Feedback: Creating new insights

[joethreepwood]

I've already discussed this briefly with @clarkus, but documenting here for further discussion. Basically: Is the Explore button in app.posthog.com correctly labelled or adding any value?

Current behaviour:
1: Clicking Explore leads to the ability to create new insights.
2: Clicking Insights, directly below the Explore button, leads to existing and saved insights. The Insights section also has a New Insights button in there.

It would seem there's an inefficiency there, because the quickest way to create a new insight is not to click the button which is labelled Insights.

In a totally scientific test, I showed my partner app.posthog.com and asked her what she would do to create a new query and get a new insight, such as a funnel. She clicked Insights > New Insights > Funnels. The actual quickest path is just Explore > Funnels.

Suggested solutions
Maybe we should remove the Explore button entirely, or else title it New Insights?

[clarkus]

Some context from the sprint where we made this change

One outstanding thing to resolve is making starting the insight creation workflow a prominent and discoverable action. We want to make this list available for finding existing stuff, but we need to solve for that immediate "I need to explore my data now" task. This could be a big prominent action in the global navigation. Thoughts?

During that iteration we changed the behavior and model for the Insights navigation item. Previously this took you directly to insight creation. The important piece was this immediate, on-demand access to exploring data. In this previous model, saving to a short-lived history was automatic and immediate. Saving an insight for reuse wasn't really a concept outside of adding it to a dashboard. TL;DR insights felt very exploratory

When we changed the model, there was concern (mostly from me 😀 ) that users would respond to this change in negative ways. To soften the blow, I tried encapsulate the exploratory experience in this prominent button "explore". The changes to the insights model are still pretty compatible with this exploratory feeling, but we allow for a user to specify more details up front if that's their intent.

All that said, "words are hard™". I think another label value could be worth trying. Longer term, I'd like to move to an inline-creation action as shown in the concept ideas at #5346

[clarkus]

Also related #5747

[mariusandra]

Having played with the interface for a bit now, the "explore" button also seems slightly misleading.

Renaming it to "New Insight" seems to make its functionality pretty clear:

Other verbs that I tried don't seem to make it clearer:

I'll put out a PR for the change.

[mariusandra]

I think it's much cleaner with "new insight" now, so issue closed?
We'll be redoing the sidebar soon anyway, and keeping it as "new insight".