Archive for December, 2009
Getting Visual Feedback from Online Users
Sometimes is hard to see what people are doing from looking at Web Paralytics. There are people who can look at the numbers and understand the user experience picture. Even if you are one of those people, my guess is that your manager or your client isn’t.
It can be really compelling to take a look at what users are doing on a page. Recently, we started making some information architecture changes based on analytics. However, we wanted to have a more visual proof for the client to see that the parts of the site that were strongly active were the ones we knew should be kept prominent. It also allowed us to see other activity on the site.
The strong button clicking was an ah-ha moment because none of the headlines were linked – robbing users of the common activity of clicking headlines.
When you work on a site over a long period of time, you get used to how it works and have the “curse of knowledge” regarding its use. Even as a usability practitioner, there is a certain interpretation of what users are doing.
For this project, we used Crazy Egg to capture the click heatmaps. For $19 a month, we got invaluable insight into the user experience of the site. By installing javascript code on the key pages we wanted to test, Crazy Egg will render these click maps and will also do scatter maps that allow you to filter by new and returning visitor, search terms and geography.
Being able to slice the date in multiple ways is very powerful, but in general the master heatmap is more than enough for management.
Social Media has buzz but Email delivers
There can be no debate that social media has captured the imagination of the online world. Companies are jumping headlong into the space in hopes of riding the conversational wave and reep the rewards of the ‘good vibrations’ on these social networks.
SocialTwist did a recent study on Social Media Sharing Trends for 2009. The study found that 59% of respondents preferred email as their channel for sharing. Making the 14% for social networks and 25% for IM pale in comparison.
Even more telling is a recent “Social Influence Benchmark Report” put out by StrongMail. The best platform converter for sharing online content is email. Strangely enough embedded badges came in a distant second with 20.5%. Facebook and Twitter were left in the dregs with only 3.2% and 0.4% respectively.
Can you blame people? Email is like your car. A private little space in the public world. I have friended far more people on facebook than I would EVER give me email address.
In 2009 and for 2010, it might be social media getting all the buzz, but email still delivers.