Taylor Davidson - Latest Comments in Cutting a desire path through life

Re: Cutting a desire path through life

Bryan Landers — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:20:53 -0000

What other tools/services have you heard of? I've seen Overture, Google Analytics, any other recommendations?

Re: products self-adapting, that's going to be amazing! For now, the best I see is where a service is so general that a third-party ecosystem can innovate on top of it. Twitter would be an example...also, desire paths can be observed and implemented by humans (not as cool as self-adapting, but still very wonderful and smart). Twitter added the @reply functionality only after users set up the convention.

Re: Cutting a desire path through life

Taylor Davidson — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:30:57 -0000

Great timing: a post by Noah Brier on desire paths and using web data: http://www.noahbrier.com/ar...

Re: Cutting a desire path through life

Taylor Davidson — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 12:40:23 -0000

How would you follow, track and understand product usage? Observation, heat-mapping and eye-tracking, Google Analytics, the "focus group of one" approach (I'm not a fan of actual focus groups), all of these are ways to observe how people use one's products and can be used as the basis for tests and permanent design changes.

But carrying it forward, how can you make the product adapt on its own, naturally, without your intervention? How can it be a platform to allow people to create innovations on top of it?

Re: Cutting a desire path through life

Bryan Landers — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 02:24:57 -0000

Love love love this concept! So, on the product design tip, are metrics the best way to observe desire paths? Are Google Analytics enough or are other, custom tools needed?