Remembering Christopher Alexander, GA4, better tools

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Perhaps the single most influential person on Draft’s design practice, architect & urban planner Christopher Alexander, passed away on March 17.

Outwardly, you probably know his work from our citation of his books A Pattern Language & The Timeless Way of Building in the sidenotes of our first book, Cadence & Slang. You may also know his influence on the wildly influential book on software development that he helped inspire in the mid-Nineties, which gave rise to object-oriented programming. But his influence on me goes much deeper than my descriptions of modular design & normative context back in 2009.

Christopher Alexander had an unflinching, generous, alive sense of structure, of the built environment and how we can relate to our selves and communities, and how we can create buildings, neighborhoods, cities, and even civilizations that honor the earth & one another. His other essays and books took into account the full arc of built history, showing how towns were created from prehistory to the present day, arguing firmly against post-war planned developments and high-rise architecture. In his latter years, his four-part opus The Nature of Order & final book The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth laid out a comprehensive vision for the theses that he spent decades building.

Adam Greenfield:

This is why A Pattern Language has always held for me something very like the comforts I imagine religion offers the believer. I dip into its pages whenever the physical world seems elementally hostile to my attempts to think, learn and grow — whenever I need a reminder that a dining nook, a workbench at a window or a lively street corner could all be made in such a way as to affirm and fulfill these desires, that indeed at various times and places they sometimes were, and that with a little bit of effort they might be again.

Christopher Alexander has no contemporaries in architecture or design. The closest person I can think of in any field is Indigenous botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose book Braiding Sweetgrass hit me in week 3 of the Bad Times®, permanently shifting my consciousness around nature & food. (I literally have a serviceberry tattoo in large part because of this.) Alexander’s lack of contemporaries does not diminish his impact; it only underscores the urgency of his message, which stands in danger of vanishing. Society ignores his wisdom at our peril.

This week, for paid members

• Our fortnightly teardown is for our first ever Draft Analysis brand, mattress brand Casper. As a fitting send-off to Analysis, we’re revisiting this brand to see what a few years and a bunch of venture capital will do to you.
• Our design of the week covers one of the more interesting size guides we’ve ever seen. Does it work?

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Links & analysis

• A call for better tools in design. I think the argument that “all websites look the same” is actually good, since it ensures a degree of familiarity for other people. But I also think that we’ve come to use only a few tools, and that’s problematic if only because we’ve seen the end result of a monopoly in the past. Do we really want to go back there?
• A monster of a tutorial on documenting accessibility & interactions. It rules. I wish I had written it. Read the whole thing. That’s it.
• Since almost all of independent DTC ecommerce is reactive, this post on how to avoid reactivity was interesting to me. It seems to me that the answer is to create an actual strategy and build to it. Part of me wonders whether “strategy” would be a reasonable sell for DTC brands.
• Accounts are not something that most of you need to think about. But for enterprise companies, subscription businesses, and situations where membership makes the most amount of sense, you will want to think through the UX of account maintenance, which is nigh-universally bad. Baymard’s got you.

This month’s free lesson: What does the transition to GA4 mean for your business?

In 2019, Google introduced Google Analytics 4, their new version of Analytics. They claimed it was better. It ran alongside the current Google Analytics. You couldn’t “upgrade” a property to GA4.

I took a look, told all of you that it was not ready for prime time, and did what pretty much everyone else in my position did, which was to forget about it for two and a half years. It was a fun, innocent time.

Then, a week ago as of this writing, Google posted this, saying that Google Analytics will stop reporting data on July 01, 2023, and no, seriously, you have to switch to GA4 right now. Google proceeded to get ratioed, correctly.

Part of me wants to think: does anyone truly believe this? So much of the internet depends on a free, backwards-compatible GA that pulling the plug at literally any time with no fallback would spell disaster for hundreds of thousands of small and mid-sized businesses. In my private chat rooms with other consultants, we whispered about how this will certainly be delayed, if not cancelled entirely. I made a joke about how it would be like how the implementation of Real ID at TSA checkpoints has been delayed over and over since 2005.

But no. This is Google. The company that accelerated the western world’s descent into fascism by shutting down Google Reader is going to have no compunction about doing this. GDPR changed things for them. They know that GA data processing is more burden than benefit for them now. They have been planning this for years. And Google doesn’t care about your feelings.

Fortunately, I care about your feelings. And because I care about your feelings, I’d like to list some things that you can do in response to this right now.

This is the easy part. It should take you about 15 minutes.

1. Sign up for Google Analytics 4 right now. The sooner you sign up and get it integrated with your store, the more data you will have, and the more continuity you will have to navigate any future switch. This is how you do it.
2. Create a “data stream.” I believe this is what regular Google Analytics calls a property. This is how you do it. Tap “Web” on that page to expand those steps.
3. Install GA4 on your store. You can do this by adding everything from gtag.js to your “Additional analytics scripts” section in Shopify. This allows tracking on checkout pages as well as the rest of your theme.
4. Turn on Google Signals. This allows you to track across devices on GA4 properties. Note that this is not full resolution yet; I still see many dropped sessions between mobile & desktop. But it’s useful to have, and there’s no benefit to omitting it. Google Signals comes with zero work on classic Analytics, and requires a few steps to put together on GA4. Google’s how-to guide for doing this is here.
5. Link to Google Ads. Here’s how you do this if you already linked to Google Ads on your classic Analytics account. Here’s how you create new links to Google Ads in GA4.

The less easy part

1. Switching events. GA4 has a totally different events system. First, GA4 has its own set of stock events that you have to use. Here’s the API reference for it. Upsell takes should be set as the add_to_cart event. For your interactional events, such as those tracking scroll depth or search use, you will want to create a whole separate set of custom events. Here’s Google’s reference for doing so.
2. Assuming Google really does turn off GA3 in July 2023, you will need to remove it. You can do that by removing the additional script and including your GA4 property ID in your Shopify settings.
3. Recreate any segments that you might have put together for yourself or your team. GA4 segments are substantially different from what you’ve come to expect. In particular, you can’t use them in the regular reporting interface. (I know. I know.) Instead, you have to create and apply segments in the Explore section, where you build custom reports as if you’re working within a BI dashboard tool. Here’s a how-to guide on creating segments.
4. Google Optimize. Optimize can integrate with your GA4 accounts just like normal. Here’s how to do it. That being said, you may want to hold off on sending experiments to GA4 until you’ve come to depend on it for your daily reporting. That may take a minute.

This sucks and I hate it

I did not want to write this lesson.

As of press time, Google Analytics 4 is a feature-incomplete solution. It will not give you the sort of data you’ve come to expect. I am only recommending that you switch to it because Google is making us switch to it.

I invite feedback on this, especially from people who have made the switch and have come to rely on GA4 for their daily reporting. In what ways is it preferable for you? What are you missing out on? I’d love to hear from you.

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Say goodbye to spreadsheets 🎉 Tradeswell’s AI-powered, all-in-one platform automates the collection and analysis of your most important data across DTC, marketplace and advertising channels and provides real time insights for optimizing your ecommerce revenue and profits. Learn More.