by danudey | 2025-11-13 22:21:26+00:00
> We could go to Z site and say, "Hey, you could probably make your users happy if you made this change". Maybe they'd even pay us for that insight?

My honest opinion:

1. No site would pay for that insight

2. Every site should pay for that insight

Part of the problem is that a lot of companies fall into one of two categories:

1. Small companies that don't have the time/energy/inclination to make changes, even if they're simple; often they're not even the ones making the website itself and they aren't going to way to pay the company who made the site originally to come back and tweak it based on what a small, self-selecting group of users decided to change.

2. Large companies who, even if they did care about what that small, self-selecting group of users wanted to change, have so many layers between A and Z that it's nearly impossible to get anything done without a tangible business need. No manager is going to sign off on developer and engineer time and testing because 40% of 1% of their audience moves the sidebar from one side to the other.

Also:

1. Designers are opinionated and don't want some clanker telling them what they're doing wrong, regardless of the data.

2. Your subset of users may have different goals or values; maybe the users more likely to install this extension and generate tweaks don't want to see recommended articles or video articles or 'you may like...' or whatever, but most of their users do and the change would turn out to be a bad one. Maybe it would reduce accessibility in some way that most users don't care about, etc.

If I had to pick a 'what's the value of all this', I would say that it's less about "what users want from this site" vs. "what users want from sites". For example, if you did the following:

1. Record all the prompts that people create that result in tweaks that people actually use, along with the category of site (banking, blogs, news, shopping, social media, forums); this gives you a general selection of things that people want. Promote these to other users to see how much mass appeal they have

2. Record all the prompts that people create that result in tweaks that people don't actually use; this gives you a selection of things that people think they want but it turns out they don't.

3. Summarize those changes into reports.

Now you could produce a 'web trend report' where you can say:

1. 80% of users are making changes to reduce clutter on sites

2. 40% of users are disabling or hiding auto-play videos

3. 40% of People in countries which use right-to-left languages swap sidebars from one side to another even on left-to-right-language websites

4. The top 'changed' sites in your industry are ... and the changes people make are ...

5. The top changes that people make to sites in your industry are ... and users who make those changes have a 40% lower bounce rate / 30% longer time-on-site / etc. than users who don't make those changes.

On top of that, you could build a model trained on those user prompts that companies could then pay for (somehow?) to run their sites through to provide suggestions of what changes they could make to their sites to satisfy these apparent user needs or preferences without sacrificing their own goals for the websites - e.g. users want to remove auto-playing videos because they're obnoxious, but the company is trying to promote their video content so maybe this model could find a middle-ground to present the video to users in a way that's less obnoxious but generates user engagement.

That's what I think anyway, but I'm not in marketing or whatever.