Issues in Document Management 2

1. Issues in Document Management 2 “The road to finding is paved with data: Web Analytics and User Experience”. By Louis Rosenfeld Presented by Alexia Gibbons, Lisa Hogarth, Anna Ingram, Felicity Kelly, and Emma Lawler 14th September, 2010

2. Who is Louis Rosenfeld? • Louis Rosenfeld is an independent Information Architecture consultant http://www.louisrosenfeld.com • Founder of Publishing house, Rosenfeld Media • Co-wrote “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”in 2005 with Peter Morville

3. Finding Rosenfeld outlines three main types of information seeking: • Browsing (eg) Flickr • Searching (eg) Netflix • Asking (eg) IKEA help centre People with “different skills” are responsible for each type. (p.2)

4. The process of Finding This diagram shows a user’s circuitous path to finding information (Diagram by Peter Morville) Rosenfeld uses this example to illustrate how “finding wanders in a highly dynamic way.” It shows how the user’s initial query changes through each iteration of searching, asking and browsing.

5. Failure to Find • Most systems don’t support finding (ie) no alternative to browsing, searching or asking • Systems need more than one process (ie) integrated finding • Commerce sites often better than Government/Corporate sites at integrating due to more motivation (ROI)

6. Finding is often a “broken experience” • A lack of models • Digital vs Physical world • Finding models are divided by irrational boundaries • Who is responsible for what? • Wrong people maintaining the systems • Lack of understanding of finding process • Designers are sometimes complacent • Haven’t paid much attention to data

7. User Experience (UE) • The result of a combination of design-related practices and methods • The acknowledgement by designers that it takes many different types of expertise across different disciplines to design digital products • Also known as “Experience Design” • The adoption of this concept is leading to more competent web design

8. Web Analytics (WA) • Web Analytics is quantitative data that analyses the behaviour of users • Real data that suggests what is “actually going on with our sites and our products” • Complements the qualitative data already being used • Data that can tell a valuable story about the way users find information on the web

9. UE meets WA • The marriage of the two fields hasn’t taken place yet • Why? • Designers are reluctant to move outside their comfort zones • Designers not yet fully sold on “data-driven analyses” to answer the “why” questions about user behaviour

10. The importance of “Data” • Helps designers improve their qualitative analyses • Leads to better user experience • Behavioural data can be fully integrated into web design • Designers can witness the “winding road between searching, browsing and asking, and therefore “design experiences that weave together these finding methods”(p7) • Designers can look at failures or “roadblocks” in the finding process and see how users get around these problems

11. Finding the perfect match • Needs to be a “wedding” of WA and UX • Designers need to “learn the language of data” • Designers need to get better with data to: • Design for finding • Better communicate with other players