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by clementpiki 711 days ago
Without Analytics, I'm blind: I can't tell which feature are popular and which aren't. I need those infos to undertand where I should focus, what are users the more interested in. By "Privacy respected", I meant that I am not asking you for your email, your name, and what you do on the editor stays on your machine: no cloud uploads of your files.
3 comments

> Without Analytics, I'm blind: I can't tell which feature are popular and which aren't.

There's plenty of alternatives to google analytics though. This sort of basic breakdown could be done with goaccess (or an awk one-liner); plausible, matomo or simple analytics would be decent options that cover most reasonable requirements.

> Without Analytics, I'm blind: I can't tell which feature are popular and which aren't. I need those infos to undertand where I should focus, what are users the more interested in.

I have a suggestion which has always served me well: Ask. Or don’t even ask, users will tell you what they want anyway. Analytics will only give you skewed information, as you are unable to distinguish the popularity of a feature is due to its usefulness, its prominence, or a general lack of clarity.

That's a totally reasoble way to do it, but it leaves you with other blindspots People will tell you what they want anyway but also, sometimes people aren't aware of what they want or need

Non visible parts of aproject tend to get neglected a lot more if you just ask your users What will get more people talking to you, a 10% speed up split among many small interactions, or a visual glitch that doesn't affect usability but it's front and center?

> sometimes people aren't aware of what they want or need

And analytics won’t tell you that, so I don’t see your point.

> Non visible parts of aproject tend to get neglected a lot more if you just ask your users

Do they? Perhaps if you keep relying on analytics, they do. In my experience, users will just tell you anyway. And some of them will be better at feedback than others. Treasure those.

Also, and this is another topic, why don’t you use periods in your sentences? Your comment was unnecessarily hard to parse.

I'd say Analytics can give you an aditional data point that can guide you to conclusions your users might not / can not be aware of. For the same reason you'd want to track things personal experience would be unreliable with.

A good example is time tracking, people are notoriously bad at this, ignoring non events that consume time and over assigning time to task that demand attention

On the other topic, no real reason. I just suck at prose; I'll take the comment in consideration to improve that. That comment in general is just poorly written all around, I'd love to edit it, but the time window has passed

What exactly is tracked though? What information about my videos and my usage patterns are send to Google?

It would be great if you could use a self-hosted analytics platform instead! :)

And I would strongly advise not to develop based on anonymous analytics, users might tell you different desires if you ask them and use completely different workflows if added. Optimizing for web analytis metrics has ruined many projects.