Designing Clean Event Taxonomies for Product Onboarding

A disorganized analytics tracking schema is one of the quickest ways to stall product iteration. When different engineers invent their own event names on the fly, analysts end up writing brittle queries trying to stitch together AccountCreated, sign_up_success, and User_Registered.

Establishing a formal event taxonomy standard eliminates this friction before it compounds.

The Object-Action (Noun-Verb) Convention

We recommend adopting a strict Object-Action naming pattern across all application events:

[Object]_[Action]

Examples for Onboarding Flows:

• onboarding_step_viewed
• onboarding_form_submitted
• workspace_setup_completed
• team_invitation_sent
• integration_connected

This structure ensures events sort logically in data catalogs, prevents synonym collisions, and makes reporting dashboards instantly intuitive for new team members.

Global Properties vs. Contextual Properties

Every event payload dispatched by your client SDK should contain two tiers of properties:

1. Global Context Properties (Auto-attached by SDK)

• app_version: e.g. "2.14.0"
• client_platform: e.g. "ios", "android", "web"
• session_id: Unique string identifying the active user session
• locale: e.g. "th-TH", "en-US"
• auth_state: e.g. "anonymous", "authenticated"

2. Event-Specific Context Properties

For an event such as onboarding_step_completed:

• step_number: 2 (Integer)
• step_name: "workspace_preferences" (String)
• duration_seconds: 18.4 (Float)
• skip_used: false (Boolean)

Preventing Data Type Inconsistencies

One of the most frequent schema bugs we uncover during audits is data type drift across platforms. For example, the iOS team sends user_id as an Integer (10482), while the Web team sends it as a String ("10482"). In downstream data warehouses, this breaks joins and corrupts cohort funnels.

Maintain an official JSON schema contract and validate event payloads in your CI/CD test suites before shipping updates to app stores.