Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Alison J. Head

Alison J. Head — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:12 GMT

I agree whole heartedly with you, Alok. Thanks for speaking up.

SAMs, as you suggest, could (should) be applied early on, too, along with other KPIs, if a project (and when you are hired) allows. In fact, this is my point, there are certain indicators beyond the classics (e.g., task completion rate) that I think add some additional and fundamental value to the entire UCD process.

In my “little” case study abstract that you read, we used SAMs on a vendor extranet that the foundation “purchased” several years ago. Since we were hired for an evaluation this summer, we used SAMs, along with other measures, to find out how well the site supported the client’s business goals as well as users’ behaviors.

We found that SAMs, beyond their colloquial mention in a presentation, gave the client one (not just the only) good measure of how well the site was working for them (in our case, not so good).

- AJH

Alison J. Head — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:20 GMT

Thanks for weighing in Madonnalisa. I agree with you—what consumer sites are doing to get wayward site abandoners back would be an interesting bit of research to know, if you could get it.

Equally interesting (to me, at least) would be how successful have consumer sites been with these “reel back” attempts—that is, how many abandoned consumer sites are able to win back their former users by tracking them and trying to get them to return to their site.

Not many, I’d guess.

- AJH

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.

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.