Understanding User Behavior with Google Analytics - Analytics Help The more you know about your users, the better equipped you’ll be to make smart choices about your website, mobile app, or SaaS (software as a service) application development investments. Measure what matters, from download and first use through usage, purchases, and loyalty. Google Analytics helps you capture and understand user behavior in most kinds of applications, including mobile apps (iOS and Android), web and SaaS applications, and IOT (internet of things) devices. With minimal instrumentation, Google Analytics provides many pieces of information to help you understand the behavior of users as they interact with your site or application. User data in Google Analytics is captured using either first-party cookies, randomly generated IDs, or an SDK for mobile apps. With additional instrumentation, you can gain an even richer understanding of how people interact with individual application screens or pages on a website. Measurement planning Your measurement plan should define: Goals
Do the hard work to make it simple | GDS design notes This is apparently a slide from a Google engineer highlighting their focus on the user. I don’t know who the quote is from but it was tweeted by Paul Frampton the other day. It reminded me of our fourth design principle, do the hard work to make it simple. The second sentence, “If they don’t know how to form the query, it’s our problem.” was one of the reasons we redesigned the homepage a year and a half ago. And it’s another reminder that user experience is the responsibility of the whole team. This slide is from a talk Leisa and I gave at Service Design In Government last week.
Search interface: 20 things to consider What questions to ask users? What to consider while prototyping? And what are the best practices in search interface design? Depending on the project, search may be one of the most complex features. Users see just a box, but designers and developers see an intricate system and a lot of work behind the box. This post is a collection of questions we should answer before designing a solution and a check-list of elements we should think about while prototyping. Part 1. 8 questions designers should answer during the research phase to understand why users search and when and how they form queries. 1. Do they search to: Navigate, find a particular web page.Find specific information (“Weather in Prague”, “Capital of Australia”).Find advice (“How to design a search interface”).Find resources, applications, documents.Find facts, data (“How many active users do we have on our website?”). 2. What were they doing right before clicking on search? 3. Interaction with search is a conversation. 4. 5. 6. 7.
What is a UX designer / IA? There's a certain amount of terminology used on this site that assumes a reasonable level of previous exposure to the world of UX design and Information Architecture (IA). One of the key considerations in my role as a user experience designer is to make sure that the site or application I'm designing makes sense to the target user groups, and phraseology and terminology form a large part of this. With this in mind, the remainder of this page is my take on some of the common terminology associated with the realm of UX design in the hope that it may help those getting acquainted with this field. If you are interested in finding out more about this area of website and application design and production, please feel free contact me and I'll do my best to help. User experience designer Information architect User centred design User testing Usability expert review User experience specification Personas, user journeys, and task based design User Experience Designer (UX Designer) Top^ User testing
Usability Testing Accordion-Style Checkouts: 2 UX Pitfalls that 75% of Sites Neglect - Articles When benchmarking checkout flows for the first time back in 2012, we found that 14% of the top 100 US e-commerce sites used an accordion-style checkout. Accordion-style checkouts have been an ever increasing trend since then, and in our latest checkout study we’ve found that it’s now 32% of checkout flows are accordion-style. In accordion-style checkout flows, the just-completed step collapses and the new step expands – hence, the name “accordion”. The accordion concept is seen here in Walmart’s checkout where step 2 (first image) collapses into a text summary once the user progresses to step 3. While an accordion checkout often is an aesthetically pleasing option, our past 9 years of large-scale checkout testing have not found that accordion-style checkouts consistently perform better than either traditional multi-page checkouts or one-step checkouts. In this article we’ll present testing findings from our Checkout Usability study that relate directly to accordion checkouts, including:
Customer Experience v User Experience In the process of writing the book (, yes, it’s coming, I promise!) I found myself surprisingly flummoxed when it came to writing about Experience Strategy and the role it plays (or should play) in business strategy. I’ve talked about Experience Strategy with clients over the years, written Experience Strategies for projects I’ve worked on, and worked under the illusion that I was clear about what this actually entailed… however, in coming to write about and thereby define what it meant, it all of a sudden felt very fuzzy. What is Experience Strategy? Having done a review of some of the significant contributions to this topic from the UX community, I found myself dissatisfied… for Johnny Holland some time ago. Then I discovered Customer Experience (CX). Turns out there is this whole other profession, born, it seems, mostly from the marketing discipline, who have an active interest in orchestrating company wide good experience for their customers. This worries me.
The Definitive Guide to Shopping Cart Abandonment What is the biggest drain on your profit potential? If you sell online, it could easily be shopping cart abandonment. It doesn’t matter whether you sell one product or thousands, you’ve probably experienced it: people exiting your site after clicking the Buybutton but before the sale is complete. So how do you protect yourself? Ready for some straight talk about shopping cart abandonment? Table of Contents Introduction to a Killer: Straight Talk about Shopping Cart Abandonment Reason 1: Your Website Lacks Trust Factors. Reason 2: Your Website Has Usability Problems Reason 3: Your Checkout Process Is Long and Complicated Reason 4: Your System Requires Account Creation Prior to Checkout Reason 5: Your Shipping Charges Take Shoppers by Surprise Reason 6: You Don’t Have a Return Policy Reason 7: Your Payment Options Are Limited Reason 8: Your Security Measures Are Either Too Strict or Too Lax Reason 9: Your Shopping Cart Is Hard to Find Reason 10: Your Coupon Codes Don’t Work Reason 14: Conclusion 1. 2.
The Difference Between Usability and User Experience As long as there’s been an Internet, the discussion between user experience and usability has been explored. Although they are conceptually linked, taken separately, they highlight different elements of the human-computer interaction. Yet in these days of advanced user interfaces, from mobile devices to e-readers to tablets, has the line between user experience and usability blurred? And if so, what does it mean for web standards and design? The Road Throughout the early days of the Internet, the analogy of a road was widely used to describe usability and user experience. However, a road with a high level of user-experience is completely different. As the Internet has grown, so have the roads built by designers and developers. The road analogy is no longer sufficient to define user experience and usability. What Comes First? The Nielsen Norman Group says that: "User experience" encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.