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I've never seen the Trending page before, but it looks like another take on the the "Explore" page. I wonder, do people generally go to GitHub just to browse around? But if people find value in it, then who am I to say. By the way, it's deprecating. Depreciation is something else.
The most effective thing the team behind this feature did to drive adoption was to threaten to remove it. More people know about this feature now than ever would have through traditional marketing tactics.
I am incredibly glad they are keeping it around for now -- for now being the key word here. From the way they worded it, doesn't seem like they were prepared for the feedback they received, in terms of (paraphrased) "the few people who used the page seem to love it". How do they not know such an important metric? Shouldn't they be able to measure the number of recurring users? Shouldn't that metric tell them that ins…
However... This is tech, and the way engineering teams in tech work these days means it's probably something as simple as this feature is considered low impact and not "career enhancing", so no one was willing to take on maintaining it or promoting it. The only option was to kill it. When someone saw how passionate users are about it they changed their mind.
The initial call to deprecate this page was quite obviously driven by usage telemetry (i.e. "engagement" metrics), rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like. I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.
I don't know what their telemetry said, but generally it's something like this.
This is empirical enough to say decisively "most people do not care about this feature."
The initial call to deprecate this page was quite obviously driven by usage telemetry (i.e. "engagement" metrics), rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like. I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.
yeah, they said that.
> rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like
how do you suggest they talk to their users to do this? less than 1% of people invited to take a survey actually take the survey. however, when you say you want to remove something, those who use it make the effort to respond; at a far higher rate than would participate in a survey.
by saying they were going to remove the feature, they solicited better feedback than they would have gotten in any other way. if that was not intentional on some level, I would be surprised.
> I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.
I suspect that some people will look for any excuse at all to share their opinion about the horrible new world with its horrible new ways as if only they and no one else knows what they are doing. I am not referring to you specifically, but your comment reminded me of just how often I see this "new ways to do things are always bad" sentiment and it is so wrong in so many ways.
The initial call to deprecate this page was quite obviously driven by usage telemetry (i.e. "engagement" metrics), rather than actually speaking to users about what they like and don't like. I suspect that companies sometimes believe they can automate their way into quality designs, by relying on analytics, rather than empathizing deeply with their customers.
I mean, how exactly do you argue with something like "0.5% of users have visited this page in the past 12 months, and 0.3% of users have only visited once"? I don't know what their telemetry said, but generally it's something like this. This is empirical enough to say decisively "most people do not care about this feature."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, how exactly do you argue with something like "0.5% of users have visited this page in the past 12 months, and 0.3% of users have only visited once"? I don't know what their telemetry said, but generally it's something like this. This is empirical enough to say decisively "most people do not care about this feature."
if we follow that logic big red emergency stop buttons should be removed from machinery because of their low usage.
You can't make that conclusion with a webpage for content discovery.