

Next steps​