In my last post on data visualization, I had a couple tools recommended to me to try out. One had a limited trial period that I didn’t take advantage of in time, and the other, a tool by VisualizeFree, was too buggy to work. I uploaded my data easily enough (still had to clean it up first like some other ones), then I can’t view the actual visualization. Lame.  I could email support, but I’m too lazy to do that again.

I think I got more out of reading this article on what is (or should be) the point of data visualization.  Its based on a talk given by Manuel Lima of VisualComplexity.com, who curates that collection of data visualization examples and resources.  The main point from Lima was this:

“We need to make a transition from tools of curiosity to tools of functionality.”

Which is true, there are many tools that provide interactivity but not much substance. On the other hand tools for fun or aesthetics only can also drive innovation. I’m torn. It seemed like a lot of people were disagreeing over separating “information art” from data visualization, but this article states it more eloquently than I can. Manuel Lima also listed some key principles for data visualization that I did not know and should probably keep in mind:

form follows function

start with a question

interactivity is key

cite your source

the power of narrative

I’ve become much more judgmental toward charts and graphs thanks to blogs like Junk Charts, Flowing Data, and Simple Complexity.  So when I tried out one of the many Twitter measurement tools, Graph Edge, and received my first report, I was confused by the charts.

Followers and "Legitimate" Followers

This graph shows my Twitter followers and “legitimate” followers (they have a definition for it). Because the lower limit of my y-axis is the number of legitimate followers, it gives a false impression of having a very low number of legitimate followers. Why not start with 0?

Net Twitter follower change

This line graph shows the follows, unfollows, and net follower change over time for my Twitter account. But I thought it was strange to include negative numbers, because it looked like I had negative 1 unfollows. Anyway, there’s room for improvement here.

Misc.

Today I created a Twitter list for #measure and web analytics people (like @ABTests did) on TLists. I think the value is that its curated so you can see recommended people who actually tweet about web analytics on a regular basis, and you can follow many people at once/discover new people. It may not be worthwhile once Twitter implements lists though. And I successfully integrated my GWO data with GA thanks to this post from the GWO Tricks blog!

It’s that time.  Some of these events aren’t until October, but that’s ok.

1. InfoCamp on Oct. 10/11 2009! It’s in its 3rd year, and this year I fully intend to go. From what Rachel Elkington tells me, it might sell out this year, so you need to get tickets soon.  Find out more about this “unconference” on UX/IA/information here.
   

   InfoCamp design by Aaron Louie and Josh Walker

2. Baron Brewing is awesome. Not only are they making beers for the Pillager’s Pub (pirate-themed) in Greenwood, they also have this tiny taproom in South Park only open on Fridays from 4:30-8:30 that I must go back to pronto.
3. The band formerly known as Ladies and Gentleman but now known as The Head and the Heart, is having an art/music show on Sept. 27th at the Jewelbox Theatre.
4. Everyone raves about Fremont Oktoberfest, but I think I’ll skip that in favor of the less crowded Enumclaw Oktoberfest this year on Oct. 9th and 10th.
5. Web Analytics Wednesday is back on Oct. 7th at Cobalt. 3rd time’s the charm for me and hopefully ZAAZ will not have a conflicting party.
6. There is an excellent SEO and GA post on Yoast (unintentional rhyme), on how to set up a profile in Google Analytics just to track keyword positions–not just pages. At first it didn’t work for me, and then it did and I don’t know why. But still, its good to know versus the basic page info you get on Google Webmaster Tools.
7. Most importantly of all…today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.  To celebrate, here is a pick-up line:

“That’s the finest pirate booty I’ve ever laid eyes on.“

Otherwise, UW beat USC and Cal beat Minnesota!  I spent all day trying to re-educate myself on SEO and figuring out how to insert an Excel scorecard into the body of an email and not have it look janky. It took way too long to get a workable solution for that.

Lately I’ve been seeing a ton of new data visualization tools/experiments that I thought were worth sharing. One is not really applicable to web analytics or reporting, but others are.

Trendly

I saw a post about Trendly on the Google Analytics Blog, its an application that leverages GA data to display it in a way that is supposed to help you understand the data better. From what I can tell, they use statistically significant numbers (between the upper and lower control) to show a trend-line that is less jagged and crazy. I think that is helpful for noting the big picture of change over a longer time span, but less so if you want to do a deep dive. Which might be besides the point. And then their other graph shows time vertically (I’ve always had issues with that metaphor), and the percentage of traffic from that source correlates to thickness. Its easier to show than tell so here it is:

Trendly time graph

Darwin’s Origin of Species

This is the English major in me geeking out, but I think this changing textual visualization by Ben Fry (go to the site to see it in action) is a great way to show how different editions of an important book like this can change. I’d like to see it for Lyrical Ballads. This is from the information aesthetics blog again, but I think its cool.

Darwin visualization

California Stimulus Map

I should probably find some more data visualization blogs, but I like the information aesthetics finds so much. This interactive map by Stamen Design shows where stimulus money is being spent in California, and what kinds of projects it goes to. The subject matter is worthwhile, but mainly I liked the vertical graph on the right side, I find that visualization easier to duplicate (in Excel!) and translate to different data sets than the one in Trendly. I will try to sneak it into a report at some point, and I’m sure I will get a WTF reaction, but it would be more interesting than the standard Excel graphs for me and the reader.

CA stimulus map

Otherwise I am having fun with my new G1 phone, new running shoes, and I’m going to Arizona this weekend–good times! Hoping to get some hiking in if it is not over 100° outside.

I finally took the plunge and tried out optimization. I am (literally) surrounded by optimization at ZAAZ, since the optimization team sits near me and I’m hearing about it all the time. I really like the approach that ZAAZ takes, (see here for the ZAAZ process) with viewing optimization as part of a holistic process for website design/maintenance.  Once you analyze the data, you know what parts to improve upon, and optimization prevents blindly implementing things based on what the developer/designer/manager likes best.

All I knew about optimization was that its the process of designing different versions of a page and then testing them to see which performs better.  A/B testing is testing 2 or more different versions of a page (according to Google), while multi-variate testing is testing various sections within a page.  Since I’m a noob, I went with A/B testing in Google Website Optimizer because it is simpler to set up the experiment.

I will preface this with the fact that yes, its a fake experiment that I didn’t put much thought into, and no I don’t actually care about the conversions. Here are the basic steps to setting it up with some notes on my process:

1. Decide what you want to test and how you want to test it.  This is the hardest part I think, though if it were a more important site I would preferably base this on analytics data for underperforming pages, campaigns, or the key conversion funnels. I didn’t care, so I made 2 versions of my usability portfolio page and a super-obvious conversion CTA. I opted to have 50% of visitors see the original and 50% see the test page.
2. Enter in the URLs for the original page, test page, and conversion page.  Easy enough except I wanted to set up 2 different conversion pages, and that did not appear to be allowed.
3. Place the tracking code in each page.  Fortunately this plays nicely with Google Analytics, but you have to be careful about the placement of the tracking code–just after the head tag and just before the closing body tag, and after the Google Analytics code. Then click to validate the tags.
4. Begin the experiment…and wait for the results! It says the results come in within 24 hours, and I’m not sure how accurate that is because as of now I have more conversions than I have visitors. Not sure how that is possible.

Overall fairly painless process, though I’m skeptical about the accuracy of the data I’m getting so far. I think next time I will try out the multi-variate testing though for something more interesting. My colleague Rachel Elkington wrote a great article on combining UX principles with optimization that I also want to try out.

And I seem to not have enough hours in the day to do everything I want, which means the blog posts have been fewer and I haven’t gone running as much. My bad.

It’s time to pimp out events that I am a fan of again.

1. Monthly IA Meet-up at a new location, Rendezvous! It’s the 2nd Tuesday of each month (in Seattle), and usually has lots of cool/interesting people in attendance like librarians, iSchool peeps, and UX/IA professionals.
2. Its Web Analytics Wednesday again! This time I hope to not have an epic fail again, and will stay the whole time. Hopefully I can put faces to handles for some followers on Twitter! Once again, POP is generously hosting.
3. And Houghton Market in Kirkland is having a beer sale for 20% off as they are going out of business. Sad times, but beneficial to beer lovers.

GA Rant

OK, I hope that Google Analytics was having some random, never-will-happen-ever-ever-again technical issues going on today, because I was really annoyed. First, I kept getting compiler errors for the graphs that are automatically generated. Then, GA had all these horrible error messages that were not informative and did not assist in user recovery. The first error message I got was: “There was an error fetching data for this view.”  So, you know, I didn’t know what to do other than refresh the page. Next, I got another error message on a different metric that read “An Error Has Been Detected. Please try again. Thank you for your patience.”

Besides the fact that they used incorrect capitalization on the 2nd error message, it clearly violates one of Jakob Nielsen’s 10 heuristics for interface design:

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors. Error messages should be expressed in plain language (no codes), precisely indicate the problem, and constructively suggest a solution.

I generally really like the UI and UX of the Google Analytics tool, I think its easily manipulable and employs clear, simple design. However, the errors were frustrating, and I didn’t know how to fix any of them. I still don’t know what went wrong! #UXFail.

Also tomorrow is ZAAZ kickball and I’m on Team Tom Selleck. I hope to represent well.

Note: feel free to ping me or leave a comment if you are having major issues!

Yesterday the event tracking on a site was not working, and someone thought it might be that I had missed a call to the ga.js file or some extra Javascript. My first thought was “This is why I hate Javascript.” That thought recurred throughout my investigation process, but I decided to save some people time and effort by posting a few things you could check before giving up and crying. My particular example was an onClick event, but the same things could apply to other situations.

1. Check the JavaScript call. So you must understand that Javascript (which I shall now write as JS) can be the best and worst scripting language. Very powerful and can do cool things like animation (and your analytics tracking), but also a pain in that you must be very careful with syntax and punctuation. One easy way to see if your JS is creating errors is by installing the Web Developer’s Toolbar in Firefox, it will show you when there are JS errors and a myriad of other useful things.
   

   Example: onclick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(“Foo”,”Bar”,”JS”);” This will be wrong because you have double quotation marks instead of apostrophes within the parentheses. So the page will read it as “pageTracker.trackEvent(” which will not do anything. Fix it like this: onclick=”pageTracker._trackEvent(‘Foo’,'Bar’,'JS’);”.

2. Is the variable actually pageTracker? In most cases, if you’re not changing the Google Analytics code that is on every page, it should be pageTracker. If the variable is named anything else, like movieTracker or pageCounter, then you need to fix the call in the onClick and change it to: onclick=”movieTracker._trackEvent(…);” This is the part of the code you want to pay attention to:
   

   try {
   var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxx-x”);
   pageTracker._trackPageview();
   } catch(err) {}

3. Where your code at? This ended up being my problem. People recommend that the GA code should be inserted at the footer of the page to not slow down the loading time of a page. The catch is, the JS file/definition of the variable pageTracker may need to be at the top of the page for _trackEvent to do its thing. If you try moving the code with the ga.js file to the head of the page, it should help. Or it helped me anyway.

As much as I hate debugging JS, I think it has really helped me to have knowledge of how it works, so if this is all kinds of confusing, try working through the W3C tutorials.

Misc.

The Grok delivers!! I was tweeting with @TheGrok and I asked if there was any way he could post about web analytics for non-profits. Brendan Regan wrote an awesomely helpful post about it. I will probably comment more about it later, but still, very cool.

And for those who use Twitter, #wa is being deprecated in favor of #measure. See Web Analytics Demystified for an explanation.

Ok yes I am being a baby because I’m not used to the weather, but its really hot for once in Seattle, so I feel uber lethargic. I think I’m typing at about 40 wpm, that’s how lethargic I am. Pyramid beer probably did not help. Below is a picture of the weird clouds hanging out now that we have crazy hot weather, courtesy of Cydne.

Today at work finally gained some momentum on a project, got to do some event tracking, and figured out how to get rid of those pesky parameters appended to the end of URLs in Google Analytics like: “sarahdeatley.com/index.php?id=13c4eb92kp“.  Sometimes they are useful for tracking different content within a site or for campaigns, but other times its the same content, and yet you’re seeing 20 different URLs that all are the same page.

I thought that you’d need to create complicated filters to accomplish this, but turns out its a really simple fix in the profile settings. Its easy:

1. Click “Edit” when viewing profile settings.
2. Click “Edit” in the first box that says “Main Website Profile Information”
3. Enter the offending URL Query Parameter in the form. So in the example above you would enter in “id.”

Yay for simple solutions, but if you have more complex needs, see this post by Justin Cutroni. Or if you need web analytics inspiration in general, read Avinash Kaushik’s latest post.

In other news I discussed my page tagging ideas with someone at work, and found out that the excessively complex page tagging is mainly in Omniture, and not so much WebTrends.  Basically we decided that controlling too much of the tagging limits creativity, but lack of documentation/control can lead to a chaotic mess.  We also talked about the advantages and disadvantages of automation in extracting data from reporting tools.  We both find the idea scary, but I know there are others who think its key to having more time to focus on analysis. I’m too hot to figure out an answer. Someone else should do it for me please.

Page Tagging

As promised, I said I would post about social media and page tagging. Even though I haven’t done much page tagging outside of Google Analytics, I had a few discussions about it at ZAAZ this past week.  Omniture and WebTrends have some structure around the variables you can tag links/onload events within a page, such as campaign variables and traffic counting variables.

One co-worker showed me her process for keeping track of what she was tagging and how you could use the tags for a variety of purposes when thinking creatively. She had to create a data dictionary to keep track of what she was tagging and why she was tagging it that way for herself, the developer, and any future people working with these pages.

To me this seems like a less than ideal system, and the information science training kicked in and made me think that there should be some kind of taxonomy or controlled vocabulary for page tagging within a company or group.  At least on a project, or in the long term, it would make it easier on everyone if people were naming their variables in a similar way, especially if someone has to decipher your tags later.  It seems almost necessary for Google Analytics, where the user has complete freedom in naming each part of the event tracking tag. I will want to discuss this idea with other people, maybe there’s some obvious reason I don’t know about that prevents people from creating a taxonomy.

Social Media

So I won’t repeat how to do this because I just followed the instructions on this very useful post, but I created a custom advanced segment matching a regular expression in Google Analytics to track the social media traffic sources as a group.  Very easy to setup, you basically just list all the sources you want to track (e.g. “Facebook | Twitter”). It showed social media traffic as much lower than I expected based on the referrers, especially from Twitter, but I’m not sure why that is. I had an interesting discussion today at lunch in the Microsoft Commons, about whether there is really an ROI in social media, and basically I thought that it was more about brand perception and viral marketing, and he thought you had to rely on organic interest and creating a tsunami effect with your sphere of influence.

Side note: GA now offers pivot tables?? But is rolling them out gradually. I am not one of the lucky first.

Why so low social media?

Other Things

Last night FC ZAAZ 99 lost, 4-2 (I think?).  It was a frustrating game not because we lost but just the playing style and some of the issues that come when playing with new people and boys. I felt like I was running like a maniac all over the field and not getting the ball enough to make it worthwhile. Also how ghetto does a high school have to be when they lock their toilet paper dispensers to the wall?

Today I officially became a real person at Microsoft because I show up in the system and have my ID badge. So now I’m not just a pseudo-person getting locked out all the time.  I’m working on a laptop that runs Windows 7, and so far I really like the new features. Then I got to play with a Surface table for the first time, which was very exciting after all of the videos/discussions/projects I’ve worked on this year that relate to it.  It does work pretty much as I thought it would, though this one was not interacting with devices.

Just for fun, the Microsoft Surface parody video:

I’m really tired so this will be the quick and dirty version as my geometry teacher used to say.  Today was a really long, but really productive day from a personal and work perspective.  I will summarize below.

1. First group lunch with a bunch of people from the analytics team. Really fun hanging out and I got to have dim sum, which leads to…
2. First time successfully using chopsticks! I seriously failed at this all my life until today and then I just randomly got the hang of it.
3. Finally put into practice what I preach, and created a wireframe (in PPT) of a scorecard based on what I thought would be a good layout. I tried to include the top KPIs in a prominent location, visual representations of the data, and a clean and simple layout that I think reflects the whole “people read along the lines of the letter ‘F’” thing. Then once I got manager approval I created a more hi-fi representation in Excel. I think its ultimately a time saver like sketching is in UX, if its a wireframe, people aren’t going to ask me to change every box line and color, and will pay more attention to the organization and structure.
4. Got to play with making advanced segments in Google Analytics for social media. Will probably post more on that at a later date.
5. First time eating cocktail buns, which sadly, do not contain alcohol.
6. Rode on the new Seattle light rail in the tunnel. It was very fast, clean, and convenient! Now if only it went to more useful places…

Now I just want to sleep, but I am moving this weekend, so I must pack instead. And tomorrow is the first day at Microsoft (due to bosses being on vacation forever), and game #2 for FC ZAAZ 99!

Last week I kept saving links on del.icio.us to different tools, so I thought I would post something about some of the ones that looked interesting.

Sorting terms on WebSort

1. WebSort is an online card sorting tool that is free (for up to 10 participants) and very intuitive. You create a list of the words that would typically be on cards for figuring out a taxonomy, and then the user drags and drops to sort the words into categories. You can view the results in Excel or see them as a tree chart or broken down by participant. I think its really useful if you don’t have the money to pay participants, or you can work remotely.
2. Pixlr has been around for awhile, but I never tried it until recently when I was on a computer *gasp* without Illustrator or Fireworks or Photoshop on it and I needed to make a heatmap. It took me probably 5 minutes or less to take a screenshot, crop the image and save as a PNG; which was much faster than it usually takes for some of the Adobe programs to open. I vote yes.
3. Notable is an application that helps people give direct asynchronous feedback on websites by taking screenshots and annotating them with comments. It stores and organizes the feedback online, and looks like a great way to get quick feedback from people on a team. The only drawback might be having less of a dialogue because its remote, but overall I think its a good way to involve busy people. Right now you have to sign up to get an invite and it looks like its fee-based.


Color Hunter

4. Color Hunter allows you to upload images and see exactly what colors are in those images, and then you can create new palettes based on that. I wish I had known about this a couple years ago; it would have made my life a lot easier.
5. If you’re a Google Analytics user, take advantage of Erik Vold’s Better GA Firefox Extension, which compiles other GA extensions into one package. You need to a) use Firefox (duh), b) install Greasemonkey, and c) install the extension.  Some things are small but nice features, like skipping that stupid “Access Analytics” button that GA makes you click for entry. It also lets you export into GoogleDocs, includes social media metrics and content searching in the nav bar, and has easier sorting on tables.

Also I really enjoyed the Oregon coast, good weather, and food, and I had to overhear the most ridiculous conversation between a couple from NYC. This was the best quote by far:

Godzilla is full of stoicism. You know, Godzilla was a stoic and noble creature….I think that’s why the Japanese like baseball so much, because its this sport with an aura of solitude.

And sometime soon I’ll be posting again on event tracking/page tagging ideas swirling around in my head at the moment. Until then I’m getting a haircut! w00t!