[at_a_remove]

I don't work at that level, or even want to, but I did detect a dark pattern that I often complain about, but have never managed to get people to pay attention to: do not collect data unless you have attached to it a decision with two or more distinct outcomes based on that data.

[drjasonharrison]

Do you mean "don't collect metrics unless you monitor them and have alerts" or "don't collect data on products, customers, sales..."

[at_a_remove]

Yes.

[tylerrobinson]

Can you give an example of what you mean?

[at_a_remove]

So when I ran the university website, the homepage naturally had links to other sites. One guy had this inflated sense of importance. If there weren't a lot of clicks over to his site, we should MAKE THE LINK BIGGER because people weren't seeing it. If clicks to his site went up, we should MAKE THE LINK BIGGER because it is that important. His flowchart had only one distinct outcome: MAKE THE LINK BIGGER.

All of the effort that went into collecting the information was for nought, because the outcome was always the same. That was collection with a flowchart, but without two or more distinct outcomes.

A second example would be search engine logs. Nobody wanted to make decisions on them, but "we could always trawl them for data later." A decade on, this had never occurred. That was collection with no flow chart. Offloading the logs, parsing them out, making the data available, week after week, month after month, year after year. Wasted effort.

So part of it is "don't waste effort," but the other part is, if there is decent information to collect, you should be doing something with it.

[drjasonharrison]

Thank you.