[majewsky]

Can you give some examples of changes that you made specifically to make the site work better for users, and how those were guided by analytics? I usually just do user interviews because building analytics feels like summoning a compliance nightmare for little actual impact.

[ordersofmag]

We generally combine what we learn from interviews/usability testing with what we can learn from analytics. Analytics often highlights use patterns that are of a 'we can definitely see that users are doing 'x' but we don't understand why' genre. Then we can craft testing/interviews that help us understand the why. So that's analytics helping us target our interviews/user testing. It also works the other way. User testing indicates users will more often get to where they need to be with design a versus design b. But user testing is always contrived: users are in an "I'm being tested mode" not a "I'm actually using the internet for my own purposes" mode. So it's hard to be sure they'll act the same way in vivo. With analytics you can look for users making the specific move your testing indicated they would. If they do great. But if not you know your user testing missed something or was otherwise off base.

[arp242]

I've decided to either stop working or keep working on some things based on the fact that I did or didn't get any traffic for it. I've become aware some pages were linked on Hacker News, Lobsters, or other sites, and reading the discussion I've been able to improve some things in the article.

And also just knowing some people read what you write is nice. There is nothing wrong with having some validation (as long as you don't obsess over it) and it's a basic human need.

This is just for a blog; for a product knowing "how many people actually use this?" is useful. I suspect that for some things the number is literally 0, but it can be hard to know for sure.

User interviews are great, but it's time-consuming to do well and especially for small teams this is not always doable. It's also hard to catch things that are useful for just a small fraction of your users. i.e. "it's useful for 5%" means you need to do a lot of user interviews (and hope they don't forget to mention it!)