Bigger Patterns in the Data

The nature of marketing is to collect data and analyze the numbers. As a user researcher, I have reviewed endless pages and reports of this raw data to uncover that magic questions every company wants to know, "What is driving our customers' behavior? It is so easy to go down rat holes with each little piece of data. It started me thinking once again about ways to make research actionable in terms of creating a better user experience. From my experience, marketing and user experience don't collaborate much primarily because marketing is looking for different data than the behavioral data collected by user experience specialists. But, a good user experience secret is to use marketing data as an entry point for much bigger patterns in the data. From a big picture perspective, it is a chance to first re-examine the high level goals (macro insights) of the Website and discuss with the stakeholders. Having context to the data is important to understanding where opportunities exist.

1. Why does this Website exist?

2. What are the top Web strategies?

3. What do you expect users to do on your Site?

Looking deeper into the data is like examining rings on a tree trunk. First you have to look at the parts of the tree for the particular purpose they serve. The trunk of a tree serves many purposes:

· The tough fiber tubes made from cellulose that form the trunk provides support.

· The dead outer bark provides protection from weather, insects and other damage.

· Inside the trunk, various parts of the wood transport nutrients and water move the food made by the leaves back down to all the branches, and provide new wood growth year after year.

The good years and the bad years are seen in the relative width of the rings. Each ring represents a year of growth and patterns become evident. The same goes for the relativity of the data. Often times the stakeholders’ goal is to reduce support calls. It is often my job to uncover the reasons why their users were not finding their answers to their support questions on the existing site. This is like looking overall at the tree rings, based on what you see in the pattern, you can tell there was some force influencing or interfering with the growth of that tree. In the marketing data, you can also clearly see shifts in users' behavior due to changes on the Site.

The content and navigation behavior will help give more context to the story of conversion rate. Most marketers often drill down to the smallest data points, but completely miss the bigger picture.