WordCamp Las Vegas -- Make stuff that people want

I tried a choose-your-own-adventure style talk at WordCamp Las Vegas. These are the slides, but we didn't go through them in order (or anything close to it).

Transcript

1. Make stuff that people want Evan Solomon | Automattic @evansolomon
2. Hi WordPress.com Data Code Marketing
3. Choose your own adventure
4. Context Experiments, what & why? Designing an experiment Tools we use Data analysis Qualitative data Data mining in WordPress
5. Experiments What and why?
8. Build Measure Learn
9. A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.
10. Validated Learning
11. Want
12. Have
13. Try things
14. ...and measure, or it doesn’t exist
15. Design Experiment (v.)
17. Reasons It’s bad It’s important We have ideas We can measure it
20. Previews up 10%
22. What’s next?
23. Failure Shouldn’t exist
24. Tools Optimizely Kissmetrics Internal HotnessTM
25. Optimizely A/B testing
28. An (abridged) plugin wp_enqueue_script('optimizely ', $this->url); wp_localize_script( 'optimizely', 'wpcom_optimizely', array( $experiment->slug => true ) );
29. gist.github /1275892
30. jQuery (".post-812") .find("h2 > a") .html("Nacin fights Koop"); The change
31. jQuery(".post-812") .find("h2 > a") .live("mousedown", function() { window.optimizely.push( ["trackEvent", "a_click"] ); }); The goal
32. optimizely_experiment( "nancin_coding_title', array( "action" => "init", "logged_out_users" => true ) ); The test
33. <script> var wpcom_optimizely = {"nacin_coding_title":true}; </script> <script src='http:// cdn.optimizely.com/js/ 123.js?ver=1316379297'> </script> The browser
34. The target
35. Kissmetrics Arbitrary data
36. What did they do?
38. gist.github /1428452
39. Using it WP_Kissmetrics::init( KISSMETRICS_API_KEY ); WP_Kissmetrics::identify( get_current_user_id() ); WP_Kissmetrics::record( 'Viewed shopping cart');
40. Mission Control Aka “Internal hotness”
46. Internal API bump_stats_extras( 'wclv_talk', 'audience_impressed' );
47. Analysis We have data! What does it say?
48. All data is not equal
49. isvalid.org Confidence interval Significance test
51. github /evansolomon/isvalid.org
52. Garbage in, garbage out
53. It is a mistake to use statistics without logic, but the reverse does not hold: It is not a mistake to use logic without statistics
54. Qualitative Get out of the building
56. Why did you sign up?
57. How Polldaddy.com Survey.io Usertesting.com
58. Data Mining Get answers
59. Pageviews
60. iPad Views
61. evansolomon.me /notes /data-visualization-is-itself-data/
62. wordpress.com/ stats
64. Your new friend $wpdb
65. WordPress Bootstrap include('wp-load.php'); global $wpdb; //magic goes here
66. $wpdb->prepare() Cleaner, safer SQL
67. Prepare $query = $wpdb->prepare( 'SELECT post_author FROM {$wpdb->posts} WHERE ID = %d', $author);
68. $wpdb->get_var() Readable code
69. Get Var $author = $wpdb->get_var( 'SELECT post_author FROM {$wpdb->posts} WHERE ID = %d', $author);
70. codex.wordpress.org/ Class_Reference/wpdb