Hay - Researching UX: analytics understanding is the Heart of Great UX

Good UX is based on evidence. Qualitative evidence, such as user testing and field research, can only get you so far. To get the full picture of how users are engaging with your website or app, you'll need to use quantitative evidence in the form of analytics.

This book will show you, step by step, how you can use website and app analytics data to inform design choices and definitively improve user experience. Offering practical guidelines, with plenty of detailed examples, this book covers:

• why you need to gather analytics data for your UX projects
• getting set up with analytics tools
• analyzing data
• how to find problems in your analytics
• using analytics to aid user research, measure and report on outcomes

By the end of this book, youll have a strong understanding of the important role analytics plays in the UX process. It will inspire you to take an analytics first approach to your UX projects.

This book is for UX professionals, designers, product managers, and anyone interested in using an analytics tool to improve UX. No prior experience with Google Analytics or other analytics tools is assumed.

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Without data, youre just another person with an opinion.
W Edwards Demming

Analytics is an often overlooked area of UX. This book will help you understand how an analytics-first approach to UX will enable you get great results. Im not suggesting that you use analytics to replace your other UX methods, but instead that you combine analytics with other UX methods to create an excellent user experience.

In the first chapter of this book, well look at why analytics data is important when it comes to evaluating user experience. Well then move on to how to check that your analytics data is accurate, and how to go about analyzing it. The second half of the book focuses on how to use analytics to find problems, how to use your data to aid your user research, and how to use analytics tools to evaluate and report on the success of your design changes.

By the end of this book, youll have a good idea of how to use your website analytics to make informed decisions about the design of your website or app.

Good UX is based on evidence. This is often qualitative (qual) evidence, such as observations from usability testing or findings of field research. Using only qualitative evidence, though, means overlooking a huge amount of quantitative (quant) data that may be available to you. Quantitative data is primarily numerical and can be measured. This is often used in the form of website analytics, and can be even more compelling than qualitative evidence. Later on in this chapter, well look in more detail at how the two forms of analysis are defined and what they entail.

Its not a case of using one form of research and analysis: qual and quant go hand in hand to give a rounded picture of the overall user experience.

The diagram below shows how analytics can inform other user research methods:

Where analytics fits in with some common user research methods (credit: Tim Minor)

As the diagram shows, the landscape is made up of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Both make up crucial parts of user experience research and design. They give different forms of insight that are crucial for getting a rounded picture of the user experience of a website or app.

Put simply, the quant side of things will generally tell you