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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

"Optimizing" UI for session length and clicks is the same thing as finding the local maxima of bad, right?

The effects of this are easiest to see with online recipes; the highest ranking recipes are all thousand word ramblings with a recipe tacked on at the end. Google sees you spent more time on the site (i.e. wasted scrolling) and thinks you were more 'engaged.'

Wow, I hadn't made that connection! I just kept wondering why all recipe sites had devolved into fiendishly consistent kind of stupid.

> Google sees you spent more time on the site (i.e. wasted scrolling) and thinks you were more 'engaged.'

That seems specious. By that reasoning we could predict long form articles would triumph over short ones, but that doesn't bear out.

It seems just as plausible that there's a population of readers that do like those terrible rambling stories and tend to be more loyal to a site if they do, vs a large population who will just click on whatever recipes show up at the top of the search results with a reasonable sounding recipe name.

Recipe sites also rip each other off all the time, and it would be difficult to tell where the authoritative source of a recipe was. The personal story part is harder to rip off without being caught as a scraper (and may then boost your SEO prospects).

No one scrolls to the end of a long form article to get a recipe. Instead, they just close the tab and say "too long; didn't read."

Your other point are good though.

> No one scrolls to the end of a long form article to get a recipe.

I highly doubt this is true. Scrolling to the bottom of a page is a very low cost to pay for a recipe.

That was an explanation of why long articles that don't have recipes at the end aren't consistently ranked higher than short articles that don't have recipes at the end.

Ah, I see how I completely misread that. Thanks for clarifying!

I noticed this too and made a plugin that saves me a lot of time; it copies the recipe into a container and puts it in a modal at the top of the page with original formatting intact.

Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/recipe-filter/ahlc...

Source: https://github.com/sean-public/RecipeFilter

Video demo & explanation: https://youtu.be/3Xq1p10f3v4

This is awesome and will save me a lot of time. Thanks!

You don't care about how that cookie recipe that only uses four ingredients changed their whole live and how their children just love it and the whole office goes nuts when they bring them in?

Yeah I don't either, I just wanna know how to make the damn cookie.

I guess it is up to you to define your metric to be measured and to be optimized. To define the right metric and targets is not easy and probably is business-specific, i.e., is not the same for every business.

Seriously, +1 to this. Defining key metrics is something where you should sit down with a data scientist that is familiar with your domain. In my experience, the problem isn't that people can't A/B test, they don't know what to test or how to determine if an experiment was "successful".

You are right. Another detail is to find a metric which is meaningful in long term, e.g., the one which is in line with long-term happiness of your customers.

My user experience has continually depreciated on google and most websites the last few years.

Gradient Decent aims to please the average consumer, which often is not what is in-demand in the market place.

Had Henry Ford used ML he would've invented a faster horse.

That mademe laugh, but true.

When I look at the all the flashy stuff Apple is planning on jamming into MacOS and iOS this fall, I expect the same will happen with my UX on those platforms. Who needs these features?

It depends on your goal. If you want to show more ads for longer, it's the local maxima of profit. If you want to provide something like a quick reference guide, then yes, it's terrible. Instead of optimizing for some arbitrary metric you should focus on doing whatever you're doing right.

Behavioral analytics on user interaction can help you fix a bad design but shouldn't matter that much.

Not necessarily - if I have a website that is trying to offer information to people about something, then it's better for everyone if it's more navigable/undersatandable, which session length / clicks might be a proxy for.

That said, it certainly can be.

If your users find what they need right away, session times will go down.

And perhaps total and unique visits will increase as they share it with others. At least, I wish it were that way.

If session times go down, there is a lower chance users will notice the ads, and Google wants them to see the ads.

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