[anonyfuss]

Doesn't make it right. It's also astonishingly user-hostile; wasting the user's resources (bandwidth, battery life, cpu) on things they don't care about, without their permission.

On top of that, doing anything economical with the analytics is very rare. It's very difficult to isolate meaningful variables, and you're almost always better off spending that money paying a designer to tackle issues and features that really ought to be obvious to you already ...

... unless you're Zynga, I guess.

[DeusExMachina]

> On top of that, doing anything economical with the analytics is very rare.

If this was true, then A/B testing would be useless, while it's quite the opposite.

[anonyfuss]

For most people, A/B testing a complex app (non-app websites are a completely different beast) is not economical compared to tackling larger (and hopefully obvious) design problems.

If your product is so well designed and developed that there's literally nothing obvious that you can improve without either 1) isolating changes down to colors or placement, and/or 2) throwing different options at the wall to see what sticks, then I say:

Congratulations.

[nemothekid]

>doing anything economical with the analytics is very rare.

That is a very bold claim and I'm interested if you have any sources to back it up. I'm hard pressed to believe that all of Facebook's design decisions hinge on whatever side of the bed Zuckerberg woke up on.

[anonyfuss]

Belief that numbers can be interpreted usefully without a rigorous statistical approach is an enormous fallacy; I don't really see why the burden of proof lies on me.

Once you do apply rigor, you'll find that what the numbers can tell you provides very little help in guiding application design (unless you're optimizing for extremely simple measurable metrics, eg, Zynga).

Note that Zynga themselves copies a full game design, and then applies metrics to optimizing games for addiction and spendthrift response.

The numbers also can't tell you that what you really need to do is rework your application's entire interaction model to cleanly integrate feature X, Y, and Z -- which will also be far too expensive to even attempt to A/B test.

Most analytics users are simply playing an expensive game of "hot or cold".

[sjtgraham]

I'm interested how this is user hostile? What is the purpose of collecting such data? I think it's to improve whatever is being measured, to make it more useful. I don't call that hostile.

[spingu]

I thought I was the only one. I too think (in general) companies collect data to improve user experience. Although I am sure there are companies that misuse it (selling user data), but I would think most companies genuinely want to collect data to improve their product. Why do I believe this? Because I myself am a founder want this data for exact reason. It makes no sense to me to user that data in any other way. Why else woud I want it?

I am that "crazy" individual that actually answers YES to share usage data (as long as I feel it's reputable company or reputable management team). I do this because I don't want to be a hypocrite. I have yet to suffer any consequences of answering YES to most. Although I realize that my experience alone of opting in to sharing usage data has been fine, it doesn't mean much. I just hate when people cry loudly without any solid data of misuse.

My two cents...

[anonyfuss]

Then ask the user first. I'm sure that if you can elucidate the value of tracking their every interaction, they'll be happy to agree.

I'll say no, because don't want my battery wasted, my bandwidth consume, my IP logged, my address book mined, etc, just because a PM can't decode where to spend development and design dollars without fudging almost uselessly ambiguous numbers.

[sjtgraham]

You are so incredibly misinformed. An address book cannot simply be mined. Those are extended permissions and access requires explicit opt in from the user at the OS level before the OS exposes any of that information.

Furthermore, do you have any data on how much battery, or bandwidth heap uses? No? Ok, please spare the FUD.

This is clearly about allowing developers to see how their users use their apps so they can improve the experience and make them more useful not about snooping on contacts/photos (which heap clearly does NOT facilitate). It goes without saying that the user has to be made aware that certain data is collected. I wonder, have you ever heard of a privacy policy?

[anonyfuss]

> You are so incredibly misinformed. An address book cannot simply be mined. Those are extended permissions and access requires explicit opt in from the user at the OS level before the OS exposes any of that information.

It used to be possible without requiring opt-in. What I've seen in some applications has been piggy-backing permissions -- that is, wait until you have a legitimate reason to request access to the user's address book, location, etc, and then also send that information to your analytics service.

> Furthermore, do you have any data on how much battery, or bandwidth heap uses? No? Ok, please spare the FUD.

Sure I do. They're uploading every 15 seconds, which keeps the WWAN and/or WiFi links up all the time. That can shave at least 25% off of battery runtime (exact numbers aren't easy, given that there are a lot of other factors at play. The basic battery device recommendation is simply: let unused hardware be powered down whenever you can).

There are very limited CPU and battery resources on a mobile device, and it's ridiculous to waste them without asking, specially if you're planning on pushing a massive torrent of mostly-useless data.

> It goes without saying that the user has to be made aware that certain data is collected. I wonder, have you ever heard of a privacy policy?

Ah, right. Put it in the huge document that no user ever reads (because it's huge and unreadable), and that excuses everything.

This is the same argument that sleazy people make in favor of opt-out mailing list spam.

[sjtgraham]

Please don't slight me by implicitly putting me in the class of "sleazy people" whom send "spam". It's been nice discussing this with you, but since you're resorting to ad hominem I'll wish you well and bow out of this discussion. Thanks.