Analytics

The hermit tarot card refers to attaining knowledge, and that being ready to impart that knowledge to others. He is carrying a lamp which symbolises enlightenment, awareness, insight and perception. So continue looking to your finals goals but building on the insights you have already gained.

Understanding what is going on through analytics is going to give you important insights into your user’s behaviours. It shows you what people are doing. Up until now web analytics have been mostly built to generate information for marketing teams. But if you can get useful metrics, the quantitive data can support the qualitative data you have gathered with user testing.

More usability and user-experience professionals are going to have to use web analytics and quantitative-data research to support the experiences they are designing. Also ‘big-data’ is apparently shaping user experiences in a whole lot of unintended ways.

In an interview with the Harvard Business School, Clayton Christensen makes this observation about analytics.

Gerdeman: You mention that what gets measured gets done. Southern New Hampshire University tracks how many minutes it takes to respond to an inquiry. Amazon focuses on when orders are delivered, not when they are shipped. The key here is keeping what matters in focus, right?

Christensen: Isn’t that a great concept? A lot of companies don’t do that. I spent my life developing theories about management. A theory is a statement of causality. Every time you as a manager take an action, it’s predicated on a theory: If I do this, this will be the result. If we do it this way, we’ll be successful. Managers are voracious consumers of theory.

In all of our research, we have not developed a good theory about metrics. Are we measuring the right thing or the wrong thing, and how do you know whether it’s right or wrong? Do you wait until all the evidence is in and then say, “Oh crud”?

The connection of job to be done with the metric is really an important idea. We know there needs to be a great theory there. I don’t think we’ve developed it yet.

So it will be interesting to see what the merge between data and UX is going to generate. We may already be in Chris Anderson’s Petabyte age…

‘Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.’