Once we get closer to having a live production instance of NDS Labs, we should look into adding it to Google Analytics. This would allow us to passively track all kinds of useful metrics of the UI, as opposed to asking the user to provide these details to us manually via feedback.

More information about Google Analytics can be found on the homepage

Several of the GA features might be less than useful for an academic platform, such as tracking income from ads, but there are still plenty of benefits that could be gained by analyzing the traffic to the UI.

Some interesting metrics that we could track include:

• OS / Browser versions: this is vital, as it tell us which platforms we should target for UI testing
• Screen Resolution: also vital, this will tell us how to style the UI such that it fits on commonly-used screen resolutions
• Frequency of use: this will tell us how often are users require access to the NDS Labs UI
• Acquisiton: this may be able to tell us more about how people are finding out about NDS Labs, in the case of non-NDSC traffic
• Usage trends: this will tell us whether NDS Labs is gaining or losing popularity
• Page load times: this will tell us areas of the UI that are performing poorly and may require further performance analysis
• User flow: this will tell us on which portions of the UI / API we should focus our testing, as well as areas that need improvement - if users aren't utilizing a particular feature or page, there is likely a reason (i.e. too confusing, unnecessary, "broken", etc)
• New vs. returning users: this will tell us how many new users hit the site and how often they return
• Geographic / Network access: this will tell us where people are viewing NDS Labs from, and possibly who we should reach out to about gaining access
• Mobile vs Desktop: I expect that most users will not be using mobile platforms, but who knows?
• And many, many more!

While ideally this is something we could throw in for the Odum release, it is not mission-critical. That would give us plenty of useful data to analyze from our first rollout with 20+ simultaneous users.

This ticket is complete when our production instance of NDS Labs has been added to the Google Analytics Dashboard. We may need to discuss which Google account(s) to use for this endeavor.