The problem with vague things like "objectives" / "promote ecosystem" /
"provide infrastructure" is that it leads to "he said / she said" kinds
of arguments about improving the website. My experience at companies
like Amazon is that numbers are much more accurate than gut feelings.
If we don't pick a good set of conversion measures to improve, then
we're not going to be able to improve the website - instead we'll end
up with random changes and arguments
about why they are good or bad.
In addition
to some of your ideas, I would
suggest we could also measure.
- Number of unique users to
our site (new and returning users). We want to encourage returning
users.
Why? Don't we really want to encouraging something else? Eclipse usage
maybe? Click throughs to our members? ... It seems to me that if we
could find a way to achieve our goals without serving any web pages at
all, that would be perfect, right? So just encouraging returning users
is (to me) not a good measure of success.
- Length of time they spend
on the site - Longer means they are getting the useful information or
they are struggling to find stuff . This might be dependant on the
pages they are visiting. For instance, if they go to the download page
it should be quick. If they go to project pages (ie they are looking
for information) they it might be longer. We might want to think of use
cases for this.
Again, I think this is the wrong measure. We want to measure whether
they are *getting* useful information, not whether they are hanging
around - for exactly the reason you state: time on site could be good,
could be bad and thus it's not a useful optimization number.
Again, why? What value is that providing to our members and our users?
We want to be measuring the end value, not the symptoms of that value
or lack of value.
-
- Overall satisfaction with
the site (yes we don’t measure conversions but I would hope the goal of
the site is to be a useful information source.)
Ah, the holy grail of all websites - I don't know of a way to measure
that, do you? Hence the only things we can measure are things like
conversion (downloads, articles, mailing lists, etc). I suppose we
could have those annoying useless "user satisfaction surveys" that
pop-up and we all ignore (I say in jest).
There's a science to build a good website. The first step in science to
figure out what you want to measure.
- Bjorn
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