🧰 Design Methods Toolbox

# Analytics

# Phase: 🛠️ Problem solving
Focus: Test

IN BRIEF

Time commitment: A few hours
Difficulty: Easy/moderate
Materials needed: A site/application for analysis with analytics tools already enabled
Who should participate: User experience designers, product/project owners
Best for: Gaining insights from aggregate numeric data on clicks, traffic patterns, scrolling and similar user actions

# About this tool

While website and app analytics tools are most often used from a marketing funnel perspective, the analytics they provide can also be thought of from a user experience perspective as passive quantitative testing, and in many cases a lot can be gleaned from their data without having to expend energy and expense on additional testing methods. (Alternatively, analytics can also be used to better inform what you'd like to ask your users in other forms of tests!)

The primary item of importance in using analytics is to remember to adequately set it up long before you think you'll need to use it; depending on what you think you may want to eventually measure and analyze, it may take some time to build up a large enough set of user actions to be statistically useful.

Whether using Google Analytics, Adobe Experience Cloud or any reasonably robust analytics tool, you'll often receive data that can help you infer such decisions as:

  • Effectiveness of navigation structures: Are some items clicked/used disproportionately more or less than others? Does a navigational link in a menu gather more clicks than one at the bottom of a screen? (This is also a good scenario for A/B testing.)
  • Adequacy of a site or app's layout: Do heat maps indicate that users never make it to the content that's lower on the screen? Are there hotspots that indicate users are clicking on something that isn't clickable?
  • Ability to keep users engaged: Is site dwell time high enough to indicate that users are staying long enough to do what they need to? Are pageviews proportionately reasonable (for example, a high number of pageviews on a help page is probably a bad sign)?
  • Are users navigating through your site or app in a way that aligns with how you think they do, or how you'd like them to: Do inbound and outbound links indicate the sort of "happy path" progression you're aiming for?

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