How Do You Track User Behavior During Login Flows?

I've found that login flows are often under-tracked, yet they're crucial for optimal user experience. Many teams only log 'auth success/fail,' but tracking drop-offs, retries, error types, and time to login can reveal meaningful insights. Once you start capturing this data, you can make small adjustments that can significantly reduce support requests and improve user experience overall.

We typically use libraries like Clerk or Supabase Auth. They manage user experience tracking for us, so while we don’t see user flows directly, we do get insights on successes, errors, and failures. It’s quite helpful, but I’ve found that their dashboards only give a high-level view. If you want to dig deeper into frontend events, they don’t provide much detail.

It really depends on your needs. In a previous job, we tracked everything possible—button clicks, mouse movements, and even how long users spent on each page. But where I am now, we're not tracking much because it isn't a top priority for us.

Most authentication providers give you the basics but lack detailed insight. You might see a 'login failed' metric, but not specifics like how long a user spent on the password field. I started adding custom events to capture user interactions around the login flow—like how long it takes to engage with the login page or how many times they clicked 'forgot password.' Honestly, there's a huge gap between basic metrics and real user behavior.