Life is grand

Daring Fireball writes:

This is not about “easy” vs. “hard”, which are clumsy, imprecise words for describing a user interface. Easy what? Easy to learn? Easy to understand? Easy to remember how to use? Easy meaning “simple”?

There’s nothing complex or confusing about iCal’s event entry UI. And with specific fields for each item of data, it is more obvious than Backpack’s — but only for a first-time user, which is the wrong case to optimize for.

I love reading that. That optimising for first-time-users is wrong (generally.) I am in the middle of designing an RSS interface and am hitting this wall a lot. I put in UI elements that are aimed at fast, efficient, repeated use but which are difficult to figure out on first glance. They take a bit of learning.

In this short-attention span economy though immediate comprehension has some value. Striking the balance between grabbing a users’ attention and keeping them is difficult.

evhead makes some good points about how pageviews are going the way of hits in the grand game of website analytics:

Pageviews were never a great measure of popularity…

So what’s a better measurement? Good question. Like many good questions, the answer is “it depends.” If you’re talking about what’s important to pay attention to on your own site, you have to determine what your primary success criteria are and measure that as best you can. For some sites, that could be subscribers, or paying users, or revenue, or widgets deployed, or files uploaded, or what have you. It may even be pageviews.

At Blogger, we determined that our most critical metric was number of posts. An increase in posts meant that people were not just creating blogs, but updating them, and more posts would drive more readership, which would drive more users, which would drive more posts.

Essentially it depends on your site and your intentions. A search site has very different measures of success to a site such as MySpace or Flickr or a web-app like Megite.

evhead goes on to say that someone should tackle the tough job of providing a single metric culled from various data. I doubt one metric can be found and doubt it is even worth it. The measure of success between different vertical markets is too great for one metric to be anything more than vainglory. It is largely worthless knowing that MySpace is on the march to beating Yahoo! in pageviews/traffic/something. Two different sites.

Looking above you can see my latest Google Analytics report. It is pretty and has some interesting data points but the interest is the same as a funny video on YouTube. Interesting but useless.

Google Anlytics isn’t useless. For many sites it is a power tool but in my case and the case of many personal bloggers it is pretty pictures and nothing more. My measure of success is connections with readers. Readers who email me, readers who comment and readers who mention my posts in theirs. Not pageviews or sources, not search keywords or length of time spent.

A metric per vertical market would be useful, for advertisers and investors and even us users, but one, grand, over-engineered metric isn’t worth our time.

Interesting graph from Dr. Dobbs on the challenge many Web 2.0 websites face; crossing the chasm. Early adopters and innovators may jump aboard your baby but that doesn’t mean you’ll manage to cross over to the mainstream.