I’ve Been Using All of You

Well, it's time to eat my own usability dog food. Ever since I redesigned this site, I've been trying to monitor your people have been using it. As one can expect, I haven't received much direct feedback from visitors, and most of it has been positive. I'm glad most of users of this site find it easy to use and not so ugly.

However, without critique it is difficult to make things better, as one may assume that "everything is fine", while people just won't tell you what is wrong, or what they would want modified. Some times it just happens that usability problems are not that obvious, or are difficult to put in words. This might sound familiar to those of you involved in usability tests, survey evaluations, etc. In general, your public will most likely not answer questions related to quality if your product is "good enough", they will only comment if your product is outstanding or if they have complaints

So, I've been checking the statistics for the last couple of months, and I'm happy to see that most my assumptions were correct. As a matter of fact, the new organization has determined a greater polarization in the statistical results, which makes it easier to read visitors' behavior. During the migration to my new server, I started using a new program for statistical analysis: AWStats. I used it before (version 5, I think), but it wasn't installed in my new box, so I got version 6 running, which does a great job discriminating viewed traffic from non-viewed traffic. It has many other great features which allow for more detailed information about your traffic. If you use another web traffic analyzer, you may notice some differences in the number of hit and visits reported. For instance, Webalizer reports an average of 602 daily visits for this month, while AWStats tells it was only 474. The difference is significant and is due to the fact that AWStats lets me leave out of the count any traffic generated by aggregators, robots, my visits to the statistics pages, etc., producing a ultimately cleaner report.

Two months, however, are not enough time to make a serious study, even for a small site like mine, but I feel like this is going somewhere. During this time I've adding more tools to the blog, some for you adn some for me. For example, that list of searches at the bottom updates with every new query, I am counting the times a post is viewed, etc. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.