We’re Running Web 2018 With Web 2008 Dashboards. And That’s a Problem.

The dashboards we look at to monitor the health of our products are lagging the experiences our user communities are having.

Back and forth flame wars on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere register as “engagement” and high clickthrough on “new comment” mobile notifications. As cortisol levels spike and keyboards get punched and one or more users eventually abandon the service, or feel a little angrier, or radicalize into an identity at odds with where they started out, just because that’s what makes them feel like part of a tribe.

“Time on site” and “minutes of video watched” are up-and-to-the-right indicators. More is better, caveated that we also measure “short clicks” and other indications that the user can’t find something to do or isn’t getting the right answer. But so long as they’re watching more, reading more, going deeper down the rabbit hole, that’s fine. A user eating snacks engineered to take advantage of our sweet, salty urges. Diabetes and weight gain be damned.

How did our product make you feel? Measured infrequently with user research studies, pop-up surveys, NPS questions. Next wave of startups trying to use your phone’s camera and sensors to calculate emotional response. But ahead of that we’re still flying pretty blind as product designers to understand and…