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“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.” Joseph Campbell.

I read a piece of research sometime ago that looked into the different behaviour people exhibited in the way they got from one location to another. The researchers set up two different scenarios. In the first they created set pathways across a square in a university campus. In the second they created no paths and simply observed how people crossed the square to get from one location to another. Read more about: Social media customer service: Whose path do you take?

Have you ever wondered what it might be like to browse a website with a visual impairment? Or wondered how your website is perceived by a person with a vision disorder?

There are many different types of vision disorders that can affect a user’s ability to view web pages and way too many to cover off here. However, to give you an idea, I have simulated how the Foviance website homepage might look to someone with cataracts, macular degeneration, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy. These are four of the most common types of vision disorders. Cataracts is the leading cause of blindness worldwide and in the UK, 2 million people are visually impaired with macular degeneration (40%), glaucoma (13%) and diabetic retinopathy (8%) being the three most common causes. Read more about: What’s the sight of your site?

The recent PR furore about the reception issues on Apple’s iPhone4 has got me thinking again about the impact of smart phones on digital analytics. As the world moves to mobile the digital analytics industry may be taking a significant step backwards in its ability to provide actionable insight. Tracking of mobile devices is still developing, so just when the Web Analytics industry thought it was getting to grips with clean data it now has a real challenge on its hands. Whichever way consumers react to Apple’s current problems, the smart phone is here to stay and advertisers who will spend £61 million on mobile in the UK this year, rightly want to know the impact of this spend across display and applications (apps). Read more about: Web analytics tracking mobile

The topic of whether to allow users to check bets before they place them has come up a few times and often the arguments spread to the wider e-commerce world. Checking the contents of your basket before you make an order is common practice, especially for complex orders. Recently, one of our clients decided to remove the confirmation step from the checkout process to make it shorter, under the premise that “shorter checkout processes are better”. Read more about: Check your baskets but not your bets

I suppose like most people who work in the related industries, I have been having lots of conversations and thoughts about the iPad recently. Nearly all of them have ended with two conclusions: That the iPad is game changing (something I have not always agreed with); but no-one is really sure how. Well now I am convinced and I think I do know how. Read more about: The iPad is the latest business tool

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 16/07/10 and is republished here with permission.

As web reporting and analytics gets more mature as a technique and as an industry, I sometimes now hear comments from organisations along the lines of “We’ve finished our web analytics implementation now and we’re on to the next project”. It’s as if the implementation of web analytics in a business is seen as an event rather than as a process. Whilst the introduction or the upgrading of a web analytics system can be seen as a project, the adoption and the ongoing use of web analytics data in an organisation is something that requires ongoing management and maintenance. Read more about: Like your food, after a while your data can go off

This article, written by Neil Mason, was originally published on Clickz.com on 01/07/10 and is republished here with permission.

Last time I looked at some of the characteristics of data collected from surveys, particularly data collected from surveys run on websites where you have no control on who is answering the survey. Generally this lack of control can cause some bias in the data which can cause some issues if you are looking at the aggregated reports. For example the data on the profile of visitors (i.e. gender, age etc) that you collected from survey data may not actually reflect the true profile of visitors to your site because of the different propensities of different groups to respond to surveys. So, does that mean that survey data is useless? Not really but it does means that it needs to be handled with a bit of caution. Read more about: Analytics Basics: Interpreting your survey data wisely

Just like every year at the same time, a new version of the hugely popular iPhone was recently released on the market. The iPhone4 boasts a whole new range of sexy features like video calling or multitasking and, like its previous versions, is meant to take the mobile world to a new age. But despite all the hype a closer look at the device shows that the iPhone4 is far from perfect. Some important aspects of the phones technical specs have clearly been overlooked by the general public and even though it remains a state-of-the-art device, the iPhone4, I have to say is not as good as you may think. Read more about: The iPhone4 not as good as you think