There are loads of good reasons to look at and study users visiting your site: entrance points, pages visited, time spent reading, adverts clicked etc. Google Analytics (GA) provides a great free service for this and can’t really be faulted considering how much traffic it is receiving.
Still, GA only provides averages, aggregates and tries to show a typical user, rather than individuals, nor does it handle JavaScript-heavy pages or AJAX very well, and you also have to wait until the morning to get traffic stats on your site.
So, today I’ve been looking at real-time solutions, and I’ve come up with a few.
Reinvigorate (www.reinvigorate.net)
Reinvigorate.net summary dashboard
Reinvigorate gives you a few features the others can’t, such as named user tracking and detailed stats about those users (which pages they visited, in which order and how long they spent on each page). The heatmaps are great, tracking any click (though take some time to generate) and the dashboard updates instantly. It’s also pretty cheap given how powerful it is.
ChartBeat (chartbeat.com)
ChartBeat summary screen
ChartBeat works in a similar way to Reinvigorate, giving detailed real-time traffic analysis of your site. Its detailed and flexible dashboard gives you instant feedback on which of your pages are popular at a certain time. It’s also got a good API and an iPhone app to keep you informed on the move.
UX Tools
Arran Ross-Patterson (@arranrp) sent me this bookmark list of analytics solutions over Twitter, of which MouseFlow and ClickTale looked very promising. These are tools designed to record all movements on the screen over the browser and be able to play them back to the developer, effectively performing silent usability tests. If anyone has any experience using these, please let me know.
So, for now, I’m using Reinvigorate, but I’m sure there are others out there. Let me know what you’re using in the comments.
I’ve been asking questions about my blog on Twitter, and a few notable things have come back:
- Text shadow on hover makes you feel seasick
- Text shadow is fine on headers
- Colours on the footer are hard to read
- It all feels a bit busy
So, many of these things can be remedied simply, but I can’t get it out of my head that you just skim the content because it’s all bunched up. The white space for the text is compressed against two differently coloured, high-contrast sections which mark the edge of the world. Instead of helping you focus, I feel trapped when reading it.
So, I reach out again, what would help alleviate this? What would make you read more on this blog. It’s not a for-profit enterprise, it’s simply putting my opinion and some of my work onto the Internet.
Please, your thoughts in the comments or contact me steve at steveworkman dot com (or use the contact form on this site).
Hearing childhood teenage professional hero Andy Budd speak at #lwsux last month confirmed many things that I already knew, and introduced me to even more things that I needed to be more aware of (read my full write-up).
The one thing that really got me was talking about the “low-hanging fruit”. It’s a pretty simple concept, as a consultant, much of the benefit you will bring to an organisation, in improving a system’s design, will be painfully obvious.
Take, for example, a client of mine. An old system based on 2003 technology, with even more prehistoric standards support. It used javascript everywhere, all links opened in new windows (complete with navigation) and whilst there were templates, from a programmers perspective, there may as well not have been.
So, how to make it better instantly? Update the system to use templates, stop links appearing in new windows, make it work cross-browser and replace as much of the javascript with “server-side” code as possible. That’s before you get to the simple layout changes that you can make. Spending a bit of time on the information architecture improves the flow of information and user journeys. The system hasn’t changed much, but it’s infinitely more usable and user-friendly. The client almost had a “crisis” when I showed it working on my iPad.
What’s the lesson here? Take the easy usability problems and solve them with best practices. Test as you go, there’s no need for large-scale user testing unless there’s a specific problem that you’ve been asked to solve. The simple solutions to simple problems solve most of the issues of user-friendliness within a system, and a good bit of IA generally does the rest.
So, take the easy option!
Last night was London Web Standards‘ UX Questions with Andy Budd (of CSS Mastery and Clearleft fame)
My sketchnotes for this are at the bottom of the page. This is only a brief write-up, hopefully the LWS guys will put the video up soon. Much of this is para-phrased. Andy, if you do read this, let me know if you want any of these answers changed.
Q: Good UX vs Good design? (the actual question was a lot more wordy than that)
UX is a quality attribute, it can be good and bad. An aspect of good design takes UX into account, though there are exceptions i.e. the Phillips Juicer. Good design does not imply ease of use, UX is a design philosophy or style. A good UI designer understands HCI, social, environmental and cognitive psychology .
Q: User-Centric Design or Persuasive Design?
Both together please.
Q: How do you manage difficult clients?
Clearleft tend not to get them thanks to their reputation. Basically, just manage expectations all the way through.
Q: What should you do if you’re told to design “for IE 6″ or “inaccessibly”
Ignore the request. You’re a professional (dammit) and you need to use the right tools for the job. Don’t just keep patching a crumbling building, i.e. if you have an intranet made for IE6, don’t just patch it up, start again.
Q: What tools couldn’t you live without?
Pen and paper. Oh, and sticky notes.
Q: What makes a good UX designer?
- Empathy
- Inquisitive
- Unsatisfied with life (want to make things better)
- Desire to fix the world
Q: How do you get clients to invest in UX even if they have a small budget?
Design on paper to reduce costs. Too many designers just go straight into photoshop. This will allow for more iterations and less money in the long term. Remember that you’re also in a facilitation role so its up to you to guide the process.
Q: Is any testing better than no testing?
Yes.
Generally there’s lots of low-hanging fruit (if doing a re-design) so take that! You only need to do the deep level of thought if you’re solving a very specific problem.
Q: Are there any design patterns you use regularly? Should you make new ones?
Real-world patterns work very well, i.e. tabs. Most people don’t know that a site logo takes you to the home page, so always have a home link. If you’re making a new pattern, test test test, then think, would something else be better.
Q: Where do you get your inspiration from?
The real world. Architecture, a book called “Why people buy” (but not the section on the internet), the Disney Imagineers. Overall, it’s about how it functions, not how it looks.
Q: Is the user wrong? When does the designer know better?
Generally, the user isn’t wrong. It’s very rare that their opinion doesn’t count, so swallow your pride.
Q: How do you establish credibility in an organisation?
It’s difficult, very hard to do internally. You need to play the office politics game. Build a level of knowledge and use references as much as you can, so it’s not only you saying these things. Have confidence in you and what you are doing. Visualise it in your client’s language if possible.
Q: What should you do if a business objective creates a disjointed experience?
Andy can’t help on this one, this is an answer from the LWS crowd.
Switch it around, get buy-in from people and sell ti to them. Do it in the pub, many people are much more open there. With regard to “Dark Patterns” i.e. hiding a company’s phone number or directing through certain channels, read Dan Lockton’s post.
Finally, if you’re not happy in your job, there are loads of UX jobs out there at the moment. Clearleft is hiring a world-class interaction designer.
That’s it. Sketchnotes below. Hope you enjoyed it
UX Questions Sketchnote - apologies to Andy Budd
