“User Experience, meet Web Analytics”

The title of this post is taken from a recent article on Adobe.com’s “Think Tank” written by Lou Rosenfeld, information architecture rock star and co-author of the beloved “Polar Bear Book.” I think Lou hits the nail on the head when he says that user experience designers have much to learn from web analytics, and that in the long term we will see a melding of these two fields. Here are a couple of concrete examples offered to show how this sort of combination of qualitative and quantitative methods can provide value right now:

So, if a designer is trying to develop a task analysis exercise, she can now draw on real analytics data to determine which are actually users’ most frequent tasks, or which tasks are most likely to fail and therefore benefit from qualitative testing.

And:

Designers can look at failures—roadblocks in the finding process—and, if possible, see how users pivot at those failure points. For example, which pages cause users to fail at browsing most often? It might be the pages—aside from the main page—from which new searches are most commonly executed. In other words, pages where users have given up on browsing and have pivoted to an alternative—searching. Conversely, where do users navigate when searching has failed them? Study the clickstreams that most commonly begin after users retrieve a zero hits search results page (in other words, where search has failed).

Lou’s article is one of the inspirations for this blog that you are reading now, and I aim to advance this idea that user experience and web analytics are becoming one and the same practice.

Posted by David Zienowicz