Brian Cray: Measurement-driven, user-focused web entrepreneur & consultant

About 2 years ago he wrote an “Alertbox” titled How little do users read?. His research suggests that users will read only 18% of your content. Given that I spend a few minutes editing each sentence I write, that’s pretty deflating.

Since I reread this article a few days ago, I’ve been more sensitive to my own reading habits on the Web. And I’m just another statistic. I find that I read the first couple of paragraphs before I get distracted and scroll down for a call to action.

Then I thought, what strategies can I apply to increase that number from 18%? How can I get my users to read more?

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A big downfall in the IT industry is fixing inventing a problem that doesn’t need fixed. “Problems” are fabricated and “fixed” because we’re too eager to use new technology. This eagerness manifests itself as a superfluous new feature, an implementation that is stimulated by a common misconception that adding more features is a market advantage. This couldn’t be further from the truth. This downward path usually ends in a stupid piece of shit that doesn’t fucking work, and none of us want to be that guy who built it.

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As many of you know, social sharing sites like delicious give URLs a “score,” whether it’s based on # of bookmarks, # of reviews, or whatever.

The important thing is that higher “scores” usually result in increased traffic to your site. For example: enough delicious bookmarks will eventually get you onto delicious.com/popular.

But query strings mess up things. On many social sharing sites, if I share http://briancray.com/ and someone else shares http://briancray.com/?query, the score will be attributed to two unique URLs instead of being recognized as the same URL.

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Once upon a time, designers had to invest some time into blogging, which made pumping out crap a pretty stupid idea. Then it changed.

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For years I’ve been trying to fix a critical home design problem: How to organize the dishes in my cabinets. While fitting dishes into cabinet space seems like a simple design problem, it actually has many parallels with website design.

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Every time I see “web analytics” I inevitably find “bounce rate” trailing close behind, being thrown around as if it’s some kind of silver bullet for measuring user engagement. “Get your bounce rate low, and life is good.” Wrong.

Bounce rate’s simplicity is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Simplicity gives it the strength to be easy to read and measure over time. Its weakness is that it makes people lazy.

So lazy in fact that people are failing to ask the most important strategic question about measurement: Are my methods of measurement relevant?

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Some SEO folks may scoff at the following statement. If you’re one of them, just read the whole article.

The most important SEO factor in blogging is the title of your posts.

There, I said it.

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You may have noticed that I’ve been going through design changes like crazy over the past month or so. That’s because I’m tracking almost everything my readers do into web analytics. With the right web analytics tools, you can gain real-time empirical data on your website visitors’ habits in massive quantities.

What I’m learning may shock some of you, and it may confirm ideas for others. It’s not far from what I’ve blogged about in the past: Supplemental navigation is, in most cases, visual junk.

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“Analytics, analytics, analytics, blah, blah, blah.”

“Code, code, code, blah, blah, blah.”

Two people, one a web analytics professional, the other a web developer, awkwardly sip coffee across from each other at a small cafe table that feels like a vast expanse. Their professional focuses seem not to hit any harmonious tones.

Then it happens. The internet marketer asks the question: “Do you know what an API is by any chance?”

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I wrote this article to give you insight into the complete design process for the redesign of Nearby Tweets. Web app developers and entrepreneurs will hopefully gain some ideas or reinforce their own processes. Users may find it interesting to see what goes into the design of a complex UI. I’d love your ideas, feedback, and thoughts at the end of this article! Enjoy.

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