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The UX Research Field Guide > Continuous Research Methods > User Analytics

THE UX RESEARCH FIELD GUIDE

User Analytics
Introduction
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01. UX Research Fundamentals

02. Planning for UX Research Enter your email address Subscribe

03. Research Recruiting

04. UXR Methodologies

Launching a new product or experience is exciting, especially if you expect that it will
05. Discovery Methods boost you business in a substantial way. But after you’ve launched, it’s time to assess
06. Evaluative Methods
how users are actually responding to what you've put out there, in real life.

07. Continuous Research Methods

How long are visitors staying on your site or in your app? How long does it take for
i. User Analytics them to complete key tasks? Are they stumbling on the same things over and over
ii. Continuous Feedback Surveys again? Are they buying the stuff you want them to buy? The stuff they indicated they
iii. Sales, Support, and Product Data would buy in your previous research? Are they generally picking up what you’re
08. Analysis and Synthesis
putting down?

09. Reports and Deliverables

Many of these questions can be answered by reviewing user and web analytics.
Appendix

Start with user goals

Begin with understanding your user’s goals. For example, if you’ve created an
experience within a fitness app for someone who wants to get lean, you want to
understand which actions are the most important for meeting this goal, then track the
ease with which folks can complete those actions.

So, how do you know when someone’s having trouble? Sometimes users give you
feedback directly through a survey or support interaction. Other times the writing is
on the wall in the form of quantitative analytics—like Google Analytics for web,
Mixpanel for product events, or other tools in your analytics stack.

Understand why reviewing analytics

matters
Quantitative analytics are important to all organizations, with different departments
and functions monitoring what is most relevant to their needs. The C-Suite is likely
watching top line metrics, like daily, weekly, and monthly revenue, plus whatever key
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🌞 Introducing The 2022throughout the entire funnel. Product teams are focused on product usage and user x
User Research Yearbook, a groovy directory of essential voices in UXR.
centric metrics that help drive that usage, and ultimately revenue.

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or team,the beauty Sign Up
of rallying around quantitative metrics is
everyone can speak the same language in a pretty objective way. In the context of
ongoing listening following a product release, you probably have some historical
benchmarks to watch post launch, focusing in on the areas you were seeking to
impact. Mapping user goals, to product goals, to revenue goals, to quantitative
metrics is an important part of aligning goals across an organization.

Determine the essential analytics

you want to measure
Depending on the goals of your product launch or feature updates, you may want to
focus on some of the below common quantitative metrics.

Survey analytics

Fictional NPS data over time via Promoter.io

NPS, CSAT, or CES scores - As outlined in Chapter 1, these survey metrics

give you an idea of how your customers feel about your company and
particular touchpoints with your company, such as the support experience.
If these scores are changing (positively or negatively) following a launch,
this can be an indication of how your changes are being received. Drilling
into your data with a focus on key segments and cohorts, and validating
with further data will help you uncover insights.
Qualitative survey data - Often the above surveys include a free-form
question that can help you understand some of the whys, the motivations
behind the positive or negative scores. As you combine quantitative data
with qualitative and segment it by meaningful customer
Get the groups,
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start to from hypothesis you can then validate through testing and further
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research.
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Example of retention data from Mixpanel

Feature use - Which features are used and the most? Are your new
features, or updates, getting used?
Recency and frequency - How recently did someone use your product?
How frequently do they return?
Value of use - Are people who use a given feature more valuable, happy, or
otherwise positively impacted by using it?

Web analytics

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 High level web analytics data from Google Analytics x
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Time on site - This canbe a great area
 
to drill into, especially for a content
driven experience, or one where the revenue model is closely tied to visit
duration.
Visits - How many people visited your experience overall? How are visits
changing over time? More isn’t always more, but all things being equal, it is.
Unique visitors - How many different users are interacting with the
experience?
Goal completion - From leads generated, to purchases completed, to
buttons clicked, if you can tag it, you can track it.
Pages visited - Which pages did an individual or group of individuals visit?
Are those pages connected to key buyer/user journeys?
Traffic source - How did the user enter your experience? Was it from a
certain campaign, organic traffic, or another source?
Path to conversion - Before converting, which pages do users visit? How
long do they stay on site? Is this path as direct as possible? Is there an
opportunity to improve your site navigation? Evaluate across different
personas, lifecycle stages, or user stories. Not every user has the same
goals.

By understanding and tracking your baseline against the metrics that matter to your
goals, and your users goals, you’ll quickly notice where a product update or launch is
having an impact.

Set up a system for measuring

analytics
Once you've determined the metrics you need to track, find what teams may already
be using, then what you may need and don't have. Some user researchers build out
custom dashboards, integrating Google Analytics with Microsoft Excel, or taking
advantage of one of the many business intelligence tools now available. Whatever
you can do to automate your dashboards so you can spend less time collecting your
data, and more time analyzing and acting on it, is great. Make sure to share your
dashboards with other stakeholders too!

A good dashboard:
Prominently highlights the most important data
Illustrates change, anomalies, data worth noticing
Is connected to deeper data for drilling in where necessary to understand
what’s “really going on.”
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 🌞 Introducing The 2022Create a cadence for reviewing x
User Research Yearbook, a groovy directory of essential voices in UXR.

analytics
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Perhaps you have a weekly department meeting where key metrics review is a
recurring agenda item. Or maybe you have a monthly OKR meeting. Or maybe you
are the lead researcher on a particular project you’re very invested in, and you need
to know what’s happening by the day or hour on something that has just launched.
Depending on your individual, team, or company situation, set up a regular cadence
for reviewing the metrics that matter to you the most. Of course, it may make sense to
review different metrics at a different cadence. We recommend a weekly check-in of
your top level key metrics at a minimum, and then build from there based on your
needs. Give yourself a recurring task or calendar event to make this ongoing review a
habit or take advantage of automated email reports for your services that offer them.

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