Using website analytics as a design tool
by Janus Boye
October 26, 2011
Tags: analytics, higher education, user experience
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For most web professionals, website analytics is little more than a set of reports for management and another task on your already long to-do list. Analytics can help measure popularity and better understand your users, but too often web professionals don’t find the time to really take action on the numbers. In fact, most find that they are overwhelmed with data, but have too few resources available to crunch it properly and follow up.
To help you take the next step with the usage of website analytics, we’ve invited Michael Fienen, Director of Web Marketing, Pittsburg State University to give a fascinating presentation called Chaos in context: Informed design through analytics. The talk is on the higher education conference track, where Michael will show how numbers can be utilized as a design tool and how you can effectively merge analytics with user experience design.
One of the key take-aways in the talk is a new way to think about redesigning your website. As websites age, the act of redesigning serves a necessary, but costly role. According to Michael, it can frequently be a much better use of resources to constantly be realigning instead. That is – making a consistent stream of smaller, incremental changes over time. To do this, information contained within your analytics can help resolve tools that are failing, falling out of use or are not being understood.
More tips on how to move forward with website analytics
We’ve previously shared how 2 members of the international J. Boye community for web and intranet professionals have managed to work professionally with website analytics. Learn more from:
For additional insights, UX and information architecture expert Lou Rosenfeld gave a well-received keynote at the J. Boye Philadephia 2009 conference where he talked about marrying web analytics with user experience.