Marko Hurst

“User Experience By The Numbers” is my presentation I gave at JBoye Conferences Philadelphia 2010 on May 5th. This presentation shows how user experience (UX) professionals can start using web analytics to inform the experiences they design by focusing on Behavioral Metrics and using onsite search and SEO to inform site content for a better experience.

1) Behavioral Metrics – which are what I feel everyone, but especially UX folks should be focusing on. Behavioral Metrics actually capture and show a user’s behavior, which is in contrast to site and aggregate metrics (visits, visitors, page views, etc).

2) Content & Keywords – By understanding your visitors natural language  you can apply that knowledge to you site and improve your SEO, SEM, content, URLs, metadata, labeling, taxonomy, ontology, site navigation, etc.

Both of these methods are a huge step in the direction of leveraging both qualitative & quantitative data and is very easy to learn. GUARANTEE if you use these two methods it will have a MAJOR impact on improving the experiences you design.

Good luck & enjoy!

Last week I spoke in Washington DC to the US EPA on my book Search Analytics and one of my co-speakers was Tony Byrne of CMS WATCH. Two key things I had to say was that 1) User Experience & Web Analytics should come closer together and 2) that while you can obtain search data from a server log, it’s very messy and not the easiest to look at and that most of the major web analytics tools that utilize page tags for data gathering do NOT have the ability to capture your internal search data.

Tony took those a step further in his article “Aligning Web and Search Analytics” and discusses what he feels needs to happen with Web Analysts and Marketers first. Read what Tony had to say here.

This was my talk give the NYC UPA. It discusses what I call ” Designing Outcomes”, which is a type of ‘backcasting’ that I’ve found works better than other methods I’ve used for determining what steps need to be taken to achieve a specific goal. It does this by starting out with your desired outcome, end state, and moving backwards to the present.

For an example and tool to use this technique download the excel worksheet which shows a real client example from a women’s hair care line from a few years ago.

Hot “off the press”! The book cover to my new book due out next year is designed and ready to go. To keep up with the book and ideas that my co-author, Lou Rosenfeld, and I are testing check out the book 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.