Measuring Success: One Click at a Time
Session: eMetrics and the Science of User Experience
This session approached eMetrics, or the science of measuring the success of your website, from two angles. Tammy Sachs spoke on using focus groups and usability labs to quantify how users interact with your site. Jim Sterne presented web log analysis techniques to achieve the same results.
“User experience research is a bottom-line issue and makes a difference,” said Tammy Sachs, of Sachs Insights. Her research into how users interact with the web has uncovered 10 lessons important to site design…
Tammy Sachs’ 10 Lessons for Site Design:
1. Engage your all of your target audiences.
2. Organize your site around the way your consumers think, not how you do business.
3. Use screen real estate wisely. Put what’s most important front and center.
4. Integrate other channels into your site experience. Make sure your customer can easily find your phone number and store locations.
5. Have an effective search function.
6. Offer “just in time” information. Give users all the information they need at the time they need it.
7. Stay clear of gratuitous animation.
8. Provide clear and clickable links.
9. Use breadcrumb trails effectively.
10. Constantly refine your site experience, utilizing consumer interviews and focus groups to find what works and what needs refining.
Jim Sterne of Target Market tackled the problem from the flip side: mining your data after the consumer has visited your site. With web analytic technology, a site publisher is able to examine what sections users are reading, how they are navigating, what they are buying and what they aren’t. After analysis, your business manager is able to take action to improve the online experience.
Sterne will follow up with examples at “Web Metrics Workshop: Measuring Your Site’s Success,” which will be blogged here later.
During the Q&A period, an attendee asked how we should bring these two theories together. Both panelists agreed that usability labs usually are used during the development process, not after the site is up and running, and that analytics can be used to see if you have corrected problems encountered in usability labs. Both processes are important to a successful site.
