It's not "auto hate", it's 25 years experience of making web stuff. I used to track users. I can read Apache logs by sight alone. I was an Urchin stats user before Google bought them. I had hit counters.
I realised a long time ago that massive data gathering didn't really help me. I had a ton of data and no idea what to do with it. If you launch a site and find the engagement time is 5.54s and users scroll 40% down the page before the bounce when they hit the site from a Google SERP for "my special page" that doesn't tell you why they left. That only tells you that they did. If you want to fix the problem you need to actually reach people and engage with them. To build what users want you need to actually talk to users.
Maybe some people can get value out of GAnalytics data, but I reckon for most users it's "metrics theatre". They're randomly poking at their website and seeing if the numbers change. That's stupidly inefficient when you can just talk to some people instead and immediately know where the problems are because people will tell you if you ask. Oh boy, will they tell you. It's hard to make them stop.
It's not "auto hate", it's 25 years experience of making web stuff. I used to track users. I can read Apache logs by sight alone. I was an Urchin stats user before Google bought them. I had hit counters.
I realised a long time ago that massive data gathering didn't really help me. I had a ton of data and no idea what to do with it. If you launch a site and find the engagement time is 5.54s and users scroll 40% down the page before the bounce when they hit the site from a Google SERP for "my special page" that doesn't tell you why they left. That only tells you that they did. If you want to fix the problem you need to actually reach people and engage with them. To build what users want you need to actually talk to users.
Maybe some people can get value out of GAnalytics data, but I reckon for most users it's "metrics theatre". They're randomly poking at their website and seeing if the numbers change. That's stupidly inefficient when you can just talk to some people instead and immediately know where the problems are because people will tell you if you ask. Oh boy, will they tell you. It's hard to make them stop.