Comment by johnfn
11 hours ago
Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision.
Sometimes HN drives me crazy. From this thread you’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move and facial expression and sending it to the government. I’ve worked at places that had telemetry and it’s more along the granularity of “how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab?” This is a far cry from “spying on users”.
Many products would be much better if they listened to what people are saying on public forums instead of using telemetry. For example, Google Maps has a longstanding bug where it auto-translates all reviews even if they are in a language you speak. If Google cared about user feedback, they could’ve easily fixed it, but no amount of telemetry will tell them this.
I hate this feature. Google knows the languages I speak because I added them in my account, even with all the tracking they obviously know, but they keep messing it up in all their products, Google Search, YouTube (they add machine audio translations to videos and translate the thumbnails).
They even do it on Google Play. No, I don't want to buy books in a language I can't read, suggest me ones that I can. It's been like that for a decade now I think. I guess it doesn't make them lose a noticeable amount of money.
> Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision.
Yes, admittedly, the first time you do these things, they're difficult, hard and you have lots to learn. But as you do this more often, build up a knowledge base and learn about your users, you'll gain knowledge and experience you can reuse, and it'll no longer take you weeks or months of investigations to answer "Where should this button go?", you'll base it on what you already know.
You seem to be interpreting my position as saying that one should only use telemetry to make decisions. Of course, no one reasonable would hold that position! What I’m saying is that only relying on user interviews without supplementing them with analytics would be knowingly introducing a blind spot into how you understand user behavior.
Yes, probably because someone else said "If you dont have analytics you are flying blind" which I initially replied to, then when you replied to my reply, I took that as agreeing with parent, which isn't necessarily true.
> What I’m saying is that only relying on user interviews without supplementing them
I also took your "spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work [...] Or you can look at the analytics" as a "either this or that proposition", where if we're making that choice, I'd go with qualitative data rather than quantitative, regardless of time taken. But probably it comes down to what tradeoffs we're willing to accept.
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Asking users isn't a substitute for usage data.
Usage data is the ground truth.
Soliciting user feedback is invasive, and it's only possible for some questions.
The HN response to this is "too bad" but it's a thought-terminating response.
The ground truth that I never click on Stargate on Netflix is completely at odds with the actual truth that I love Stargate and want more of it and things like it.
What the ground truth usage data is completely ignorant of is that Netflix's copy is a crappy blurry transfer, and so I got dvds instead.
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It goes the other way as well. Usage data isn't equivalent to asking users either. A solid percentage of bad decisions in tech can be traced to someone, somewhere forgetting that distinction and trusting usage data that says it's it's okay to remove <very important feature> because it's infrequently used.
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> Asking users isn't a substitute for usage data.
Sure.
> Usage data is the ground truth.
Absolutely not. That's how you get "we buried this feature and nobody used it, so clearly nobody wants it".
> Usage data is the ground truth.
For what, precisely? As far as I know, you can use it to know "how much is X used" but not more than that, and it's not a "ground truth" for anything besides that.
Then pay for the data if you need it so bad.
So if you don't want to spend the time doing that, or as is more accurate in corporate settings, the general turnover of the team is high enough that no one is around long enough to build that deep foundational product knowledge, and to be frank most people do not care enough.
This is why telemetry happens, its faster, easier and more resilient to organizational turmoil.
> This is why telemetry happens, its faster, easier and more resilient to organizational turmoil.
I don't disagree with that, I was mainly talking about trying to deliver an experience that makes sense, is intuitive and as helpful and useful as possible, even in exchange for it taking longer time.
Of course this isn't applicable in every case, sometimes you need different tradeoffs, that's OK too. But that some favor quality over shorter implementation time shouldn't drive people crazy, it's just making different tradeoffs.
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"You’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move" - that's literally what tracing and telemetry is about.
"Sure, you can spend the weeks to months of expensive and time consuming work it takes to get a fuzzy, half accurate and biased picture of what your users workflows look like through user interviews and surveys. Or you can look at the analytics, which tell you everything you need to know immediately, always up to date, with perfect precision." -> your analytics will never show what you didn't measure - it will only show what you already worked on - at best, it's some kind of validator mechanism - not a driver for feature exploration.
This kind of monitoring need to go through the documented data exposure - and it's a sufficient argument for a company to stop using github immediately if they take security seriously.
But I'd add that if you take security seriously you are not on Github anyway.
No, telemetry is not "literally" about screen recording. Telemetry is metrics. That is why they invented a new word for it rather than calling it "screen recording".
Why do you need to collect hardware fingerprint, IMEI, phone number, geolocation, list of nearby wifi access points, list of installed applications, selfie and passport photo when you can simply count how much times a server route was called?
My comment explicitly uses "how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab" as an example, not any of that nonsense -- you are not responding in good faith.
That's a slippery slope and we both know it. Telemetry does not automatically include those things.
Indeed it's not fair in discussion context, so wonder if it was meant as a statement on the ills of telemetry as a whole.
> and sending it to the government
It literally is. The network itself is always listening: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
The mere act of making a network connection leaks my physical location, the time I'm using my computer, and the fact that I use a particular piece of software. Given enough telemetry endpoints creates a fingerprint unique to me, because it is very unlikely that any other person at the same physical location uses the exact same set of software that I do, almost all of which want to phone home all the goddamn time. It's the metadata that's important here, so payload contents (including encryption) don't even matter.
There are two aspects of that:
1) Metrics lead to wrong conclusion. There is software which has extremely rarely used features, I need it once or twice a year only, but the ability is why I use the software to begin with. If metrics get too much attention such things are removed as being unimportant ...
2) a lot of the tracking happening is way too intrusive and intransparent. There are valid use cases, however some large corporations especially, in the last had cases where they collected way too much, including private information, without really giving information about it. That overshadows good cases.
Telemetry is the previous obvious step to surveillance. Not the telemetry you implement in your own small bus, but at the scale of microsoft, apple, meta… yeah
You're never going to win this argument, most of the people who post here have never actually shipped a product themselves and only work on isolated features and others have to handle / manage all of this for them so they have no real understanding of what it takes to do it
the other crowd that pretends otherwise are larping or only have some generic open source project that only a handful of people use or they only update it every 6 years
> You're never going to win this argument
Probably because there is no "truth" here, only subjective opinion, there is no "winning", only "learning" and "sharing".
I could ramble the same about how "people relying on data never shipped an enjoyable thing to people who ended up loving, only care about shipping as fast as possible" and yadda yadda, or I can actually make my points for why I believe what I believe. I do know what I prefer to read, so that's what I try to contribute back.
You could hire people to be testers and pay them for the analytics, I think they would even allow you to record the screen if you paid well enough. The problem is that you do not want to pay or get consent, you want to grab the data for free and without permission and without people realizing what you do. And such kind of people deserve much worse treatment than they are treated today.
Nobody actually cares "what it takes to do it", that's not our problem. You're not entitled to knowing even a single bit of information about us without our consent. Try innovating a way to do it without spying on people.
> with perfect precision.
Precision isn't accuracy and all that.
> From this thread you’d think telemetry is screen recording your every move
> it’s more along the granularity of “how many people clicked the secondary button on the third tab?”
You don't see the contradiction here?
Yes, but the answer to "how many people clicked that button" is irrelevant if it describes the outside world. This id like concluding something is wrong with umbrellas because none of the users in the desert opened them.
If the questions you have can be answered by simple telemetry you are likely asking the wrong questions. E.g. a confused user will click all the buttons, while one thst efficiently uses your software to solve a very specific problem may always ever press the ssme ones.
The actually interesting questions are all about how your software empowers users to deal with the things they have to deal with. Ideally with as little buttons as possible. And if once a year they need that other button it will be there.
It is very easy to draw the wrong conclusions from telemetry.
> Sometimes HN drives me crazy.
You can tell the difference between those who build businesses and those who simply use them.