Marko Hurst

I recently did an interview with Pek Pongpaet.

1. Who are you and what do you do?
2. Can you explain analytics to us in a way that my diverse group of readers can understand?
3.You’re also working on a book I hear, can you tell me more about that?
4. Tell us a bit about the Netflix contest you’re working on?
5. I hear you are also a avid muay thai fighter. Can you tell us about that? Do you think your martial arts training compliments your line of work and vice versa?

Full interview can be found at Pek’s blog.

I was talking with Lou Rosenfeld the other day about the book we are currently working on, “Search Analytics: Conversations With Your Customers“, and I proposed the the following…

A conversation is in most cases a two-way dialog that happens in real-time, i.e. someone is speaking, while at least one other is listening and that exchange might go back and forth. But this rarely happens with most websites, it’s mostly a one-way dialog with your users doing all the talking and the site owner just ignoring them. I can hardly call this a “conversation”. To me it seems more of a confession. And that’s not a bad thing if you consider what a confession really is… acknowledgment; avowal; admission; disclosure. Your users/customer/clients/etc. are telling you what they need, what they can’t find, what is frustrating, etc. And the best and juiciest part of every single confession is that it is in their own language! Short of using that all that wonderful info to take action on (hint hint), life on the Web doesn’t get much better than that.

So, is that book about conversations or confessions? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Today I signed a book deal with Rosenfeld Media to co-author a book with Lou Rosenfeld – Site Search Analytics: Conversations with Your Customers.

The book will attempt to bring together what both authors feels is missing from both the UX and Analytics practices, namely each other. UX could take a few lessons from analytics and vise versa. What we see, is a world where the ‘what and why’, i.e. quantitative and qualitative, collide, to not only bring together a much richer and more cohesive understanding of your customers/users, but also to effectively tie your strategy to execution, which in turn will help you create and design better experiences.

Due out in 2009.

Related:
Expansion on the above: Hello. My Name is…
Interview with Lou Rosenfeld: e-consultantcy