A few insightful sessions on Web traffic analytics have got me thinking about the myths we marketers, webmasters, execs, and development folks hold dear about our data. Whether it's Google Analytics, Visual Sciences, Urchin, Webtrends, Analog, Clicktracks - however you collect your data - these myths keep us from making the most of what our metrics can tell us.
Myth #1. Analytics tell us why our (inscrutable) users do what they do.
Traffic data gives us the "what" - and only part of the "what" - of how visitors use our site. It doesn't give us the "why." Yes, we can use the "what" of visitor behavior to speculate about the "why" of user motivation, but we don't know, for instance, why someone spends a particularly long time in a certain section of the site. Is she fascinated and reading every word - or so bored she walked away completely?
Myth #2. Accuracy is what we're shooting for.
If only. Analytics help us look for trends - not hard-and-fast, statistically significant numbers that can give The Irrefutable Facts. They do a great job of showing us growth or contraction over time, changing visitor behaviors, overall visitor loyalty. But the rules for how each analytics program collects data are constantly changing, which makes for good benchmarking, but, for instance, poor t-tests.
Myth #3. Traffic data is all numbers - hard quantitative stats, my friends.
Well, okay, you're right - in today's world, that's still mostly the case. When people talk about measuring and benchmarking traffic data, they're typically referring to big, impressive numbers.
But some of the most interesting developments in the analytics world are actually around qualitative user data, such as that collected through tools called Web Use Recorders. These tools record individual browsing sessions to give you a more qualitative view, from your constituents' perspectives, of your site: where their attention is drawn, what content is overlooked, how they scan your homepage.
So now what?, you ask. If our traffic data doesn't tell us "why," isn't always accurate, and isn't "just the numbers," why do I analyze this data at all.
The answer: Triangulation with other user research methods and data sources. Traffic data is a critical - but singular - pillar of user research. Without alternative techniques like user interviews or surveys, usability tests or focus groups, even the best-laid plans of metricians and analysts can only answer part of the eternal question:
Who are our constituents, what do they want, and why do they do what they do online?
Show Paradigm: everything is displayed and the user explores and organizes it.
One of our recent projects, Report Writer, is the latter: the whole world of report data is available to the user, and we’ve created a tool that empowers users to easily build, organize, and extract the data they find most meaningful. For our upcoming release our usability & design team refreshed a part of the bigger Report Writer tool, and I thought it'd be a good case study to talk about how we approach user experience.
We went from this:
And we finished with this:
Some of the questions we asked ourselves at the beginning of the project were:
What are our users trying to achieve when they get to this step of creating & defining filters?
What kind of control do they expect, and can we give it to them without compromising performance?
How tedious is the current usability and can that be corrected?
What’s the user experience we’re going for?
Will the result provide a pleasant, effective, and efficient user experience?
Working with other departments, our team received A LOT of support to produce this, and had a plenty of data internally and externally to help us along.
One data point concerned the oft-repeated client pain: system response. To address this, then, to reduce page reloads and improve the system response we implemented AJAX so not every create-a-filter and edit-a-filter is a page refresh. Everything's achievable inline, whether creating, editing, or deleting. For example, clicking the “Create a filter” button in the top left—the primary action—causes a new filter to slide down beneath the button with all the filter configurations inline.
Lastly, to help make this powerful tool easy to use, we've moved away from the database-sounding query language to common plain language descriptions, enumerators, and filter labels. The result is amazing, our usability testing showed users able to quickly grasp the tools with virtually zero training.
We're excited to see how client users respond and look forward to making similar changes in other areas of the product soon.
Posted by: brandyreppy at 9:53AM EST on April 9, 2008
Last Saturday, I couldn't find my favorite pair of shoes. I looked everywhere downstairs, then finally went upstairs to look in the closet. Feeling frustrated and like I needed to take control, I started pulling clothes out of the closet, folding them, rehanging them, and even throwing some away. Then, I decided to reorganize my dresser drawers, getting progressively more frustrated at the disarray at which I was storing everything. Next thing I knew, I was in the car, heading to the store, buying new bins and organizers for storage. Too much money later, I headed back home, and began assembling containers and reorganizing. By the end of the day, I was tired, frustrated, and had some how managed to create a bigger mess than I had originally started with. To add insult to injury, I still could not find my favorite pair of shoes anywhere.
While I somehow doubt many care about my poor closet organization skills, we can draw a pretty useful analogy here to what happens with website management: you have to be able to define a problem before you can solve it.
Because I didn't define the problem (finding my shoes), there was no way that I could throttle my efforts to solve it. I got frustrated and immediately felt like I needed to fix everything at once.
When you find a shortcoming on your site, it's important to be able to define the problem - not the solution. If you cannot define the problem right away, then that is the problem.
For example, let's say you are seeing drops in traffic to your site. The problem may be that you need to do more marketing - easy enough. But, another issue may be that you had turnover at the organization and now no one knows how to update the content. Therefore, the content is getting stale, so no one is visiting because there's no new information. If you had chosen to do more marketing to drive traffic, you may have sent a lot of people to your site which has stale information - not good for credibility and certainly not a long-term solution to the issue at hand.
Being able to define a problem on your site is fundamental to finding a solution. Not unlike my closet scenario, throwing random solutions at a problem will likely result in some benefit. But, if you still can't find your shoes, then it's difficult to justify the expense of all of the other components,and you never actually solve the real problem.
Front-loading an issue with discovery - whether it be looking at site analytics, reviewing market trends, or just surveying users - can be extremely useful in helping to define what the actual problem is. Taking some time to sort out what the issues are will help exponentially in finding an appropriate solution.
Posted by: Misty McLaughlin at 11:23AM EST on March 21, 2008
First, a caveat: This post, coming your way from an interactive technology conference that is not NTC -
On the heels of a very different technology extravaganza, South by Southwest Interactive, I wanted to take a few minutes to do some sidelines commentary on the good Web accessibility work of a team of three Convians and our partner at Causeway Interactive.
Two weeks ago, Team ConAIR won the 2008 Accessibility Internet Rally (aka AIR Interactive) competition. AIR is an annual challenge to design and build new, highly accessible websites for Austin-area artists and musicians. The team created a new site for local duo Byrd and Street, which is worth exploring because it is both a) innovative in its accessibility, and b) generally groovy.
(Warning: Web Accessibility and AIR mavens among you can skip the background and head right on down to “what’s cool.”)
First, the challenge: The team was tasked with creating a new browsing experience for all visitors to Byrdandstreet.com – from users with disabilities, like vision, auditory, cognitive or motor impairments, to users accessing the site from slow Internet connections, or old browsers, or small monitors. The goal is a compelling online experience that’s flexible enough to accommodate everyone’s browsing needs.
As those of you who’ve tried this before know, it’s no easy task.
The approach: Team ConAIR team met with the Byrd & Street duo – musicians and artists who were ready to start publishing more of their songs and visual art online – to learn about what their ideal site should be and do, who their visitors are, their future plans. Then, the team sat down and developed an information architecture, visual design, and implementation plan, and started coding.
Accessibility and good design are one and the same. If there was ever a doubt, Byrd & Street’s new design just goes to show that accessibility, usability, and enjoy-ability are not contradictory terms. It's visually compelling, clean, and moves the Byrd & Street brand in a new direction.
There’s multi-media everyone can enjoy. Visitors can choose their sensory mode, either listening to songs or reading lyrics, or listen to descriptions of artist drawings instead of looking at them.
The control is in the hands (or feet, or keyboard) of the users. Whatever your browsing needs are, you can “customize view” to display the site in a way that works for you. Want a larger text size, or a font that’s easier to read? Want to turn off visual styles and have your screen-reader (which is reading the page aloud to you) skip the navigation and get straight to the content? This is all built into the basic structure of the site.
It’s navigable, readable, adaptable, and easy to use. And for the geeks among us, it’s XHTML Strict 1.0 that validates, and completely separates structure from presentation. This baby reads as well with styles disabled as it does in its full graphic glory – and offers some great alternatives for assistive technologies that the standard visitor would never encounter.
Check out Byrd & Street’s new site for yourself, and give a virtual huzzah for Team ConAIR on a job accessibly done.
Posted by: Gene Austin at 11:59PM EST on March 18, 2008
Welcome to Connection Café, a blog created from the hearts
and minds of the employees of Convio. Our vision for this blog is to aggregate
the latest trends, ideas and best practices for nonprofits online. Through
discussions about online communication tactics, the latest in Web 2.0 strategies
and integration of offline and online campaigns, we hope to share insight and
create an open and honest dialogue in the nonprofit technology world.
Unlike other corporate blogs you may have looked at, you
won’t find information or sales pitches about our latest product and service
offerings here. Instead, we are venturing out and doing something different -
we’ll be writing about the issues you
care about and the topics that can help
you succeed online. From time to time that means our products and
technologies and how clients are using them to get results will be part of the
discussion, but we don’t want it to be a sales pitch, so let us know if we
cross that line.
Connection Café will discuss how the Internet is
fundamentally changing the way people connect with causes, forcing nonprofits to
rethink the traditional models for communication, advocacy and fundraising. We
want to share our internal resources and expertise with you, as well as
information from our Fusion Partners and point you to other online sources that
are having the same, or better, discussions. Bottom line, we want to keep you better
connected and engaged with the people, ideas and technology that are driving
the industry.
Over the past eight years, we’ve kept you connected with our
Convio Connection newsletter, presence at industry events and our online client
community. Now I’m inviting you - the nonprofit Executive Director, the weekend
volunteer, the marketing/communications expert – to connect with us once again
by being a part of our online discussion.
So, when we think we have something
valuable to share, you’ll see it here. And while it may be natural for us to
draw from past work experience, this blog is not about Convio as a company but
rather the people, ideas and technology that are fueling the industry we serve.
If you see us veering off that path or becoming too Convio-centric, send a note
or post a comment to let us know. You have my word that we’ll listen to what
you have to say.
I hope that each person who reads
this blog will find something beneficial in the editorials, news and multimedia
content we produce. We also want to read
your comments, get your suggestions and do our best to answer your questions –
or find someone to answer them. I
encourage you to reach out and give us feedback from time to time on what we’re
doing well and what we can improve on.
