Research: Analytics

When Google announced last year that its Core Web Vitals (CWV) update was set to become a ranking factor in June 2021, SEOs, developers, and designers around the world emitted a collective shudder.

After all, any new, major tweak to Google’s algorithm would typically tend to cause tectonic shifts in how Web sites rank. Generally, such updates require adaptation, optimization, and, often, equally seismic changes to the ways in which your site displays content. All of that adds up to a lot of work.

But CWV is a special case. Google has designed and is implementing these new criteria specifically to improve the speed, interactivity, and layout of your Web site’s pages. This algorithm update is neither arbitrary nor capricious. In building it, Google has actually prioritized the user experience across the online community. Read More

When we think of analytics, we think of marketing campaigns and funnel optimization. Analytics can seem a little overwhelming, with so many charts and lots of new features. How can we use analytics for design insights?

The best thing about analytics is that they can show us what people do on their own. The worst thing is that analytics don’t tell us much about context, motivations, and intent. Like any kind of data, there are limitations. But that doesn’t mean analytics aren’t useful. Working with analytics is about knowing where to look and learning which questions you can reasonably ask. Read More

The ultimate goal of any product manager is to create a better product or service. But with this role comes great responsibility because every mistake product managers make can cost their company lost revenues. That’s why great product managers reject a reliance on people’s gut instincts and subjective views and instead rely on data in making as many product decisions as possible. Thankfully, we today live in a data-driven world, which makes the product manager’s job a lot easier.

In this article, I’ll discuss a number of data-driven methods of understanding the performance of Web sites—especially their conversion rates—and how to use this data to improve their results through iterative design. Thus, these methods are equally useful to UX professionals. Read More