Know Thy User: Instrumenting the User Experience

The most important principle of user experience design is "Know Thy User, for He Is Not Thee". However, it is very difficult to know exactly what users think of your application - what they find easy to use, what's hard, what makes sense to them and what doesn't. If you ask them, they don't know, or can't remember, or don't want to admit they can't use your application, or don't want to insult you. Even finding users to ask is difficult, and current techniques such as focus groups almost always produce unrepresentative results. The only way to know for sure is to instrument your application so that it reports user experiences over many sessions. This talk will discuss ways in which this can be done and the design decisions that need to be made to accomplish it successfully. User experience tracking is different from other kinds of program instrumentation - it has to be very light, so that it doesn't degrade performance at all. Which sorts of events should you record? How do you convince users to opt in for data collection? How do you send and store the data, and how do you analyze it? A sample user experience tracking framework will be demonstrated. The silent majority has a lot to say, if you know how to listen to them.