User Behavior

After you have deployed your product, you can start running analytics on it. Which links do people click, and which ones do they never use? Which features are popular, and which ones are not? Services like ClickTale and Crazy Egg[175] allow you to get information on how your users behave. Use this information to evaluate design and feature ideas or even to help decide which features you can remove. (See Chapter 25, Removing Features for a bit more on that.)

This doesn’t just apply to websites. You can also give users of a desktop application the option of regularly sending you usage data.

Once somebody consents to sending you data, you need to determine what kind of data is useful. Microsoft’s Jensen Harris writes[176] that “we ...

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