In my previous post on analytics and retrofitting measurability, I talked about the first two phases of getting to grips with metrics and analytics in an existing system. I divvied it up so because otherwise it would have been too long to read. Continue reading
Measurability operates over an incredible range. It’s the ‘gravity’ of the metrics universe. Why do I say so? Because it is a quality attribute that manifests itself at business-level decision-making, without being constrained to that realm in the least.
Measurability permeates everything; it goes past the business level, down through engineering and development activities, and even further still, to actual infrastructure.
And what exactly is measurability, you might ask? It is the ability to quantify the behaviour of a system along with its most important outputs or results. This ‘quantitative’ aspect suggests the use of statistics and tabular data, the gathering of which exposes a well-known-yet-oft-poorly-solved problem: with a probability that is almost certainly ONE, your system has NOT been designed to fess up the numbers you need. Continue reading
I was looking at some promo blurbs for marketing and web-analytics, discussing how to formalise testing for optimal conversion rates on order forms. (‘Conversion’ usually means the completion of an e-commerce transaction, resulting in a sale).
One phrase in particular tickled me when I came across it: “unsupervised thinking”. As in, we really don’t want the end-user doing that. In fact, the less decisions the end-user is allowed to make during the entire process of taking their money from them, the better.
Which immediately makes you think, “What the hell? Can’t we be trusted to do business online without being coerced, spellbound, distracted, hypnotised or seduced?”. It leaves you feeling… manipulated. Continue reading