3 ways UX improves analytics
How UX can establish, inform and clarify measures for success.
Today every aspect of a business relies on its people to be data literate. This may not have been the case even 10–15 years ago but things have changed. It's not uncommon to have SQL queries be written by business analysts, sent to engineers and tested by product managers. So what is UX doing? How do we stay involved in this rapidly evolving landscape? Let's take a look at 3 roles that UXers can leverage to improve the various measures and data practices of our teams.
Role #1 — Establish Meaningful Metrics
There is lots of data. At best this can be an informative asset to teams but at worst it is a menu of ways for teams to lie to themselves. In most business environments the name of the game is not fail fast and learn things. More often than not its protect your neck and be positive. Sure you didn’t sell anything but visits were up so, Yay! Session duration increased by 100%. That’s fantastic as long as you ignore that it is because you built a product built with express purpose of exploiting the habit forming section of the human brain. UXers are often the influential types in one way or another and can help teams define not just vanity metrics but meaningful metrics that are true signals of progress for our teams. From the mirad of measures we can help find the ones that are the best indicators. Secondly we can work with teams on their change management and commitment to going where the data leads and being more comfortable with pivots. This is the long game but one that UX people are especially well positioned to influence.
Role #2: — Inform Measurement Strategy
UXers are in a prime seat to inform a system-wide measurement strategy. As UX professionals we possess a perspective on the user or customer journey that is shared with few others. We understand what our users are doing at a granular level but also we can look at the various systems that impact that user journey. For example, lets assume that you work on an ecommerce platform and are interested in increasing conversion rates and sales metrics. An engineering team might be focused only on measuring the single aspect of the platform to which they contribute. A business team may only be interested in measuring the numbers at the end. You however, O Reader, can take a more holistic approach. The technical solve might be isolated and the sales don’t count until they pay but our users are engaging with an entire ecosystem. An ecosystem which we can monitor and tune all the way from the first impression on the landing page through the checkout and payment experience. From our broad perspective we can help our team’s consider the context of our users and how best to capture data around that context without being caught in the weeds and minutia of technical details or business ideals.
Role #3: Clarify Metrics
UX Designers are in a fantastic place to help their teams clarify metrics. Its not uncommon for UX folks especially Information Architects to concern themselves with the definitions of words and labels and the same careful attention can and should be applied to the metrics we choose. For example, lets assume your e-commerce team wants to drive sales. The engineering and business team agree that they want to see 10% growth in the sales numbers by the start of the next quarter. Everyone is excited until the UX designer speaks up and says it won’t work. What’s the problem? The problem how do we define sales? One team is concerned with gross sales. The Engineering team thought they meant comparable sales. The managing director who sent the business team means net sales and inventory planning downstairs is expecting inventory sales quanties? Also over what time frame do we care about these numbers? How will we summarize them? All of these different metrics mean different things to different people and can be used very differently even though each may have gone into the meeting thinking of sales. This could lead to terrible arguments and more down the line if someone, like you, doesn’t help gain the alignment around the metrics and bring clarity to them.
The world is only growing more and more data reliant and as professionals in this data world we should embrace our unique contributions to it. In 1993 the first web analytics tools were launched to monitor log files for the 600 some sites on the internet. Since then some of the largest companies in the world have been built online and fundamentally changed the way our businesses operate. Data isn’t going away. If anything it is going to continue to expand and permeate the various levels of our lives as humans and as designers. If this is a good thing for humans or a bad thing for humans has yet to be determined but the ball is rolling and its in our court.
