This is what I tell all the new Heap users at my company: learn how to use funnels (my favorite part of Heap) by purposely building a bad funnel first. Walk through the steps, see the weaknesses of the funnel and then make it better using effort analysis, so you can see where users drop off, you can see where things are a little bit wonky here and there. And then you can make your question better, and you can make your definitions better. It just improves the overall funnel experience.
Effort Analysis is crucial -- you scroll to the bottom of your results to see how much effort the user has to invest between each step. I'm currently working with our UX and UI teams redesigning and optimizing a few different screens and it's interesting to see very basic workflows, how people get from point A to Point B. For example, I'm currently taking a look at how our users get to our help documentation.
Effort analysis shows us where users get lost—right where they drop off, or where they have struggles in between those two or three or four steps. It looks at three different kinds of integration points—the interactions, time engaged, and the retry rate. Interactions is the total number of clicks on whatever they're doing on that page at that point. Time engaged is the time taken to go from one step to the next, that's where the “60 seconds” rule comes in—if they're not doing something for 60 seconds, something’s probably wrong.
The Retry rate is when users need to come back and do the same steps, or come back to the same workflow to finish up that funnel. It helps me think about how we can ask better questions. Maybe we need to narrow down our analysis of what exactly is happening there. You can really focus your question and make it better—like figure out where these interactions are happening, and why it's taking 17 minutes. I think effort analysis is a cool tool to give more visibility into what the funnels are doing, and have just that much more information.