It can get highly detailed, timing how quickly you get through a certain section, checking which buttons you press, checking how you move your mouse, or whether you use a touch screen or keyboard to navigate.Īs product development increases its data appetite, they might update the privacy policy and the end-user license agreement to allow more feature tracking to take place. So, some companies turn to feature tracking. However, that can be expensive and does not always represent how it will be used in the real world. This can be done with laboratory-style testing, using focus groups. Now that Developers can see whether you use a feature, they may want to see exactly how you’re using it. Either way, the server that receives the message gets to see that a user from that IP address was using that feature.įeature tracking can quickly become a go-to approach for driving development. This could be anonymised, or it could be tied to the user identifier. Tracking whether a feature is being used simply sends a ping – a minimal message saying “the feature was used”. Is a recent feature being used? Should it be relocated to help more users find it? Does adding one feature cause other features to be used less? Is one language version performing better than others? New features take time to produce and maintain. It is typically in a company’s interest to know where to spend their development resources. When you agree to send back installation statistics, do you fully understand the privacy implications? Do you understand that just by allowing yourself to be counted, you also make it possible for a company to see other details? Because this privacy intrusion didn’t sit well with us, we developed a system for counting users that maintains your privacy. This is all highly useful for a vendor who wants to know how their software is used and where their users are from, but it immediately invades your privacy and that of any user who just wants to use the software, not share their personal business. The vendor can see how often you run the product, whether you change your IP address, whether you travel to other countries, whether you run the software daily or weekly. This identification token is then sent as part of the notification to the vendor.Īll this makes it possible to tie an installation to a user. To identify a single installation, an identification token must be kept in the user’s profile, to differentiate them from other users. This requires some kind of identification to prevent reinstallations from being counted as new users and to make sure that repeatedly running the application does not increase the user count. But this paints a false picture, since users may install software via third-party channels or via corporate software distribution, or – indeed – they may never run it again after installation.įor truer results, it may be necessary to count users by having the installations notify the vendor when they are installed or running. You could simply count downloads and hope it matches the number of installs. However, for a product that users download and install, counting users is more difficult. Most companies will want to know how many users their system or product has – for statistical purposes or for financial purposes when making agreements with partners, for example.įor a server-side product such as a webmail service, counting accounts (perhaps checking if they’re active) is usually sufficient. But aside from the chance that data can be misinterpreted, there’s also the problem of how to gather usage information while respecting the privacy of users. When it comes to tracking how users engage with products, there are two extremes.Īt one end is the idea that your activities should be ultimately private, so companies won’t actively monitor how you use a product.Īt the other extreme is the approach of monitoring each and every action that you take within a product.Īs someone who works for a software company, I can see the appeal of knowing what product features users are actually using, or which version of a feature is more easily understood.
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