Comments on In Appreciation of Measures That Tell Stories

Samantha Diegutis — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:03:18 GMT

It’s a shame the Site Abandonment is not more heavily publicised. Gone are the days when site owners are only concerned with the loading time of a web site being under 8 seconds. Gone are the days when site owners are only concerned with how usable their website is and that their products can be readily viewed or purchase ont heir site.

What they should NOW be VERY concerned about is how closely the site abandonment metric is related the ABILITY-TO-CONTACT-A-HUMAN-BEING metric – Many companies out there have made their website so very advanced that they have made it virtually impossible to find the simplest thing – a contact number for a person.

I wonder how many people out there have gone to a website for a telephone number so that they can talk to a human being – and no matter how flash or advanced the website is they dont find anything. THAT should be the focus of attention these days.

Fickle, us Humans; we want automation, but we want Joe Smith’s personal desk phone number if we get stuck.

And as ever, the largest corporations are the largest culprits, without mentioning any names micro~cough~soft.

Alison J. Head — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 00:26:26 GMT

Great comment. Thank you for passing along this clever strategy for presenting data to stakeholders.

Erin Smith — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 23:04:11 GMT

Your description of the emblematic as a “visible symbol of something abstract” reminds me of the way that after a project, I’ve often applied conversion/abandon data to the user experience maps to show clients the ROI on a project. Beside the paths and blocks on the user maps, I notate the goals and the actuals for clickthroughs to that particular path, as well as the cumulative total of clickthroughs to the other alternative (abandons, search bar, global nav).

It’s a great way of visually demonstrating ROI. Sometimes, we see that a little change upstream creates a big impact… other times, we invest a lot of resources in something that,w ith step-by-step drop-offs, creates little impact.

Alison J. Head — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:59:19 GMT

Absolutely, Fred. I entirely agree with you. There is a lot of richness and power in multiple measures, as Andrea also suggested in her post. The SAM and SAR combination could be a very meaningful one with one measure informing the other one, as you point out—dare I say emblematic ;-). I think one of the dangers we all face is that, at times, we try to do “textbook” work and work within the confines of providing an impeccably accurate measure (whatever the measure may be, e.g., bounce rates, clickstreams, SAMs, etc.). Subsequently, we lose sight of the bigger picture and what stakeholders really want to know. Thanks for posting your comment.

Fred Beecher — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 21:39:52 GMT

As Andrea said, the distinction between SAM and SAR is a great one to make, but I think stopping at just distinguishing between them doesn’t go quite far enough. These two measurements can actually complement each other, and that’s where the real value of combining UXP techniques with Web analytics data lies. While you talk about how SAM can extract some meaning from a raw SAR, the SAR can also support the SAM. If your SAR is close to your SAM, then that offers a strong argument that what you observed with a small sample of users during user testing bears out across the entire user community (maybe not technically “construct validity, but damn close!).

Adriana Iordan — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 12:07:44 GMT

Great article. I recently interviewed Avinash Kaushik on how to measure the success of an e-commerce website.

From the interview, when asked about the most important metrics: “Behavior: Loyalty, Recency, Depth of Visit and Length of Visit, Bounce Rate, Top Entry Pages, Top Referring URLs and Search Keywords.
Experience: Task Completion Rates, Likelihood to Recommend.” (http://www.avangate.com/interviews/avinash-kaushik_7.htm)
He is also insisting on improving the user experience with A/B Testing, Multivariate testing and web analytics.

I think this should be the NEW Web Analytics. The major attention it shouldn’t be only concentrated on what actions users are performing on a website but also on the cause of the actions and on what they are trying to accomplish.

Andrea Wiggins — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:43:05 GMT

This article is very well-informed; Avinash Kaushik is one of web analytics’ great “gurus” and almost undoubtedly the best source in the industry for this topic. I appreciate the discussion of the importance of properly representing insights to stakeholders – your SAM packs a one-two punch that would beat any SAR hands-down, and I’d love to see more people using more meaningful measures like these! There’s so much more value to be gained when you can use multiple sources of user data to paint a picture for the stakeholders.

Alexis Brion — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:20:40 GMT

I see your point, how to impress the stakeholders (and how to keep our jobs).
Thanks a lot for the article.