On Nov 28, 2007 4:20 PM, Robert Hoekman, Jr. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Exactly. Metrics can tell us what, but they don't tell us why. We > > cannot find out why w/o actually observing people. > > Eh - we can make a pretty dern good guess a lot of the time. Sure, there > are > certain things you'll never notice without observing people, but with > experience, some decent educated guesses will solve 80% of the usability > problems. > > -r- > > It is true that stats/quantitative data can only tell us the "what", but people seem to be implying that this is not useful information. I find that very strange. Analytics data provides a huge insight in what is happening on a website, and often I don't need to perform user testing to find out the why as experience previous experience helps. Here are some simple numbers I gained from Google Analytics reports this week. 2,051 (8%) of users who searched did not enter any search term. 28% of users did not make it past a certain page in the purchase process, yet this page comes after payment details. 15% of users partially completed a form, but abandoned it. The special offers page was seen by only 8% of users, but of those 8%, 55% went on to purchase something. Access to such accurate data is hugely beneficial when evaluating a site, or planning a user test. Regards, Des -- Des Traynor, Usability Analyst, iQ Content Ltd. http://www.iqcontent.com ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
