How you can spend your holiday by optimizing your UX analytics?

Today, we all talk about conversion and how we can optimise our rates in ecommerce. Taking the importance of this topic, this week we host our friend Yakup Bayrak, Founder of Sherpa which is a design studio, focusing on user experience design through defining and designing unique user and customer experiences. Let’s see how you can enjoy your summer office hours by working on UX analytics.
While talking about summer, If you’re obsessed with UX analytics, statistics and insights like I am, the summer shouldn’t remind you anything other than the famous quote of Aaron Levenstein:
“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”
Once stepped into the summer, it’s time to focus on what UX analytics conceal and in order to do so, spending some of those hot summer days on a solid ux analytics audit sounds like the most profitable optimisation attempt. Given only 3 shots, I would prefer the followings:

1. Start with an outsider’s first impression analysis

The loss of selective perception on the often-ignored usability best practices is a frequently encountered problem. Furthermore, the more we increase the break time of the heuristic usability test cycles, the more we get fanatical about our actual UX proposition. We lose our ability to listen and build empathy to users feedback leading us to move away from objective decision making. Fortunately, letting a professional UX Analytics & Design team put themselves in your visitors shoes and take an initial look at the properties you’ve got, will give you a fresh and hard-to-challenge usability symptoms set. The Output of this study can give you a brief “User-friendliness recovery suggestions pack” that you can prioritise regarding the resources needed and their impact levels on your business.

2. Check your UX analytics tool’s implementation

“The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.”
I think what Arthur C. Nielsen points out with this beautiful quote, is that the longer we stay in darkness, the harder we’ll able to find our way back to see the light again. That’s simply because of the darkness’ heavy burden: the lack of easily visible and actionable data. In order to move away from darkness, we should periodically check the implementation standards of any kind of UX Analytics SaaS we’ve added to our digital assets. If we analyse our user data gathered from a poorly configured analytics SaaS, the only destination we might move on to will be the one’s of the darkness. Start with the big whale of course: Google Analytics. Here is a checklist you can follow for Google Analytics implementation guideline: http://www.ganotes.com/google-analytics-guide/

3. Try to find out “why they do what they do”

Most of the time, it’s not enough to see “what is going on” and the summer is the best to spare some time to dig into the “why?”. The why needs always to be figured out for an actionable output. In plain words, observe and try to explain the user behavior that will shed light on how the data that you’ve analyzed came into existence.
Use Hotjar, Kissmetrics, Google Analytics In-page, Usabilla, Clicktale or even old boy in town, Crazyegg to track the engagement and drop-out points of your user in form of heatmaps, scroll maps, form trackers and visitor videos. Keep the one and only important question in mind: “Why they do it?”
Last but not least, check the viability of your user segments, test their performance via control – test groups and try to spot the pain points blocking your retention figures. Throughout this last journey, Segmentify will be your reliable pathfinder.