Web Analytics and the User Experience Team: WA + UX = WIN

I had a chance to chat with Andrew Janis from Evantage Consulting Monday night at eMetrics, and the subject of web analytics + user experience came up. Sorry to say I missed his talk yesterday, but I did get a chance to read his blog post, Five Web Analytics Metrics for User Experience Professionals, where he lays the groundwork for how UX people can work with analytics data. I’ve been working with our UX team lately, so his post was timely. I’ve heard a lot at this conference about marrying the “what” with the “why,” which is exactly what we do as analysts when we reach out to our UX teams.

How can a UX professional – and indeed, the entire business – benefit from web analytics? There are a number of ways.

Analytics can help UX focus their efforts where they can have the most impact. When site changes are suggested or when user pain points are uncovered, look at your analytics data to see how many users are affected. This helps the user testing team (and the business owner, too) allocate scarce resources to the areas of the site where they can make the most impact. Changes that affect only a small number of users, or are within a section of the site that is not used very often, should take lower priority over improvements that can affect more users unless there is a specific reason (e.g. the handful of dissatisfied users represent your most profitable customers).

Look for user stumbling blocks that you don’t even know you have. Scenario analysis (a/k/a funnel analysis) shows progression through a process on the site. Finding disproportionately large abandonment on certain steps of the process can point to user issues with the process. Similarly, errors on the site and in forms also point to areas where users are not having a good experience.

Help to formulate questions that can be answered through user testing. For example, analytics can identify little-used tools or sections of a website, but it can’t tell us why those sections are underutilized. User testing, however, can tease out whether it’s because those sections are poorly designed and implemented, or if they’re just not part of why people come to the site in the first place. In the former case, improving the design or content is justified. In the latter, the business can avoid spending resources improving features your users don’t care about.

Ensure test subjects are representative of actual site users. If a website contains links to information for different audiences (e.g. links for students vs. teachers, or resources for small businesses vs. large businesses), you can often get an idea of the breakdown of those populations by looking at relative usage in each area.  For sites requiring authentication, web analysts also often have access to demographic information in addition to the behavioral data, and can help profile the different segments that should be represented in the user tests.

Last, but certainly not least, web analytics can help quantify and document how UX adds value to a project. Before a redesign, UX and WA should work together to determine which metrics show that a visit is or isn’t successful. These metrics can be collected (or pulled historically) for several weeks or months before the redesign, and compared with the same metrics after the redesign to provide concrete evidence of what works and what doesn’t, and how much impact the changes made.