How to design with data

Chapter 6. Stats—Time

Time and pageviews have some similarities, but unlike pageviews, time metrics can tell you where your users are engaged... or confused.

Time per Visit (or time per session) is how long users spend in your app or on your site, on average.

Time per Page tells you how long users spend on each specific page or screen, on average.

When you are using averages from many users, you have to remember that there is probably a wide variety of times people spend on the site or on a page. By averaging those times it gives you an idea of how the site is performing overall and allows you to compare one page to another page.

For example, if your site has an average Time per Visit of three seconds. That means users are either finding what they need extremely quickly or nobody stays long enough to do anything at all.

If you’re Google, you might try to give people what they’re looking for as fast as possible.

If you’re Wikipedia, three seconds per visit is bad, because nobody can read an article in three seconds.

If you compare two pages and one has an average Time per Page of 45 seconds, and the other has 3 minutes, then those two pages are performing much differently.

Don’t Assume That Time Is Good

When users are confused they will also spend longer on a page, because they are trying to figure it out.

More time can mean more engagement or it can mean your menu is confusing, or the registration ...