Jay Goldman

Chris Brogan, whose posts and tweets I read with much relish, had a great thought up today about Understanding Your Guests, in which he drew a parallel between the way Disney understands how people use and visit their theme parks and the way you should understand how people read and participate in your blog. I left a comment over there but kept thinking about it after and so I thought I’d reproduce it here for all of you who might not have caught it.

Chris -

Great post (as always!). Made me think of two things:

1. The importance of metrics. Disney knows everything about their visitors because they’re a highly data-driven organization who measure every detail of your visit and feed it into an analysis machine that continuously improves the park experience. Gardening a community is the same: your garden is only as rich as your data. Go beyond the numbers built-into Wordpress (or your blogging platform of choice) and spend some time getting to know Google Analytics. I’d be curious, for example, to see if the low comment posts have a high enough time-on-page and low enough bounce rate to show that people are reading rather than leaving.
2. I’m commenting from my phone so can’t really look it up, but I’m reminded of a story Daniel Burka told during a presentation at mesh last year (slides from Iteration & You). I’m pretty it was about a new building at MIT, and specifically about the paths leading to it across the surrounding lawns. Rather than laying them out in arbitrary or aesthetic lines, they put down no paths and simply surrounded the building in grass. We’ve all encountered ad hoc paths: a deep, dirt groove through the greenery where the wisdom of crowds says it wants to walk. They waited for some time to pass and then used those ad-hoc paths as their guide for where to put the real ones. The first lesson here is simple: your community will find their own way through your site and will usually blaze the same trails over and over whether you want them to or not. Do you have grass in place to measure it? The second is equally simple but a little more bitter: students at MIT have to go into that building so their need overcomes the “path of most resistance” to create the “path of least resistance”. No one has to read your writing and so their determination to undertake grassroots trail blazing will be considerably reduced. That means you, as Community Gardner, have to step up your observation and measurement from passively watching grass get trampled to actively monitoring and responding.

I did a little more digging post-comment into the paths example and was reminded that they have a name by Daniel’s presentation: Desire Paths. What a poetic way to explain what people want! It was coined by Gaston Bachelard in his 1994 book The Poetics of Space:

A term in landscape architecture used to describe a path that isn’t designed but rather is worn casually away by people finding the shortest distance between two points.

This wouldn’t be the first time that the Human Computer Interaction field have borrowed from architecture (think of Pattern Languages, based on Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language). You can apply this to your own site by observing people using it (do they go straight for the posts? Do they have to follow a torturous route to get to a list of your tags?), by reading their comments and reactions (look for things like “I wish there was a way to…” or “I love your blog but…” or even “It sucks that there’s…”), and by asking them directly. Finding patterns in your data is a bit of a black art, but think about ways to codify a desire path in the information you get back from Analytics or your blogging platform. Look particularly for the entrance and exit patterns from pages (do people leave the site entirely or do they go to a specific page?) as an indication of ‘virtual’ desire paths.

How about this site? Are there paths I’m not providing that would improve your experience? Let me know!

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