Wednesday, March 8, 2017

Monitor your "improvements"

Sometime last year, to better manage my blog I thought I would try out Google+ Comments on it.

It turned out to be a disaster on three fronts:
1.  I could no longer delete inappropriate comments.
2.  Comments must have a Google+ account, a restriction I find inappropriate on this blog.
3.  I no longer received e-mails about comments on the blog, which has now put me six months behind answering questions I didn't even know where being posted.

All of that because I failed to monitor the impact of what my "intervention" did.  Don't I know better? Yes, I do.

Year before last I recall an presentation by AMIA by Adam Wright, PhD and fellow alum of OHSU on how changes to clinical decision support system resulted in a failure for certain notifications, and thus be acted upon.  While I cannot find the paper, a related poster is here. One of my favorite classes at OHSU was on how to measure the impact of an intervention quantitatively.

I should have been able to detect the low volume of questions, but didn't.  Fortunately in my case, I just failed to get feedback and had reduced capacity to use my blog.  That situation is now corrected.

   Keith

2 comments:

  1. Number 1 and 3 are wrong. I delete and report comments all the time. I also get email notifications on all of them

    Totally agree on 3. Don't like at all. Let me know what you do.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm assuming you are talking about #2 on the last. AS for your experience, it could be different. My experience was that I tried to remove a comment five different times on three different browsers and it never went away. I also NEVER received e-mails about comments.

      The funniest thing was, after I REMOVED Google+ comments, all of the sudden I got e-mails from G+ about my blog. I'm thinking BUG, and bad enough that I don't care to use G+ comments as a result.

      #2 is enough to keep me away from G+ comments though.

      Delete