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Finding the Right Things to Measure with Web Analytics

Posted by Mike Beasley at 10:09 am | Thursday, January 26th, 2012 | Filed in Analytics, Usability

On February 23rd, 2012, Pure Visibility’s own Michael Beasley will be speaking on Michigan State University’s campus, at 6:00 p.m. The presentation will cover how to cut through the complexity of all the possible things you can measure with web analytics, to find the things that are really important and useful to measure, from a business and a user experience perspective.

This talk, which is the first Michigan Usability Professionals’ Association meeting of the year, brings together the areas of user experience and web metrics in much the same way Pure Visibility brings together these two fields within the work of our own Measurement Team.

For more information or to register, please visit the Michigan UPA website.

What UX Practitioners Need to Know about SEO

Posted by Mike Beasley at 12:12 pm | Tuesday, December 6th, 2011 | Filed in Usability

Ann Arbor is home to an annual conference, Internet User Experience, which covers web site design, graphics, branding, social media, and more. 2011 was another successful year for the conference and was well attended by a variety of user experience and marketing professionals.

Pure Visibility’s Michael Beasley served as master of ceremonies once again this year, and also presented a 5 minute talk during the Ignite session on “What Every UXer Needs to Know about SEO.”

What Every UXer Needs to Know about SEO

http://igniteshow.com/videos/what-every-uxer-needs-know-about-seo

This multi-disciplinary approach is typical of Pure Visibility, where we bring together experts from different fields to help our clients’ online marketing.

Right for Your Audience? Write for Your Audience…

Posted by Andy Sadler at 02:28 pm | Tuesday, November 29th, 2011 | Filed in Design, Info Visualization

Getting started in designing or redesigning your website should begin by answering this question: who am I trying to reach with the website? By putting the customer first and serving their needs, you can connect with them. The copy on the site should show them how your product or service will solve their problem.

To design your site right, you should begin by thinking about the goals of your potential audiences. Why will people be coming to your website? What problem will they be trying to solve? What search terms will they use to find you? What information are they seeking?

Your potential audience is often composed of people in various roles. They may be potential customers, current customers, investors, job seekers, or even your own company’s staff. Take into consideration all of these roles when designing the site and writing copy, but prioritize the list to handle any conflicts.

The highest priority target audience for a e-commerce or lead-generating website is most likely potential customers. Remember, your website is essentially an online welcome mat and could quite possibly be the first point of contact that you have with your potential customer.

The primary space on the Home page of a website should be devoted to helping customers find the products and services they need. Make sure that the website copy uses terms that your potential customers would search for to find your website, rather than internal company names for your products. Of course, internal product names can and should be included as well, but make sure things are spelled out in plain wording using targeted search terms. You want your potential customers to find you using a search engine, right?

Here are some things you can do to learn more about your website audience:

Interview customers
Develop website personas
Conduct a usability study on your website – watch how users interact
Do keyword research for your industry – try out Google Insights, a free tool based on real world search history

Many companies feel that they already know their prospective customer, from a demographic point of view. Yet we find that every company can also apply these simple techniques to learn even more, and ultimately hone both their online message and the methods to reach people.

Getting Started with Analytics for UX

Posted by Mike Beasley at 09:11 pm | Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 | Filed in Analytics, Usability

Approaching web analytics as a new user can be daunting because of the complexity of the tools. There’s no one right way to do it, but a good way is to have problems to solve or a question that needs to be answered.

Integrating analytics into our user experience practice started with the need to get clear answers to specific questions. We had questions like “How many users will we alienate if we optimize this site for a 1024 by 768 screen resolution?” which is the less open-ended version of “What screen resolution should we use to optimize our site?” (The answer, it turns out, is “all of them”).

There’s a clear answer in the Google Analytics’ Visitors > Technology > Browser & OS report. Or, at least, as clear as anything gets when you deal with anything as messy as user behavior.

Another good initial analytics/UX question is “How many of our site visitors are using a mobile device?” This is a better way of asking “Should we invest in a mobile site right now?” (The answer is “yes” and you may want to focus on designing the mobile version first, before the desktop version). Google Analytics makes this easy, through the Visitors > Mobile > Overview report.

Neither of these questions lead to terribly deep insights, but that’s the point of your first few forays into web analytics. Take a little time to get accustomed to the interface of your analytics tool and to ask the sorts of questions that analytics can actually answer. That’s why it’s good to start small and get some early wins. Have fun!

Social Media Policies – Linking/Friending Etiquette during a Hiring Process

Posted by Dunrie Greiling at 07:49 am | Wednesday, October 26th, 2011 | Filed in LinkedIn, Privacy

Pure Visibility has been fortunate to be hiring! We’ve met some wonderful people through our job postings and through attending local job fairs and workshops. However, the social nature of today’s businesses and today’s hiring process has caused us to re-examine our internal policies. Essentially, we discovered we needed to be more deliberate about how we as a company, and how I as a member of this company, interact with applicants and candidates through social media.

What to Do When a Candidate asks to “Link In”

I Heart Job Offers Resume T-shirt by BlackBirdTees

LinkedIn is a great place to find candidates, network for business, and learn more about people’s work history and connections. Until recently, I was pretty loose, accepting people as the invitations arrived.

A few events led me to decide we needed to be more formal about it, during the hiring process. In one case, someone who applied for one position and was redirected to a different position was able to see the candidate we were favoring for the first position in my LinkedIn connection history.

I got a note saying “Hey, saw who I think my competition was, I totally understand why you went with her.” Which was a great response, except the details were not final and so we’d inadvertently made an “announcement” about our hiring process midstream.

Then, after a job fair, I received a number of LinkedIn requests. As the hiring manager, it makes sense that individuals I spoke with at the fair wanted to stay top of my mind. But, I worried about what message I was sending by accepting. Was I leading them on? Would they still want to connect at the end of the process, regardless of outcome? What is polite and what is proper in this case?

I decided that I should hold all Link requests until after the process is complete, and then accept them or decline them at that time. This seemed the most fair to candidates and our process.

What to Do When You’re a Facebook Friend of a Candidate?

In a separate hiring situation, we had an applicant I already knew from a non-work situation in Ann Arbor. We were Facebook friends, and during the process of considering the candidate, making an offer, waiting for the details to be ironed out, and in the period between the acceptance of the offer and the new hire’s start date, I think we both felt pretty weird about what we posted on Facebook.

I can only imagine her stress during the process. I have to admit I go to Facebook intermittently. Maybe once a week, sometimes more, often less. I wasn’t watching her stream. But I can imagine she might have felt a little trapped or at least aware of the potential for scrutiny…

An Age-Old Problem, with Heightened Visibility

Social Media platforms don’t present anything new. This kind of “in between” social stress can also happen in real time interactions. For example, I saw the “Facebook friend” candidate on the street in the last week of her hiring process. The candidate was with someone else, it turned out to be a family member, but it could have been a colleague from her then-employer.

So, I was friendly but distant, I did not want to invade the candidate’s space, yet there was this weighty thing between us…and I know the candidate was trying to read my interaction for information on her status.

So, none of the pain I’m describing of interacting with candidates during the hiring process is isolated to social media. It’s part of the awkwardness of being human, being social. However, the fact that interactions between individuals is shared with a social network broadcasts and amplifies the interaction.

Our Decision

One of our core values is simplicity. So, we’re looking to create a simple policy to avoid this kind of awkwardness, and to avoid having to think it through in individual instances. I am going to wait until the hiring processes are complete before accepting link requests.

Looking for More Guidance?

The Charlene Li of the Altimeter Group has compiled a great directory of corporate social media policies that you can review. Looking at examples from this list is sure to inspire and inform.

World Usability Day 2010

Posted by Mike Beasley at 11:54 am | Friday, November 5th, 2010 | Filed in Usability

Next Thursday, November 11th is World Usability Day 2010, there is a great free event at Michigan State University, not too far from Pure Visibility, and there’s still time to register! This is a great opportunity to learn more about designing mobile applications. Read More

Do you buy technical standards as part of your job? We may want to interview you!

Posted by Mike Beasley at 01:23 pm | Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 | Filed in Usability

Pure Visibility is working with a company that sells engineering codes and standards to engineers, librarians, and technical professionals to conduct a usability study for their website. We’re interested in learning about how people shop for and purchase standards.

If you are an engineer, librarian, or technical professional that has purchased standards at your current job, we’d like to sit down with you for an hour to talk to you and look at our client’s website together. Our findings will remain confidential and will only be used for this project. We can meet with you during the business day or after work, either at our downtown Ann Arbor office or at any other location in the Ann Arbor/Detroit area that is more convenient for you.

If you are interested, please give us a phone number where we can reach you during the day (and let us know if there are any restrictions on when you’re available to talk). We’d like to get in touch with you for a 15 minute call to ask you a few questions and make sure that you match the profile we’re looking for for this study. Participation in this study will be on a paid basis.

User experience testing: A step on the path to awesomeness

Posted by Mike Beasley at 12:14 pm | Friday, April 9th, 2010 | Filed in Usability

Changes are coming to the Pure Visibility website! In the not too distant future, we will unleash a new site architecture followed by content changes and a visual redesign.

As this effort got underway, we knew it was important to employ the same skills that we bring to our clients – to eat our own cat food, you could say. We did user research and captured that information as personas and then used those personas as the basis for our information architecture work. We then took our early website prototype out to real users to gather some data about how it worked for them.

We came up with our test protocols, which included topics that we wanted to hit on in each session, and then a scenario and specific tasks to get the participants interacting with the prototype. We also had to build out and print up a robust set of prototype pages for the participants to interact with.

User experience testing with a paper prototype is a great way to elicit feedback before you’ve invested lots of time into building a site. Although it’s obviously not the same as interacting with a prototype on a computer or a real, live website, the timeliness makes it a valuable, cost-effective tool for collecting data. It also means that you get slightly different kinds of data than a test with a higher fidelity prototype or live website.

We focused on the navigation of the site – how the pages fit together, and the labeling of the pages. We put together tasks that revolved around asking our participants where they would go to find answers to questions, like “what does Pure Visibility’s pay per click reporting look like?”

As we kind of expected, we found out early on that when our participants got the scenario (basically, “you are looking for an Internet marketing company”), they wanted to break it down into different tasks than we had planned for. We were glad that we’d spent so much time building prototype pages! This insight into how participants wanted to learn about a company like us was the most important part of our research.

When we built the prototype, we incorporated copy from the existing website. As we had hoped, this copy gave our participants something to react to. In addition to learning about how our participants wanted to research us, we gained insight into how our copy sounded to them, what they really wanted to learn on pages, and how to better organize our copy.

We’re baking what we learned into the website, but there’s still a lot of work ahead of us. While user research activities are essential to to the success of any web design project, it’s not the only vital ingredient. We will turn our search engine optimization experts loose on the Pure Visibility site to take a fresh look at it from both a technical and a content perspective – and that means more blog posts yet to come!

Changes are coming to the Pure Visibility website! In the not too distant future, we will unleash a new site architecture followed by content changes and a visual redesign.

Tools for Testing Information Architecture

Posted by Mike Beasley at 10:32 am | Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 | Filed in Information Architecture

UXmatters is a great resource for (unsurprisingly) UX-related articles, such as information architecture, usability, and user research. An article from February 22nd, “Review of Information Architecture Evaluation Tools: Chalkmark and Treejack,” provides a great overview of two user research tools from Optimal Workshop.

The first, Chalkmark, allows unmoderated testing of static mockups. You can put up a mocked up page, ask people where they would click to find information about something specific, and then Chalkmark tells you where users clicked.

The other tool that this article discusses is Treejack, which lets you test an organizational scheme, abstracted away from the actual interface. In Treejack, you build a tree that reflects how information on your site is organized into categories and sub-categories (or how you want to organize this information in the future). Again, you ask people to tell you where they think they would find a specific piece of information, but with this tool, they can click around in the tree and think about it before giving you their final answer.

The article on UXmatters goes into further detail about the analysis capabilities that both of these tools provide, and they sound pretty exciting.

ABtests.com: A/B Test Results

Posted by Mike Beasley at 09:36 am | Friday, February 5th, 2010 | Filed in Usability

Do you have a page on your website that you know could be better? Do you need help showing how subtle changes can have a big effect in conversion rates?

I came across a great site recently: ABtests.com (via The Interaction Designer’s Coffee Break). It consists of the results of A/B tests. It shows two different designs, side by side, points out which one had a higher conversion rate, and presents a theory about why one design did better than the other.

Testing designs is an important part of getting your online sales engine running. It takes advantage of the unique strengths that online marketing offers – the ability to collect lots of data and test ideas. There are free tools out there for doing it, such as Google Website Optimizer, but trying out a new idea can be as simple as rolling out a new page, using it for a while, and comparing the results to the previous design.