[development] Heatmaps on Drupal.org

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Gary Feldman wrote:
> Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
>> Arnab Nandi wrote:
>> We already collect all that data by ourselves. Drupal.org has the 
>> access log enabled and so we can in principle track every user's trail 
>> of clicks across drupal.org. I've some time ago made a graph showing 
>> such averaged trails, however it hardly generated interest:

> Those graphs look like they been distilled too much to be useful from a 
> usability sense.  They show what areas are popular, but I don't think 
> fully show what's hard to find.

Usability wasn't really what I had on my mind at that time. I just 
wanted to explore the idea to make use of the logs.

I think we could provide the logs in an anonymized form, ie replace the 
IP addresses and uids by some unique string that can't be tracked back 
to the user, to people who'd be willing to look into this.

> One thing I'd look for pogo-sticking (a term I heard from Jared Spool, 
> though I don't know if he's the one who coined it).  That's where a 
> single user is trying to find something, starts at one page, follows a 
> link, decides it's not right, goes back to the first page, follows a 
> different link, decides it's no good, goes back to the first page, etc.  
> That could probably be done automatically, but it's not trivial.

Yeah, might be difficult to spot. Especially with people who use tabbed 
browsing and who might open a series of tabs from the same start page.

> Another thing to look for is the success rate of searches, but I think 
> that requires a manual analysis.

How would you define a succes reate of searches? We log search requests too.

Cheers,
	Gerhard