After writing my last post, I got to thinking. What, exactly, would my ideal web stat site offer? After some cogitating, I’ve realized there are two main things that I would love to see: correlated statistics, and niche statistics.
Correlated Stats
If you look at most of the stat websites I looked at, you can see things like what percentage of users still use IE6 or the latest version of Chrome. You can see what resolutions are the most popular. You can (on some sites) see what percentage of users have JavaScript enabled. But I don’t know of any site that will let you combine these statistics.
For instance, say you want to use a JavaScript polyfill to support IE 7 and below. For the sake of argument, let’s assume your stats site of choice says that IE6 & IE7 combine for 15% of all users. Then let’s assume that the same site says JavaScript isn’t supported by 3% of users. If you assume the two stats map evenly, you would get a percentage of 0.45%, or about 1 in 200, that use IE7 and below; probably won’t be worth supporting. But is that last assumption, that the two stats map evenly, valid?
I think it might not be. Think about it; who uses these older browsers? The less than very tech savvy (my parents would still be using IE6 if I hadn’t intervened), and people at companies that won’t upgrade from their current browser. They’re also the types of people I think are more likely to have disabled JavaScript, either because they read years ago that it might be dangerous to allow JavaScript, or because they have a corporate policy that disallows it. Maybe half of that 3% of users without JavaScript are also using IE7 and below.
This is probably an extreme example, but I think it would be nice if you could go to a site and ask for the percentage of users with, say, JavaScript enabled, using some version of IE, and with a resolution width greater than 1200px. I don’t think it would be that hard to implement: you could probably do it with a single (long) MySQL table of data.
Niche Stats
I actually though of this one while writing the last post, and we sort of have, to a limited extent. If you recall, I said that the W3Schools.com page might be more helpful if you’re designing something for web developers, i.e. with a similar target audience to W3Schools. That’s an example of niche site stats. It’s nice, but what if we had more than that. What if we could look at the stats of just eCommerce sites? Or of sites that target corporate clients almost exclusively? Some sites may be fairly universal – I’d imagine Google or Yahoo’s site stats are nigh indistinguishable from the Internet’s as a whole – but surely there are different genres of site that pull in users with stats that typically vary somewhat from the norm.
If you remember from last time, I said that the best stats you can have are the one’s from your site, so you can tailor your site to your actual audience. I think niche stats would provide a bit of a bridge between personalized stats and the universal stats you can get from the sites I’d reviewed.
That’s all I’ve got on my wishlist, stat-wise. What about you all? Can you think of anything else that would be a nice addition to our user stat toolbox?
