IA Summit 08: Integrating Web Analytics
Integrating Web Analytics into Information Architecture & User-Centered Design
Hallie Wilfert
SRA International, Inc.
This session showed how web analytics play a role in understanding user centered design. What's important are that the numbers generated from analytics only show what people do, but not why they do it. This requires analyzing trends, which are more important than the numbers. She demonstrated examples of how changes were made to pages based on analytics. One example was looking at how one page was receiving an inordinate amount of hits, and how they were able to discover it was because that page was recently linked from a Wikipedia article. This illuminated how the website owners could then go and use these other sources to affect usage of their site in the future. Analytics also showed drop off rates on web processes, showing where users stopped, giving the UX designers the ability to pinpoint trouble spots and allowing them to re-envision the process.
Tools she uses:
Urchin
Webtrends
Analog
Clicktracks
ACSI / Forsee
(can't use Google Analytics w/ government clients)
Relevant Association:
Web Analytics Association
Slides & Podcast coming soon
Comments