The Joy of UX: User Experience and Interactive Design for Developers

Chapter 5. Telemetry and Analytics

To really understand our users, we need to see how they use our applications in actual practice—what they actually do, not what they can remember doing, or are willing to admit to doing. Lab testing and interviews provide us only a limited glimpse.

Today’s apps, connected over the Internet, can report our users’ actual behavior, in all parts of our programs and over very large sample groups. We can then examine usage patterns and behaviors to meet our users’ needs. This chapter explains how we can do that.

The Guessing Game Era

I remember frustrating design meetings in the late eighties and early nineties, when we were trying to figure out how users actually did use our program. The discussions would almost ...