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Privacy concerns aside, I'm having trouble understanding the value prop. It's more to build and maintain, requires more bandwidth and storage, and the resulting

Privacy concerns aside, I'm having trouble understanding the value prop. It's more to build and maintain, requires more bandwidth and storage, and the resulting dataset is mostly noise or not significantly different from what was submitted. Data mining that would be a lot of work for very little gain in most cases.

Dave3of5 4y ago
> I'm having trouble understanding the value prop It'll be for abandoned signups. If someone is literally on the signup page but end up not clicking the submit button you want to find out what stopped them and coerce them somehow to actually clicking the button. The more data you gather about the process the more you can adapt the signup page to actually get them to click the button. It's really important for startups as one of their KPI's will be new signups per X. Companies like slack, facebook, youtube ..etc have teams of people who are working on this type of thing. Note: I do not condone this type of invasive analytics but I'm telling you why they do it that's all.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mcdonje 4y ago
  I hadn't thought of that, thanks. I suppose if there's a trend of users quitting when they get to a certain sign up field, the company can determine if that field can be changed or removed.
- ohwellhere 4y ago
  I worked for a popular software services company that used this sort of thing on their inbound interest forms. They found that oftentimes prospective clients would write a first draft that was much more candid about what they wanted and what their budget was, and then they'd revise it to make it more circumspect before submitting. Going into negotiations, our side had the original unfiltered data.
  - actionablefiber 4y ago
    That's horrifying, and a breach of trust. If I knew a company were doing that I would absolutely not consider engaging them for business.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bennyp101 4y ago
In the article they mention getting emails from sites to follow up. “Your basket is still here” kinda thing
thedougd 4y ago
I take advantage of this on a few websites. Sears Parts Direct is a good example. Add the items to your cart, fill out your information and do not complete checkout. In a few hours you'll have a 10-20% off coupon in your inbox asking you to finish your checkout.
- feoren 4y ago
  Adding items to your cart counts as "hitting submit". "Hitting submit" means you asked the site to save some information or change state somehow. You can do what you describe without secretly collecting data that the user didn't want you to collect.
  - thedougd 4y ago
    On most commerce sites, while shopping as a guest or logged out user, you place items in your cart without providing personally identifiable information. After, during the checkout phase, you provide either all your PII in a single step or in phased steps. In either case, it's not clear that you're submitting that information to the other party until you click, 'complete order', or however they label their submit button.
sudobash1 4y ago
There was a submission[1] here on HN a while back which went into some detail about the how and why. He got an email from a site that he started to sign up for, but did not hit submit. Using the browser dev tools, he saw that it recorded the email that he put in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23384452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23384452

Dave3of5 4y ago

> I'm having trouble understanding the value prop It'll be for abandoned signups. If someone is literally on the signup page but end up not clicking the submit button you want to find out what stopped them and coerce them somehow to actually clicking the button. The more data you gather about the process the more you can adapt the signup page to actually get them to click the button. It's really important for startups as one of their KPI's will be new signups per X. Companies like slack, facebook, youtube ..etc have teams of people who are working on this type of thing. Note: I do not condone this type of invasive analytics but I'm telling you why they do it that's all.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mcdonje 4y ago
I hadn't thought of that, thanks. I suppose if there's a trend of users quitting when they get to a certain sign up field, the company can determine if that field can be changed or removed.
ohwellhere 4y ago
I worked for a popular software services company that used this sort of thing on their inbound interest forms. They found that oftentimes prospective clients would write a first draft that was much more candid about what they wanted and what their budget was, and then they'd revise it to make it more circumspect before submitting. Going into negotiations, our side had the original unfiltered data.
- actionablefiber 4y ago
  That's horrifying, and a breach of trust. If I knew a company were doing that I would absolutely not consider engaging them for business.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

bennyp101 4y ago

In the article they mention getting emails from sites to follow up. “Your basket is still here” kinda thing

thedougd 4y ago

I take advantage of this on a few websites. Sears Parts Direct is a good example. Add the items to your cart, fill out your information and do not complete checkout. In a few hours you'll have a 10-20% off coupon in your inbox asking you to finish your checkout.

feoren 4y ago
Adding items to your cart counts as "hitting submit". "Hitting submit" means you asked the site to save some information or change state somehow. You can do what you describe without secretly collecting data that the user didn't want you to collect.
- thedougd 4y ago
  On most commerce sites, while shopping as a guest or logged out user, you place items in your cart without providing personally identifiable information. After, during the checkout phase, you provide either all your PII in a single step or in phased steps. In either case, it's not clear that you're submitting that information to the other party until you click, 'complete order', or however they label their submit button.

sudobash1 4y ago

There was a submission[1] here on HN a while back which went into some detail about the how and why. He got an email from a site that he started to sign up for, but did not hit submit. Using the browser dev tools, he saw that it recorded the email that he put in. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23384452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23384452