papercoffee wrote:You are a little bit biased because you work for that industry. But that's ok. I worked for the App industry and I got a different world view about it all.
I was the one guy responsible to research user-habits and how to implement this knowledge into a UI to bond the user to the product. But sometimes I went to arty with my designs.
That makes me curious on how this research was done (not being sarcastic or anything, genuinely curious here).
From what I have seen, there's nothing more efficient than AB testing, where you don't really have to research the user habits, you just test what works and what doesn't, even big boys in the industry use it, like Google, Facebook, etc. Just curious if you also used this, or were mostly things like heatmaps, funnels and such, or if it was mostly "guessing" (which many still do btw, especially those only starting, since they have to start somewhere, which is a legit way of doing it at first).
papercoffee wrote:
Feralidragon wrote:otherwise things like recommended products, or even things users take for granted like the youtube recommended videos, wouldn't work well at all.
No it doesn't work well ...I look for anime or games and get suddenly in the autoplay "the 10 worst beauty tips" or "You won't believe how funny that celebrity reacted!" ... just because I clicked month ago on a "the 10 best games from 2000". I deleted all my YT cookies thrice in the meantime. Still no luck, my IP is logged and they still in insist that I have to watch that garbage. If they would make a close button for recommendations you don't want to have that would be really helpful. And on top, they would get a better user data.
It does work well, if you see certain kinds of videos consistently, but also keep in mind that by "working well", I mean working well for most people, not everyone will enjoy the experience (maybe you are one of those people, which is fine), and this is proven by the sheer amount of comments in YT videos about how they got there through the recommended videos, which I believe to because the same happens with me, sometimes I can spend an hour or 2 seeing videos if I am not careful, so their system works.
But if you keep deleting stuff, they will have less data to go on, plus if you don't want anything recommended based on a video that you saw, you can do 2 things:
- suspend the history tracking of youtube temporarily, to see those kinds of videos;
- delete the video from history afterwards (I personally do this).
Furthermore, I also mentioned that these are ways to maximize profit, and in youtube this is achieved through ads in videos most of all, so they will also attempt to suggest videos which became somewhat viral or from channels with a big number of subscribers, because they are money-makers from the system's point of view and this cannot be ignored, and this may mean being a bit more aggressive with some videos because you saw 1 of the same kind once, but this works with most because when you see a video about something and enjoy it, chances actually are that you will enjoy another one in the same way.
It's not a perfect system, especially because a recommendation system has to learn things about you, but it generally works, otherwise companies wouldn't invest so much time and money in the development of these.
Red_Fist wrote:You see that is just it, we should all just know they are giving away our data and being tracked, I don't need a warning.
It's not a warning, it's a consent that you're giving.
Plus, the whole point of GDPR is to actually give you control over your own data on the web, and it's done in such a way that the tracking process has become harder for companies to handle, because now there are laws in EU which they have to abide to, and given that EU by itself is so significant in the world, companies are just applying the same GDPR rules even in other countries like US, although they didn't need to, but the EU law and change is that significant, and maintaining 2 systems is nearly impossible without doubling or tripling the costs.