This past week, we focused on global internet trends and activities with the help of Mary Meeker’s, “2019 Internet Trends Report”. We pinpointed where the greatest hubs of web users are around the world, which sites see the most traffic, and what details we can infer from all of this user activity—all of that fun stuff. So of course, you know the drill, it got me thinking.
I know, whatta surprise.
LUCKY NUMBERS
All this talk about numbers and data suddenly had me questioning my own. I won’t lie, I’ve neglected considering my analytics for the past couple of weeks (because, life) but this gave me the motivation to get back into it.
It’s always fun to see behind the scenes of user activity. I’d even say that Travis Gertz hits it right on the head in his article, “Design Machines: How to Survive the Digital Apocalypse” when he describes analytics as “hav[ing] seemingly god-like access to the ways people use our products”.
With analytics, we’re given information like where our users are located, what content they like to interact with, and what devices they use to get to our sites. It’s like using a highly-developed, electronic, statistically justified Magic 8 ball. (Okay, so it’s nothing like using a Magic 8 ball.)
In saying so, now that I’ve seen last week’s stats regarding which devices are being used to visit the blog, I know that I should give more thought into what it’s like to visit Moods & Mixtapes via a mobile device.
YOU’RE JUST TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
Although, as life-changing and beneficial as it all sounds, I need to remember to not get too ahead of myself. As Gertz bluntly puts it, “metrics are the internet’s heroin”. And despite how absolute we may think the numbers are, they cannot always be trusted. We can’t just be making all of these changes just because the data led us to think they were necessary.
Take it all with a grain of salt, I suppose.
