Nowadays there are a lot of ways to perform analytics on how your users use your platform or how users will react to new features and UI designs. One way is to track how many times and what a user clicks on. This provides a very brute force-ish way of collecting large amount of data but can be very effective for deducing what features people use and don't you. The problem with this kind of analytics is that it does not provide information on why a user does not use the feature or use it a lot. It can also become polluted with noise when or if the user becomes bored and starts clicking around at random.
Another way that can be effective is a live testing session with a user, observing how they use the platform and occasionally asking them questions about the system. This allows a higher signal to noise ratio as an observer is less likely to record unfocused or unimportant data points. This method though is not scalable so while you may get a lot of valuable information from this kind of testing it will not be able to be conducted on a large scale.
Ideally, you would use a mixture of both. An example of these kinds of analytics at work can be seen with Facebook's News feed. Now while everyone hates how the News feed looks, and somehow hates every new iteration of it more than the last, it does its job very well. The News feed is designed to maximize people's use of Facebook and is the main hub for every user. Being the main hub it is important to get the user experience right, however if it is designed too well then the user never leaves the News feed. Facebook wrote a good article on how they designed a new News feed last year, which you can find here.
There is an old story that floats on the net about how Facebook had designed a great News feed that users loved and was only rolled out to some users to for testing [1]. It put the focus on the News feed and cut out the clutter around it to highlight and increase interaction with the News feed. So what happened to this great News feed? The story goes that while users loved the feed and it increased interaction with the feed it came out the cost of every other part of the site. Users would only interact with the News feed and there was much less interaction with the sites other features which led to it being scrapped.
Fundamentally, analytics are neither good nor bad they simply provide data on how people use and interact with things. How that data is used though is upto the company obtaining and analyzing it. In the aforementioned story we can see both the good and the bad of its use. Analytics helped Facebook build a News feed with a great user experience that users enjoyed but further analyzed show that it didn't provide the experience that Facebook wanted to provide so it was scrapped. It is important to note that while analytics can allow companies to maximize the value a user gets from the user experience it does not mean it maximizes the value of a platform. The more feature rich a platform is, the more it cannot emphasize any particular feature if it wants to be valuable for its whole rather than a part.
This type of analysis basically provides benefit to both the user's of a platform and the creators. In the next part I'll talk about social analytics and how they are used to build profiles of you as a person. (I'll also talk about why I think its is bad thing and does not provide any value to the user)
[1]: I can't find the article right now but I will provide an update on it here when I do
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