by Colin on December 3, 2009
Hans Rosling thoroughly impressed me in his TED talk from about two years ago aptly titled “Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen“.
I’ve never seen someone so excited by data. I was excited too, since Rosling does more than just slap some graphs on a slide. He tells a story with the data.
Rosling explains:
Statistics has to go together with other information and with experience. That’s when it’s useful…People are not stupid. They will understand statistics and they will use it, if it’s made available in relevant and interesting ways.
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by Colin on November 10, 2009
Pretty much every website administrator and marketing guru uses quantitative analytic tools to optimize their website. Apps like Clicky, Mint, and Google Analytics provide great reports on user navigation trends, popular links, visitor demographics and more.
But that’s only half the story.
It’s vital to remember that a user’s experience on your site is more than the sum of their clicks. Ideally, we’d all have the chance to sit in the same room as our users, watching their every move then interviewing them about their experience. But besides being somewhat creepy, such one-on-one assessment is rarely practical.
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by Colin on September 1, 2009
As a designer in search of the perfect user experience, I’m used to employing quantitative measures to capture user patterns and preferences. Information about popular links, click-thru rates, average time spent on particular pages, traffic sources and browser specs (usually collected by Google Analytics) give me a sense of what our users are doing and how they do it.
Last week, I got a chance to journey beyond my computer screen and help lead a focus group testing a project in development, the Peer Advising System (PAS). After some brief instructions, our potential users were let loose to explore the application. And I got to watch.
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