Site Search Analytics

Design

Does your site have a search engine? If so, you're sitting on an often under-utilized pot of gold: search query data that describes what your customers really want from your site—in their own words. Analyzing this wildly semantically rich data will help you to better diagnose and solve problems with your site's content, navigation, and search performance.

In this workshop, Lou Rosenfeld—co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and the forthcoming Search Analytics for your Site: Conversations with your customers—will combine lecture, discussion, and hands-on exercises to get you started with site search analytics. And he'll show you how spending even an hour a week analyzing your search queries can help tune and improve your site, and expose new opportunities for improving your business strategy.

On Not Declaring Victory: Going Beyond User Research

As user research becomes firmly established in organizations around the world, it's tempting to congratulate ourselves and retreat to our shiny new labs. But our work is nowhere near complete. As currently practiced, user research remains narrow in focus, often limited to the qualitative methods that reflect our own educational biases, and the tools that fit within our own comfort zones.

Other research practices, such as web analytics, business analytics, and market research, are equally powerful ways of learning about users' wants and needs. More importantly, they're often complementary with what we do. When our organizations combine methods that tell what is going on are combined with methods that tell why, only then will they truly realize the value of all user research.

In his keynote, Lou Rosenfeld will explore the complementary aspects of the different research perspectives, argue for breaking down the silos that divide them, and suggest a framework for developing products and services that are better analyzed, better designed, and, ultimately, better performing.