How can website hits statistics be helpful to improve usability?

Question

Have you noticed that almost every links in facebook have ref query string?

I belive that, with that ref, facebook somehow track and study their user behaviour. this could be their secret recipe of making a better usability.

So, I am trying out the same thing, change http://a.com/b.aspx to http://a.com/b.aspx?ref=c and log every hits into a table.

========================================================================
userid | page          | ref       | response_time | dtmTime
========================================================================
54321  | profile.aspx  | birthday  | 123           | 2009-12-23 11:05:00
12345  | compose.aspx  | search    | 456           | 2009-12-23 11:05:02
54321  | payment.aspx  | gift      | 234           | 2009-12-23 11:05:01
12345  | chat.aspx     | search    | 567           | 2009-12-23 11:05:03
.....  | ............  | ........  | ...           | ...................

I think it's a good start. I just don't know what to do with these informations. Is there any appropriate methodology to process these informations?

Answer 1

Research has shown that fast responses are a way to improve not only usability of a website. It's also a way to improve conversion rates or site usage in general.

• Tests at Amazon revealed that every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon.com decreased sales by 1%
• Experiments at Microsoft on Live Search showed that when search results pages were slowed by 1 second: a) Queries per user declined by 1.0%, and b) Ad clicks per user declined by 1.5%

People simply don't want to wait. Therefore, we track response time percentiles for our sites. Additionally, nice visualization of this data helps with measuring performance optimization efforts and monitoring server health.

Here is an example generated using Google Charts:

That looks bad! Response times of > 4000 ms certainly indicate performance problems that have a considerable impact on usability. At times the 800 ms percentile (which we consider a good indicator for our apps) was as low as 77%. We typically try to get the 800 ms percentile at 95%. So this looks like there's some serious work ahead ... but the image is nice, isn't it? ;)