I kind of knew this was happening a week ago, but I didn’t want to post about it until things were finalized. As of November 2nd I will no longer be working at ZAAZ and Microsoft, because I’m moving over to Cobalt to be a web and optimization analyst there.  Cobalt is a Seattle-based company that does digital marketing in most of the automotive space in the U.S.  One of my Microsoft bosses made fun of me for moving into that industry, but I see it as continuing to work on analytics, whatever the client.  And Cobalt just made the Deloitte Fast 500 for the 9th time, so they’re doing ok.

It is a really cool and exciting opportunity for me, and it should be an interesting challenge to deal with monetizing site activity and conversions for cars instead of software. I’m lucky to have the chance to work on both analytics and optimization (finally!), which means I should start brushing up on my statistics now.  If anyone knows of good stats resources/tutorials, let me know!

I’m sad to leave the people at ZAAZ and Microsoft, but I’m glad to have had the chance to work and learn at both places, and I even got to play on the ZAAZ soccer team. Hopefully this transition means my blog posts will include even more interesting and complicated problems from working in a new area.

Twitalyzer Top 100 Most Influential #Measure Tweeters

Twitalyzer rankings for #measure

In other news, Eric Peterson’s Twitalyzer tool ranked the top 100 most influential people using the #measure hashtag on Twitter. And you’re probably thinking “Whatever that means”, which sounds about right. I’m currently #20 on the list, but it only shows people who have been “twitalyzed” in the last 14 days.  When I saw that in the fine print (I initially did not make the list), I ran the Twitalyzer tool on my account, and lo and behold I ranked at #19.

I’ve only sort of tried to understand the Twitalyzer metrics, but like most social media ranking/grading tools, I’m not sure what they define as success is always correct. It was useful for finding new people and for making me feel very important and influential until I dropped to #20 after 30 minutes.

InfoCamp is an “un-conference” that encourages conversations about anything information related. Its supposed to be democratic, unstructured, and low-cost. Its in its 3^rd year (my 1^st year attending and volunteering), and had a great turnout:  350 people!

There seemed to be a good mix of professionals and graduate students, and topics ranged from UX to content development. I met lots of interesting people (which only added to my week of networking after attending Web Analytics Wednesday). The way it works is that people can prepare presentations ahead of time, or on the fly, and sign up to present and discuss an idea. The organizers want InfoCamps to happen in other cities eventually, and so do I.

On day 1 my former interaction design professor Axel Roesler gave a keynote on IXD, and design in general. There was one quote that resonated with me, but I forgot to note who originally said it:

“Design is the reconciliation of seemingly irreconcilable constraints.”

I also saw great presentations on user-centered design and information visualization from Noah Iliinsky, and on user-centered design, optimization, and kittens by Jason Carmel from ZAAZ. I live blogged from day 2 of InfoCamp (sadly I missed Vanessa Fox speaking) below.

Information Architecture and SharePoint

This one was presented by Microsofties, so I was a bit skeptical. I also typically hate dealing with SharePoint, and I’ve done an  IA project with it; maybe I’m just completely biased.

Someone asked about people who want to tag things with more terms than you’ve allowed, or conversely, don’t want to tag things. The answer was “I don’t think that’s a technology problem, that’s a people problem.” Not sure I agree with that. Yes, you need to establish a process that works for your users, but not allowing flexibility and user error recovery in the information system is poor usability practice.

In terms of metadata for SharePoint, their argument is that authors will automatically see the value in assigning metadata to documents and fill in metadata.  I believe unless people are educated in the value of metadata and there is some kind of control applied to what kinds of metadata terms should be used, SharePoint is not as effective.

Hm..and now he’s admitted “[Microsoft SharePoint is] not the best wiki, we’re not the best document and records management system…but we try really hard to make all of these things work together.” Fair enough.

How to start your own InfoCamp

Recommendations from the organizers, Aaron Louie and Rachel Elkington from ZAAZ. There’s tons more info on the wiki.

**NO FEAR**

1. community
2. $ – sponsorship
3. venue
4. publicity
5. logistics
6. personnel
7. social media (see the #infocamp hashtag on Twitter)

Came about from Rachel and Aaron attending IA Summit, and thinking it was good for theory, boring for practitioners.

“The best discussions happened in the hallways and afterparties.” –Rachel Elkington on typical conference experiences

Wanted to bring in the local community and reinvigorate the local ASIST chapter.  They also didn’t like that conference attendance is limited by cost and structure. Both of them wanted to imitate a bar camp format in Seattle and have it be be a movement–a viral form of conference.  The key was finding like-minded people and keeping the conversation going.

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.

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!

Information overload, but I think I’ve survived web analytics boot camp. Except now its all I can think about all the time. I’m excited to go to Web Analytics Wednesday at POP on July 15th so I can start meeting more web analytics nerds and talk with them about social media and other stuff. Now I need to play more in Web Trends and Omniture and test out the reports and things to have a sense of the UI and capabilities.  Also I need to practice making things look pretty in Excel. I used to think that was an oxymoron. Mainly I’m looking forward to playing around with data.

FC ZAAZ 99 represent

I played my first outdoor soccer game since Ireland with FC ZAAZ 99 (why 99 I don’t know) last night. We lost, but it was still a lot of fun. I hate playing against teams with people that are 20 years older than me and also unskilled, because they think they are really good and get mad if you touch them at all. I also hate playing on sand. It is the worst to feel like you can’t run as fast and its like there’s a sandstorm in my eyes. Still, I’m looking forward to the next game.

Since I won’t start at Microsoft for a couple weeks, I’ll be spending my free time reading nerdy books, hiking, tanning, and visiting interesting places.

Also Rachel’s wedding is officially coming in June of 2010!! Congrats!

So much happened today, but I’m kind of too tired to write it all. In a nutshell:

1. ZAAZ is so so cool. The people, the building, the vibe, the work atmosphere…I really lucked out. I managed to lock myself in a stairwell somehow, and I snagged myself a copy of a book I’ve wanted to read for awhile: Web Analytics: an Hour a Day, by Avinash Kaushik.  I’m excited to start doing more things there.
2. I got treated to lunch and dinner by my mom. Very nice.
3. Got a job offer on a side job as a web metrics administrator for Microsoft. Part of the reason for #2.

I saw an interesting thing in the elevator that I thought would have fit in nicely with my HCI class, because it was an interesting design choice. I’m not sure if you even can press that button, or if it just lights up when help is coming. Also if you’re not a native English speaker you’re S.O.L.

Help is on the way button

UPDATE: I think the button can be pressed, or it affords pressing anyway. I will probably not press it to see what feedback I get.

I was minding my own business, looking at some data in Google Analytics, and then I realized that one data set pretty much was a perfect example of the long tail. A) I was excited that I even recognized it when looking at a table, and b) I didn’t know what it really meant, but I did think it would be important to investigate.

General definition: increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.

SEO definition: lots of key phrases individually account for little traffic by themselves but collectively all those key phrases often could account for a huge amount of traffic.

long tail example

As usual, I first turned to the Occam’s Razor blog for answers, and it seems like the long tail can mean different things in different contexts for analytics.  When you are looking at keywords, and there a lot of keywords with small usage that add up to a big percentage, you would be interested in learning more about the tail. The tail keywords tend to be subject based versus branding keywords. So ours might be “Northwest Indians” versus “Burke Museum.”  These keywords could be better utilized in the content of the site if this is what people are searching on.

On the other hand, I was looking at the top pages for a subsite, which Avinash compares to a “cliff” at the edge of the long tail.  You should be trying to move the cliff further along the long tail ideally.  In that case, most people are looking at the head pages only, and very few reach the long tail pages.

Content Long Tail

The overall gist of the long tail examples was that keyword analysis should focus on the long tail, and with content you can initially focus on the head of the tail.  I guess what I’m having trouble with is how you apply this to other metrics, like average time spent on page, or bounce rate.  Are keywords the primary instance in which you want to initially focus on the long tail to get more insight into user behavior?  How do I decide which pages in the long tail to focus on for top content? If I see another long tail, should I just pretend like I didn’t see it so I don’t get confused again?

Last day of work at the Burke Museum. I am sad I won’t get to finish some projects or keep working on things, but hopefully they get a lot of benefits from what I did while I was here.   Mainly I’m excited to start at ZAAZ after I relax for a few days.

So if you were ever wondering how to tell what people are doing on your site, how they’re getting there, or where they are going instead…Avinash Kaushik tweeted this ginormous (but valuable) list of 75 resources that are mostly free: http://designm.ag/resources/website-analytics-toolbox/. I’m still in the process of checking some of them out.  There are a couple cool ones that do heat tracking so you can see what areas of your site are “hot” or “cold”, and are getting the most or least attention.

I can think of a number that the Burke Museum should use, such as one of the rank checkers for Google, but chances are no one will have the time or interest when I leave.  I’m not sure which (if any of these outside of Google Analytics) that ZAAZ uses, but I from what Chris Kerns told me, the tools are fairly interchangeable with variations depending on what metrics you are looking for, or the size of the site.

Here is a really good article that I think explains how important web analytics is to understanding the user, and how it integrates with user experience (which is my ultimate goal): http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/web_traffic_analytics_and_user_experience.

Also we lost our indoor soccer game last night. Vacca Patrol has gone way downhill with all the flaky guys not showing up. Now I’m trying to decide if I should play soccer this summer or not? Or do bikram yoga instead?

I think its only appropriate that in honor of my father, an accountant, that I spent the day BBQ-ing and playing with Excel.  Apparently in web analytics, reporting tools gather the data, but you manipulate or “do cool stuff” with it in Excel.  So I now know way more than I ever thought I needed to about PivotTables and such (which will come in handy at ZAAZ). Excel 2007 does seem to make it pretty easy to do all of the basic things like calculating sums, but I have a sneaking feeling that I will be doing more complicated things than this.

I should probably be focusing equally on data visualization (i.e. charts and graphs), because that’s how I’ll be getting my point across to clients.  Avinash Kaushik says that the best visualizations come from:

“1) a deep understanding of the goal / objectives 2) from thinking beyond what standard trend lines or stacked bar graphs can provide.”

I tried to emphasize my points in my last 2 web analytics reports for the Burke through varied and clear charts and graphs, but I haven’t gotten feedback yet on those.  I think the challenge is in making the numbers tangible without inducing death by bar graph. I tend to understand things better through words, so it requires creative thinking for me to not rely on rhetoric.

First day of summer in Seattle.