Events that read well

A list of events is the same few words down a column. Put a name or a title on an event and every list in the dashboard says which one it was.

What a list shows

A person's Event timeline and the Live view list events one by one. Twenty screen_view rows say somebody looked at twenty screens and nothing about which. So an event that names what it was shows that after its own name:

screen_view · Checkout
page_view · Pricing
article_read · Why we moved
level_completed · The Docks

The part after the dot is the first of these that holds text:

1. the event's title property;
2. its name property;
3. on a screen_view, the screen's name — and on a page_view, the page's path.

What reads well already

The events the SDKs send on their own. A screen view carries the name you gave screen(), a web page view carries the document's title, and an app open carries the app's name. If every page of your site has the same document title, pass one to page():

treebars.page('Pricing');   // page_view · Pricing

Your own events

This is where it is worth a line of code. An event about a particular thing — an article, a product, a level, a plan, a video — should say which, in title or name:

treebars.track('article_read', { title: 'Why we moved', article_id: 'a_481' });
treebars.track('level_completed', { name: 'The Docks', level: 7 });

Treebars.track("article_read", properties: ["title": "Why we moved", "article_id": "a_481"])
Treebars.screen("Product", properties: ["title": "Blue Oxford shirt"])

Treebars.track("article_read", mapOf("title" to "Why we moved", "article_id" to "a_481"))
Treebars.screen("Product", mapOf("title" to "Blue Oxford shirt"))

await treebars.track('level_completed', { name: 'The Docks', level: 7 });
await treebars.screen('Product', { title: 'Blue Oxford shirt' });

Which one, and what to put in it

title for something with a headline: an article, a product, a video, a page. name for something with a name: a level, a plan, a playlist, a button. An event with both shows the title. Three habits make them worth reading:

• Words a person would say, not an id. Send the id too, in a property of its own — it is what a filter should match on, because a title gets edited.
• Short. A list cuts it at 60 characters.
• The thing, never the person. Somebody's name or email belongs on their profile, through identify, not on an event.

Leaving events out of a list

Some events are worth collecting and not worth reading one by one — a heartbeat, a scroll, the app going to the background. Hidden events, above the Event timeline and the Live view, is a list of your event names: tick the ones you do not want listed. Hide them for yourself, or as an admin for everyone in the project.

A hidden event is still collected, still counted in every report and audience, and still exported. It is only left out of those two lists.