Disqus - Latest Comments for askrom

Re: Why Your Google Analytics Bounce Rate is Wrong

Christopher Fahey — Sun, 25 Jan 2015 09:07:18 -0000

I know Google hosts the data. And at least on the face of it it seems pretty smart to factor bounce rate into search ranking. But I'm skeptical of your assertion that it does. For one thing, it would lead to sites with shitty bounce rates but who don't use GA getting an advantage over sites who do use GA (and, if you are correct about the importance of events, it punishes sites who don't create events for on-page actions... and opens a door to gaming the system by allowing clever sites to exploit events to simulate false engagement and a deceptively high bounce rate). Also, as you've noted, a high bounce rate doesn't necessarily mean your site wasn't valuable to a searcher, which is what the algorithm is really looking for.

I know nobody (except Google) can really say for sure what data Google's search algorithm does and doesn't use, but your contention that bounce rate is a key factor isn't one that I've heard before, and I wonder if it's an industry consensus expert viewpoint, or just your own idiosyncratic expert assessment?

IMHO, everything you say about using bounce rate smartly to help you understand utility and engagement, and to carefully configure and use events to help you more accurately understand engagement on your own site, is super smart and makes sense. But I'm not buying that Google would make use of that data in evaluating your site's search relevance.

Re: Why Your Google Analytics Bounce Rate is Wrong

Christopher Fahey — Sat, 24 Jan 2015 17:41:47 -0000

You say that bounce rate affects SEO. I'm unclear about how your local Google Analytics bounce rate can be detected by Google's search crawlers. I've never heard that GA sends your analytics data back to Google for SEO purposes. It would seem to be a major disincentive to use GA in the first place.

Re: UX designers: Side drawer navigation could be costing you half your user engagement

Christopher Fahey — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 12:17:08 -0000

Did you really calculate "average weekly frequency" after only 48 hours? Did you really shut down an active AB test after only 48 hours?

Re: Winter Hauler

Christopher Fahey — Sat, 15 Mar 2014 13:42:34 -0000

I knocked out two teeth a block from this location, caught in a gap between nearly-spherical cobbles and broken trolley tracks. Only a fool (like me) bikes on these streets, and certainly nobody but the biggest fool rides on the cobbles in this neighborhood in winter.

Re: Execs Who Can't Attract Former Coworkers Are Red Flags

Christopher Fahey — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 17:40:33 -0000

Sometimes if an exec can't attract their former colleagues, it might be a red flag that the company they now work for sucks. #occamsrazor

Re: Cooper President Engages Critics in Impromptu Exchange

Christopher Fahey — Wed, 15 May 2013 17:12:53 -0000

Nice summary, but I could do without the backhanded insults at people who work with or for corporations. That describes more than half of all Americans. There's nothing wrong with a Cooper Union graduate, from any of the three schools, getting a job working for the same kinds of companies most Americans work for.

Re: The De-Evolution of UX Design

Christopher Fahey — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:53:39 -0000

I'm always down with creating lots of conceptual and abstract structural maps of a system, to help designers understand the underlying qualities, logic, mental models, and technologies involved in what a user sees and touches.

Two thoughts about that.

First, I think it's fine to work on wireframes or even visual design before working on any kind of conceptual flows or information hierarchies or other abstract design exercises. Each kind of activity influences the other, designers should follow their inspiration and work on whatever helps expand their ideas or better define the problem at that moment in the process, and that's a beautiful thing. Completely avoiding abstraction, however, is usually a mistake.

Second, and yes I am being a little pedantic, JJG's VV isn't IA, it's IxD. :-)

Re: Eschaton: Morning thought

Christopher Fahey — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 19:33:08 -0000

Yes, this was a profoundly idiotic post. I hate it when my own side lets their disappointment, cynicism, and fear turn their brains into mush, allowing crazed fantasies like this to suddenly seem realistic and plausible.

Re: Does NJ Support or Oppose Gay Marriage? It Depends.

Christopher Fahey — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:33:52 -0000

It looks to me like *opposition* to gay marriage is the thing that's soft. Support for civil unions does represent a kind of opposition to gay marriage, but these are not people who are leaning away from gay marriage. They're leaning towards it.

Support for gay marriage is rising steadily, there is no question of that.

People who are for civil unions today are people who are no longer as homophobic as they used to be, people who are happy to grant full legal equality to the gay couples they have come to accept and approve of... but they have not yet come to the point of accepting using the word "marriage".

81% of New Jersey is okay with gay couples having equal marriage-like rights. It's something that was unimaginable ten or twenty years ago. I'll bet half of those 42% who are currently supporters of civil unions are either going to change their minds in the next couple of years and become supporters of gay marriage, or they will die of old age and more than likely be replaced by newer, younger voters who are rock-solid supporters of gay marriage.

Think of it this way: the number of people who support civil unions isn't going to go down. Ever. Civil union supports are drifting towards full marriage equality, not the other way.

It's the opposition to gay marriage that's soft. Melting away.

Re: Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything

Christopher Fahey — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 21:05:07 -0000

Might it be that some of the people who enjoyed it more despite the spoilers mat have been people who kinda knew what the "secret" might be already/anyway, either because they are well-informed students who know the story already (nobody who actually reads Anna Karenina doesn't already know what happens) or they are able to intuit the ending regardless of the overt reveal?

That is to say, is it a problem that this test was administered to college students using typical college-assigned literature?

Would it work for lowbrow fiction among the general population, or Hollywood movies?

Re: Time Management for Creative Minds - ECR - 4ormat

Christopher Fahey — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 11:21:00 -0000

I read this article, but should've been actually doing work.

Re: http://blog.emenel.ca/post/6248890123

Christopher Fahey — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 12:15:59 -0000

What I love about this song is that it's about an insect. And it's on the same album as I am the Fly, also about an insect.

Re: http://sketchday.tumblr.com/post/5451503416

Christopher Fahey — Sun, 15 May 2011 06:52:55 -0000

Thanks for making this! I love "Crappy Game x3".

On the Wikipedia number: Add two zeros... And on the American TV number: add three zeros!

Re: Obama Birth Certificate Moved to More Secure Location Months Ago

Christopher Fahey — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:11:59 -0000

Um, no, it was founded in 1890: http://www.kapiolani.org/wo...

Re: Obama Birth Certificate Moved to More Secure Location Months Ago

Christopher Fahey — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:10:09 -0000

The effects you describe don't actually happen. What PDF document are you looking at? Not the one on the WH site, I assume.

Re: The Base and Bloggers

Christopher Fahey — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:58:27 -0000

Bush failed to pass Social Security privatization, even with control of both houses. That was his Health Care Reform, and unlike Obama, who compromised and won, Bush failed in his Big Plan utterly.

His other biggish agenda items were passed with willing Democratic support. He didn't strong-arm them. They were on board and voted consistently with their records and electorates. In other words, Bush passed bills that were filibuster-proof due to a lot of support from a group of right-leaning Democrats -- the SAME right-leaning Democrats Obama had (and has) to deal with, too. Those Democrats who helped Bush pass his big tax cuts are mostly still there, and they would never have voted for the public option even if Obama fought as hard as you imagine he should have... even if Obama threatened to reveal secret photos of them with dead hookers.

The numbers just didn't add up. You're not a racist, but I suspect maybe you're not a mathematician, either.

Re: The Base and Bloggers

Christopher Fahey — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:37:11 -0000

Oh, and also:

51% of 25% is 13%.

So there are more poor white Republicans (13% of the electorate) than there are non-white Democrats (11% of the electorate), another fact I intuited in my original comment. In fact, there are almost as many poor white Republicans as there are non-white voters of any party. One lesson of this is that the GOP strategy of appealing to certain poor white people at the expense of any appeal to minorities still makes some mathematical sense. Not for long, of course.

Re: The Base and Bloggers

Christopher Fahey — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 12:30:02 -0000

Okay.

86% of 13% is 11%.
43% of 49% is 21%.

In other words, there are nearly twice as many white Democrats making over $50k as there are non-white Democrats at any income.

My intuition isn't bad.

Re: The Base and Bloggers

Christopher Fahey — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:11:32 -0000

As best I can tell the electoral base of the Democratic Party continues to be low-income people and racial minorities. Obviously better-off white people with idiosyncratic ideological motivations also play an important role in progressive politics on a practical level.

I suspect the latter outnumbers the former, on both a practical (voters) and absolute level. Many privileged liberals like to think that there's nothing special about their class cohort, and all liberals often feel like a minority whenever conservatism heats up in the body politic and the GOP makes political gains... but privileged liberals are nonetheless fairly numerous in this country. What's more, plenty of poor white people are reliable, steady, consistent, loyal Republicans and will never, ever be part of the liberal/Democratic "base".

Re: The Daily isn’t as bad as Virgin’s Project

Christopher Fahey — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 10:42:35 -0000

The world doesn’t need general interest news packaged in a magazine metaphor.

That's the most important observation, and very well put.

Re: IFTTT Blog - ifttt the beginning...

Christopher Fahey — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:41:15 -0000

Awesome idea. You're essentially enabling people to make their own daemons. Very cool.

Re: The Advantage Of Dual-Identities (A Case Study of Nabokov)

Christopher Fahey — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 12:41:55 -0000

It's funny how the biologist Stephen Jay Gould undermines his own argument by positioning himself as an expert on artistic practice.

Ironically, Gould himself (and his wife) moonlighted as a leading expert on the work of Marcel Duchamp. His insights into Duchamp's work are really top-notch:

http://www.toutfait.com/iss...

Double irony in that Duchamp had a double life as as competitive chess player.

Re: http://littlebigdetails.com/post/2956522739

Christopher Fahey — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 11:25:49 -0000

It looks like it's on http://edition.cnn.com/, but not at http://www.cnn.com (at least not when I view it here in the USA). Americans don't get a globe logo at all, presumably because there is no world outside of America.

Re: Blackboard vs Whiteboard

Christopher Fahey — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 11:56:12 -0000

For the record, this diagram was put up by one of the IxD MFA students, Jeff Kirsch, and is based on Dan Saffer's original.

Re: In Defense of Experts

Christopher Fahey — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:39:54 -0000

Great points for people whose social graphs include hundreds of strangers.

But most people do not have hundreds of strangers in their social networks.

Either way, we need a (polite, discreet) way to prioritize people in our social networks.