Having built a number of apps, I don't know how to gain such intution once the userbase becomes too large to interact with directly enough to grok it. It's very easy to be fooled by a vocal minority of people who complain about your app sucking when the majority are getting value from it. Without data and analytics, it's easy to be pushed around by your most vocal users, because your gut is saying you should listen to them. Sometimes you should, sometimes you shouldn't, but the difference between the two can often be determined by looking at the data to get a bigger, less biased picture of what is actually going on with your app.
It's fake objectivity that often leads to a race to the boottom.
Between "engagement" as a terrible proxy for user happiness/success and the idea that it's more important and better if nobody can fail to use your app's "UX" than it is if it to enables a smaller number of people who take the time to learn to do really great things, all wrapped up in the VC driven dream of hypermegablitzscaling, all a reliance on analytics does is guarantee mediocrity.
I want software created by people who care enough not to look at the data.
As usual, it’s possible to be stupid and abuse tools, but what I wrote presumes you’re not doing something stupid. If you think it’s impossible to not be stupid when it comes to this tool, this is false.
That said, I would love to join such an organization. Any suggestions on where to find data driven jobs?
My experiences suggest a large measure of caution. Many organizations describe themselves as data-driven and many actually do try. However humans are humans and many will be “data driven” when it aligns with what they want to do, otherwise it’s off for “more data” or a “new perspective”. In other words sometimes data driven means use data when it supports my already staked out position. I hate to be so cynical but I can’t help it.
Numbers provide a happy path for consensus. If the "why" of your project is to please as many people as possible, then web analytics probably works great. I'm not arguing they're categorically useless, only trying to surface the unspoken costs I see bear out in our industry from relying on them so heavily.
The analytics people insistent denial that usability research ever existed seems to have reached a new level.
Then you'd run the app on all screen sizes before each git push and notice that the button doesn't always show up, or isn't always clickable.
Does this apply to "feature requests" by a minority whereby the majority then has to accept those "features".
My line in the sand is: never build a feature on the first request. Ideate, research, measure others opinion of the same features.
One should have a tight beta group for this.
How does analytics do that? A mobile usability scanner might pick that up, but analytics?
Maybe they should run some analytics and check the bounce rates!
(And I didn't need analytics to understand something wasn't working lol.)
I mean, you did need feedback though - you read a comment on HN, which gave you the feedback, with upvotes on the comment indicating that it's probably an issue that more people care about.
One significant difference is that the feedback was "active", though: Someone actively decided to write the comment and other people probably actively decided to upvote it. I fully agree that this is a way better way of feedback than effectively putting up hidden cameras everywhere and surveiling every step of your users without them knowing.
I'm sure the new GA is super powerful, but most people just want to see how many "hits" they got, what content is most popular, and where the visitors came from. Google would do well with a simplified Analytics service just for small business.
Once you go down the optimization route, if your Google Analytics isn't super valuable it's an easy bloat to eliminate.
The point is that we shouldn't be using analytics _at all_.
I'm not sure if I agree with that or not yet - I have to think about it more. My gut says that's right.
In the meantime, a few helpers:
- Scrolling "past" the end of the page will move to the next page.
- Left arrow, Right arrow will nav back and forward.
- On mobile, swiping will do the same.
- Space and enter key will nav to the next page.
Anyway, as somebody that builds things with no trackers, I agree with you and appreciate you posting this! The one thing I want to know is if/when a page or website is picked up somewhere, I'd just like to see where the traffic came from so I can respond or engage with people. I find absolute traffic numbers, and most of the data you get from analytics tools a distraction and a net negative, especially given the privacy and performance issues that come with their JS.
I am sure readers with disabilities (motion or vision impaired, for example) would appreciate this too!
Except when it doesn't, was my experience.
https://logz.io/learn/how-to-run-opentelemetry-demo-with-log...
If it’s not obvious, try scrolling a bit then try to go back to this page
I was trying to look up what instrumentation with OTLP looks like and got so much rage yesterday I had to quit and do something else.
No offense but I can't accept "it doesn't matter."
You can't optimize for stuff like that, and improve conversion, without that data.
I don't use analytics on any of my services simply because I don't like analytics and people tracking me, so why would I do it to others?
Does it mean I don't track my business metrics? No. I still measure general conversion rates from sign up to payers. I measure things like sign ups per-month. You don't need analytics to track that. Basic metrics combined with a "CHANGELOG" file with dates/releases/fixes is plenty for my solo business. Want to know what I did in January to spike sign ups or more payers? Look at my change log.
(Meaning, if you follow these kind of metrics closely, you may actually miss crucial opportunities, as these will always bind you to the perceived mainstream. Moreover, these analytics are still sparse and there may be hidden variables. E.g, you may have changed something in January, but what happened else in January, elsewhere, which may have had some impact? Finally, these metrics are always about intermediate goals and partial results, but never about the entire product or mission. Metrics for these are found elsewhere.)
Disclaimer: I abandoned all analytics for my own projects some years ago, and I do not miss anything. So I may be somewhat sympathetic to this.
Scrolling goes to the next page unless I want you to scroll to read, then it goes to the next page when you're done scrolling the content. Beautiful.
Exactly why most sites don't do this. But it's special!
Seems to be a personal website though, so some leeway should be given, although I also found it a bit annoying. Especially the part when you go beyond the article contents and gets sent to the "homepage", but scrolling back doesn't go back to the article contents anymore.
I really like https://www.portent.com/onetrick/ for anyone looking for an intro to how analytics enhances marketing work.
I love this quote at the end: "Caring about quality is the heart of craftsmanship. Until you're hooked into those outcomes, micro-optimizing the individual parts is pointless."
Perhaps, as we move towards a web dominated by AI agents, quality will supersede metrics.
Been thinking about that case lately, and it makes a much better argument for me in terms of analytics.
I realized that from my own perspective as a private citizen, I'm not sure if there's any way to prove that Google and Facebook are not falsifying my clicks. I face such an information disparity in bargaining. I literally depend on the company for the tools to monitor the company. "How many people downloaded my app? Arbitrary."
Its a bit like trying to win against the NSA inside America, except they can already listen to every phone line (still finding stuff, yet another NSA leak today).
It's just too easily Machiavellian. "We've got so many new user signups, and they all love your videos...post more content like that. All the rest of you are failures, because we can just bury your content and you'll never know."
One of the reasons I wrote a Perl script to analyse my access logs was to find discussions of my content that I can learn from and participate in. Hard to do that without some sort of analytics!
I wrote a post on a similar topic this week. https://mechanicalsurvival.com/blog/failing-to-visualise-web...
I can kinda agree with the section describing all the problems with tracking, but there is not really an alternative approach presented.
The last paragraphs through in lots of buzzwords and lofty ambitions ("holistic approach") but don't give any indication how to realize those except for "go by your feelings".
I consider myself a good developer with useful debugging skills. I often "went by my feelings" when trying to find the root cause of a bug - however, to be able to do that, I need some information about the program and usually some way to interact and test hypotheses. If I've gathered enough information like this, then I can use experience to make educated guesses about what is going wrong.
Likewise, in the "real world", we always have a minimum of observable feedback that helps us judge our own actions: How people react to what we do, their body language, etc.
This is true both for individuals and for businesses: If you run a small corner store, you'll also be able to get a rough measure of success of your store just by watching how many people make come in and how many it to the counter.
In contrast, on the internet, there is, by default, no feedback at all - if you make a website and upload it to a server somewhere, it's more like running a radio station: Talking to the void, not knowing if hapf the city is listening, or only a handful or no one at all
So in order to get any information about whether what you are doing makes any sense, you need feedback.
I don't think intrusive tracking and surveillance is the only way to get feedback though. I think very basic analytics, such as counting the page hits, referral and "user journey" throughout your site are ok - those aren't very different from counting customers in a physical store.
For more detailed information, I think there should be more approaches to gather active feedback - i.e. give users a way to leave a message, point out issues they see themselves, etc.
It used to be hard to analyse this kind of written feedback at scale, but maybe LLMs could help with that in the future.
That said I feel like so much of analytics this day and age are measuring what we want instead of accurately measuring. In the mess of data we generating conforms already to an existing belief. Everywhere I've worked a product guy or a ux person has an idea and makes use of analytics to prove their point and for some reason their point is always proven... I think analytics are like damned statistics.
Beyond that, Cloudflare gives me some extra data, which I really don't need but is fun to marvel at from time to time.
I only track internal product success metrics and occasionally gather feedback from phone support. You get totally better perspective talking to users.
Analyzing data is limited because you don’t the user mind when is looking for something or clicking.
sighs deeply
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Cap...
For me personally, the visitor stats of my own websites are a little bit as 'likes' on social media (nice to have for a general idea about my content being liked), but then without big tech in between.
