Recently, I have seen a spike in the traffic to this blog.  Google Analytics is a great free tool to monitor traffic.  Just seeing the increasein traffic made me feel warm inside.  Like the way a stage actor feels when they get a round of applause.  It was a near doubling in overall traffic.  I figured, “Hey, people love me, they really really love me”

But if I learned anything from my friend Avinash Kaushik, King of Analytics, is that you must understand your data.  This spike was an illusion.  I couldn’t just sit and be happy with the nice curve.  I had to dig in a little further.  I changed the filter to show only posts that contain the words “UX” in them.  Since, I title my blog posts that way alot, it made sense.  Take a look.

It was not the curve I saw before.  Plus the numbers were alot lower.  What was going on?  This is not the data I was just looking at.  I checked the Top Content report in Google and found an interesting trend.  I changed my filter to be for posts containing the word “Windows-7″.  This showed me a very interesting report.

OK, now I understand.  Windows 7 was released.  People bought it, installed in and started Googling about it.  My site came up a bunch of times and boom, massive traffic spike.  My most popular post by alot is about Windows 7 video drivers.  I don’t even follow the comments anymore.  I have lost interest.  Look at the traffic for that one page.

It’s pretty obvious that the launch of Windows 7 has deluded me to thinking that User Experience was becoming more relevant.  I feel good about knowing the reality of the data, but I was happier with myself before I knew.  Ignorance is Bliss.