Research: Analytics

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

This is a sample chapter from Luke Hay’s book Researching UX: Analytics. 2017 SitePoint.

Chapter 6: Measuring and Reporting Outcomes

“The greatest value of a picture is when it forces us to notice what we never expected to see.”—John Tukey, American Mathematician

So far, we’ve covered how to check that your analytics is set up correctly, how to use analytics data to identify potential problems, and how to use it for user research. These techniques, along with other UX methods, will help you to identify where you should make changes to your Web site, and what those changes might look like. Once you’ve made the changes to your site, don’t stop there! You should look to measure the outcome of those changes and learn from the results. 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