Why do UX Professionals not like Web Analytics? It gives up control.
Part of my discussion with my buddy (other than him calling me a web hippie) revolved around his struggle working with User Experience (UX) professionals.
He’s one of the several Web Analytics professionals that I keep in touch with, and he mentioned that he has struggles with UX folks –they resist the raw user data and activity that he provides. Why? it further removes the UX Professional from the user research process from pure user testing, a platter of alternate designs, and iterative changes.
When Web Managers look at both the reccomendations from User Experience folks, and reports from Web Analytics teams, there can be conflict –raw numbers vs intuition.
I responded to him:
“I know why it bothers UX professionals, it takes the power away from them”
He responded:
“You’re the FIRST person to say that”
He agreed that was true, and he shared examples of how this was happening. In my opinion, web analytics (measurement of what has historically happened) is only part of telling the customer story or the user experience. It doesn’t give clues to why a user arrived, their feelings and thoughts, or what they said to others. It also can’t fully articulate what information was missing. It doesn’t discount the value, I rely on Analytics to measure success daily.
In my past UX research projects, I’ve learned that you need to use a variety of testing methods to build a full mental model. Quantitative, Qualitative, and even Heuristics. Use them together, and don’t forget to just ask users –I find that yields often the best results.
I know there are designers, developers, UX proffesionals and Analytics folks reading my blog, what do you think? Is our conversation industry wide, or just a small mis-representation.
7 Comments so far
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I have just the opposite experience. I lead the analytics team at our firm (a fortune 300 financial services co.), and our UX team has been all over the data we provide, constantly asking for more analysis, more support, more visualizations. It’s a great, mutually beneficial relationship. The more we know about what they need to see measured, the more we can roll out the measurement tools to provide the data. The only conflicts we have is on the interpretation of the data. But, that’s to be expected. The great news is, that after a lot of hard work, we’re all trying to make data driven decisions wherever possible.
Jim
Thanks for this, that’s a great story to tell –perhaps my buddy’s experience is a one-off.
Jeremiah, it’s great seeing this and I hope more people can respond with their shared experiences. But yes, ideally both (UX and Analytics) should be as one… But contrary to belief, it’s just not always the case. And I can understand why…. *introducing a new factor to an exisitng equation can sometimes if not often, rock the boat.
Understood –in fact if anything, this is a healthy dialogue to have among the web team –raw data plus expert opinion and user testing.
If only users knew how much trouble goes into making them a great web experience.
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