Analysis and insight, the heart of online user experience

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

It’s been a busy week since I started a new job at Foviance. The reaction from people I know in the industry about Foviance and Applied Insights coming together has been very positive. People tell me that it makes sense, which is good news because it certainly made sense to me.

The reason why it made sense to me is that I passionately believe that analysis and insight lies at the heart of improving the online user experience. Working with one of the leading user experience consultancies in the UK as the person responsible for driving their analytical services capabilities forward is going to present some great opportunities to grow and to learn. It’s never too late to stop learning!

For me marketing has always been a blend of art and science and in the digital marketing space there is more science available to those who want to take advantage of it. For many organisations though it has taken some time for them to adopt the ability to improve the online customer experience through measurement and analysis. At times there is often a tension between the “creatives” and the “analysts”, whereas the reality is that both is needed and both need to be blended.

I think that the position where many organisations have got to know is that they have “adopted” the measurement and analysis side of things. They have plumbed in a web analytics system. They may be regularly measuring customer satisfaction. They may be routinely doing testing. They now have access to the science. However, what they haven’t managed to do is to integrate the science into the way that they do business.

Often decisions are made on the basis of judgement even when the data is available to them. But the trouble is, as someone once said, “Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement”. Or as an old boss told me after I had made some cock-up: “Neil, all experiences are learning experiences. It’s just some are more pleasant than others”. One of the key roles of data, analytics and insights is to help us avoid having too many “unpleasant learning experiences”.

So the opportunity going forward is to blend the art and the science in a seamless approach to improve the user experience. Creative designers working alongside analysts to understand the impact of their design changes in a collaborative fashion.
Quantitative analysts such as web analysts working alongside qualitative researchers such as usability consultants to understand the user experience form all the angles. Not just looking at what users did but also understanding why they did it and what they felt about the outcome. This kind of integrated approach will need integrated thinking based on integrated data. Integrated thinking will come from the recognition from all the players that they only have a part of the solution and their instinct should be to go and seek out the other parts.

The difference between adoption and integration will come down to organisational culture and processes. This is a theme that I keep returning to in my consulting activities as well as in this column as I think this is one of the biggest challenges in the industry at the moment. People still worry too much about the technologies rather than worry about what they are going to do with the technologies. Organisations and their agencies will need to start thinking about how to build the science into the creative process in a systematic way and how to view the creative process as an iterative, cyclical process rather than just a linear process. The physical manifestation of this vision might be a roomful of designers, information architects, analysts, usability experts and brand marketers coming together to throw ideas around about what the user experience should look like. Each contributing their perspective and each contributing to the final outcome. Not on an ad-hoc basis for big projects, but on a regular basis constantly iterating the solution week after week. It might take a while to get there but I’m looking forward to the journey.