I guess I was feeling too web analytically inclined lately because I have been only reading about IA/UX stuff now.  There was an interesting research posting by ClickTale, that studied how users scroll and whether or not they are actually reading things below the fold.  There are 2 parts to the study, but part 2 is where they give substantial conclusions and advice.

Turns out people do scroll. Go figure. Its relative to the position in the page though, and people’s attention span drops dramatically after the top until they get to the footer, which they pay close attention to. Here are the main recommendations:

• The most valuable web page real-estate is located near the page top, between 0 and 800 pixels. Visitor Attention and Page Exposure peak at about the 540 pixel-line.
• If you have a long web page,  add “stop points” such as headers and images to prevent your visitors from quickly scrolling down the page. It will prevent their attention from waning towards the end of the page.
• The footer of your page is important! Users do pay quite a bit of attention to that area of your page.

This is interesting to me because the primary argument of a person sitting in on a redesign meeting at the Burke was that no one will ever look below the fold, so they asked me to make a different mock-up reflecting that.  While I think the most important/engaging content should remain above the fold, it turned a content-rich page into something that does not have much content because of the design restrictions imposed. You can see an earlier mock-up in the portfolio section, but I was undecided on whether this was a better alternative or not. I would post the new mock-up but I don’t know if that’s allowed yet.

Uber complicated graph from ClickTale

And if anyone is in the market for an amazing smelling candle, I bought the Aloha Orchid one from Anthropologie. Very nice. And all the millions of people who decided to make identical Excel macro tutorials need to stop.

In my last few days at the Burke Museum, I’ve been tasked with doing anything web analytics possible until I leave.  There’s so much more I wanted to accomplish in terms of figuring out goals for the site and assessing who our users are, but hopefully web analytics won’t get tossed aside forever after I’m gone.

We’ve already done overall assessments and reports on site metrics, so I’ve been trying to figure out actions they can take that will be easy to code and maintain.  Dealing with user engagement is the biggest issue so far, especially because measuring it is difficult and open to interpretation. If they at least attempt to address engaging and interacting with our users, I will die happy.

Average Time Graph

I’ve also focused on looking at things that we redesigned recently to track their performance since they went live.  I’m totally a nerd and I got really into how we could track conversions for the Education sub-site, and how we could better market them for next year.  Common conversions for an e-commerce site might be how many people get to a confirmation page after buying something, but for an informative site like the Burke Museum, its more difficult to decide what counts as a user that basically “did what we want them to do.”  Also, the charts I put in the reports are very pretty.

Mainly I’ve just been producing reports that I’m not sure anyone has the time or interest in reading, but what else is there to do when I’m going to be gone soon? I should think of something more creative. They might not read a report, but they will always remember a dirty limerick on web analytics.

…and in other news Michael Jackson died?? Sad times.