Most Fridays we hold talks known as 'osmotics' at Last.fm. Their purpose is to share understanding about the various things that are going on in different departments; an open session which anyone can use to present recent work. It's a response to our growth, as it's now impossible to know what's happening throughout the company at any given point in time.

A few weeks back I presented some of the work we've been doing on interaction path analysis. As web developers we're completely spoilt for usage information on our apps, and interaction histories are sitting in our apache logs the entire time. We've been using tools to mine these and better understand real interaction flows on our site, in order to improve our understanding of common use cases.

You'll often find that your users don't use your software exactly as you designed for. That's natural, and as web developers we need to be equipped to observe these flows and adapt/optimize our software accordingly. As Stewart Brand observed of buildings, so too good software should learn from usage patterns rather than working against them. A good app should flow.

We use a tool suite from Omniture - the pricing may well be out of reach of most startups, but anyone can mine apache logs to get similar information. Bear in mind the presentation assumes no technical knowledge and was prepared in about 20 minutes - it's more of a lightning talk than anything. I've blacked out some sensitive bits of information.

→ Interaction Path Analysis - slides with annotations (1.1MB)