The dilemma of no usage data

Pictured: Woman not sure how many people are using her website (Unsplash)

As someone who loves to create spreadsheets, I thoroughly enjoyed hearing and reading about the various criteria we can use to assess content. While making lists and adding columns to spreadsheets is a lot of fun for me, I have to consider that the client probably doesn’t have time to read a huge spreadsheet and we don’t have the time to make one. This week it’ll be very important to listen to the client and work closely with my team to determine what criteria are the most important to include.  

Sidebar: I’ve started creating an inventory of the metrics that we keep at work, and I’m pretty sure I got the idea from this class. I work for a corporate library and we keep track of the research we do, documents we deliver, and other types of customer interactions. We’ve long decided that the system we use to record these interactions is outdated and confusing and we’re not able to record all the data that is the most important to us – potentially misrepresenting just how much work we do for the company. So, I offered to get the ball rolling on the project, and I’ve been working on inventorying the types of information we record and how we currently record it. I’m hoping this will help us understand what types of data the new system will need to accommodate. So far, the size of my spreadsheet is under control!

Something delightful and disappointing

Back to the subject of selecting criteria to use when evaluating content. In our textbook, Land emphasizes the usefulness of usage data when evaluating digital content. Dr. Kim’s lecture this week also went over how to grab usage data for most public websites using Google Analytics. Usage data can be extremely helpful when trying to understand how your customers use your content, like what parts of your website may be hard to find or just not useful for your customers. There are so many ways usage data can be used when planning your content project and when evaluating your project’s success.

But what to do when you don’t have access to it? I’m thinking it’s possible we won’t have access to that type of information for the project my team is working on, and considering what the client needs us to do, I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary. But what about auditing a website before a complete redesign? I’m currently in that position with our website at work (it’s on an internal network and permissions are tricky where we are). We have no way of knowing how many people access our site, what pages they view the most, and what paths most of them take to our core content. I know what we need to do instead – conduct user surveys and interviews – but even once we’ve done those, I’d still love to have some usage data.

Something meaningful

I really enjoyed Chapter 24, “Using Personas and Customer Journeys in Audits.” For websites with a ton of content that serve a diverse customer base with different information needs, I think mapping your customers’ journey is perfect tool to use when assessing your site’s usability. If you’re redesigning a website, making sure you account for the various ways your customers will use and access your content is so important. You certainly don’t want to sink time and money into a project that has made your content easier to use for half of your customers and harder to use for everyone else.