Watch your users – they’re trying to tell you something…
by Neil Middleton 1:55 pm Monday, 12 April 2010.
Imagine this: You’re a web based company. You build a new site. You put it live and sit back and bask in glory.
You then forget about it until the next redesign.
If there’s one thing the vast majority of web companies do, it’s not keep tabs on the users of their sites, which are the whole reason the site exists in the first place.
Every single visitor to the website is giving you important information about your website. Every single user is clicking on things, moving their mouse around and searching for information. By listening to what these people are doing, you can learn a lot about where your site could be improved. For instance, that lots of people are clicking on some text that isn’t a link, or that people aren’t clicking at all on a magical image slideshow you’ve come up with.
If you’re not listening to this information, you’re losing out.
So, how do we do this? Well, first off, and easiest is to use your analytics tool as it’s meant to use. Tools such as Google Analytics don’t just tell you how much traffic your getting, but also where in the site the traffic is going and where it’s dropping out. It can also tell you about the occurrences of certain events that you can declare programatically (how many people have looked at my whizzy tooltip, how many have seen this mouseover etc).
Secondly, you can use heat mapping tools such as Trailhead. Apps like these show you where people are clicking, and where they’ve hovered their mouse, which gives you an insight into where on the page your users are moving – which then gives you ideas as to what parts of the page generate the most interest. By coupling this with your analytics you can work out where the weaker parts of your site/application are. You can see that people aren’t visiting a section of your site because no-one is noticing the links to it elsewhere in the site.
Overall, regardless of how you gather this information, your users are using your site and leaving behind evidence of how they are behaving. Not using this knowledge is wasting a very valuable resource that can only serve to make your site better as time goes on.
Comments (0)Why you shouldn’t think of features to add to your application
by Neil Middleton 11:17 am Wednesday, 31 March 2010.
Following on from my post the other day on why your requirements are wasting your money, I thought there was one more point worth mentioning here about how people derive features in the first place.
Let’s imagine, you’ve built your application and have the bare-bones features required to make your application viable and a money-earner. What’s the first thing people tend to do? Well, they build on their basic idea. They brainstorm for all the features that users might want to make their application more useful, and more of a money spinner. They think about all the little shortcuts people might want, and all the little time-savers that are possible for the envisaged common use cases. They then package this stuff up and add it to the “requirements”.
Stop.
Do not dream up features for your app. Do not try and pre-empt what the users might want, and what features will make your app better. Just don’t.
Listen.
Your users will tell you what they want added to the app. Your users will tell you what shortcuts they want to take, and they will most probably moan unless you add stuff their way.
So don’t.
Don’t add features due to user feedback. Don’t add features because one particular user keeps banging on about it. Take the features that you feel have bubbled to the top of the feedback pile, decide whether or not you think they make the application better, and then implement it how you want it implemented. Some users will hate you for it, some will love you for it, but ultimately you will end up with a better application as a result.
Above all though, you’d have saved yourself a bundle of cash by not implementing all the things that you thought people wanted.
Comments (0)Iphone – now what next?
by Adrian Munn 8:35 am Friday, 26 September 2008.
Finally took delivery of my new iPhone and have to admit I love it. I would urge anyone who has taken delivery of one to upgrade their phone software to take advantage of the improvements to signal and battery life. With all the features it’s so easy to run out of juice which really was a pain before the update.
Of course the salesman that I am now feels 100% in touch but also thinking of all of the endless application that could be built for the phone. Just when you thought apple had hot it wrapped Google (once again) step into the mix with their own phone.
I am truley of the opinion that keyboardless mousless computers are only a stones throw away. Come 2012 you will all be talking to your computers!!!
And to think I did this blog from my iPhone sitting on a train into London great stuff.
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