Timed Event

A timed event is one that also carries a duration property, saying how long something took, not just that it happened.

A timed event is the product of measuring duration, and its value is adding a qualitative dimension to behavior: two users who both purchased are not the same if one took thirty seconds and the other ten minutes. Its use is in understanding friction and the smoothness of an experience; a long duration on a step is often a sign of confusion or a problem. But a duration property needs two cautions: it must be a number so its average and percentiles can be computed, and you must know what the duration measures, because 'time on page,' 'time to action' and 'session duration' are three different things easily conflated. An important statistical trap is that average duration is very sensitive to outliers; a user who left a tab open can inflate the mean, so duration is better read with the median or distribution than the average alone.