| RE: [phoenix-dev] Re: First steps towards a better eclipse.org website |
|
I’m with Ian on this one. If you have no definition of
goodness, I don’t see how you can measure goodness. From: phoenix-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:phoenix-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Ian Skerrett Sorry maybe I did not explain myself correctly. I think we
first need to agree what we want our web site to accomplish, then we need to
attach metrics. Do you think we have agreement on what we want our web
site to accomplish? I was just putting some suggestions forward. I
agree it is obviously not about conversions and counting downloads is not
meaningful by itself. From:
phoenix-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:phoenix-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Bjorn Freeman-Benson 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. 1.
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. 1.
2.
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. 1.
2.
Number of pages visited. 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. 1.
2.
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). -- [end of message] |