It's easy to forget just about everything these days ... thanks to our handy tools such as contact lists that hold the memory so that our minds can be used for other important ideas such as remembering that there is a preference feature in iTunes that actually makes sense.
While loading some songs last night and today, I realized that my preferences must be wack-o --- since, in order to have something other than "Track XX" display, I was typing in the song name. Why? Because my advanced import preferences didn't have a check where a check was needed: to find the names of the songs on the Internet. Oh thank heaven for the Internet!
After correcting my iTunes preferences so that the songs load quickly, I turned my thoughts to other preferences -- such as those found in marketing. I know that many marketers, when building a form for a Web site, ask for every type of preference. This extreme version of a preference form is meant to capture as much data as possible: so that they can fill their little database and make it a big database.
Sometimes these forms ask for too much; in fact, Jakob Nielsen recognized "cumbersome forms" as a top design mistake in 2005.
When is a preference only a preference and not an invasion of privacy?
One clear answer: when it's in iTunes ... at least I hope so (I could be wrong).
But then, I tend toward conspiracy theory when I start to think about the databases that I'm already in -- and it becomes near obsession when I think about the future databases that I'll be in...
or maybe those already exist in D.C. ??
This post has rambled from memory to preferences to conspiracy ... so where's the Web Analytics in that?
Web Analytics will help you determine if you've allowed the marketers to step over the line to near privacy invasion. How so?
By monitoring your forms or changes in your forms: use the famous bounce rate as a measure (you'll notice that Grok's description is not about monitoring forms -- but a form is a page and thus it makes sense to use this measure).
If you make a major change or build a brand new form -- you may even want to monitor each field within the form: where specifically does your visitor drop out? Before moving forward with field-level analysis, though, you'll want to weigh the cost of data-capture against the benefit: many reporting tools today charge for each event (rather than by the page view).
