Unleashing the Power of UX Analytics: Proven techniques and strategies for uncovering user insights to deliver a delightful user experience

BIRMINGHAM—MUMBAI

Unleashing the Power of UX Analytics

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To my parents, Dottie and Leroy Hendrickson, for their never-ending support throughout the years, and for always believing in me, no matter where my creative soul took me. Thanks, Mom and Dad, for the years of support and love.

To my sons, Miles and Dylan, two fine young men who are forging their own paths in the world – I’m so proud of you both and am eternally grateful to be your father.

And to all those I’ve worked with around the world over the years in building this career in UX. You were my champions, my coaches, and my collaborators, and I thank you for your support.

– Jeff Hendrickson

Foreword

We got it!

The month started off as usual, with me planning my workload and preparing for a special assignment with a customer and our new lead UX engineer. We had customer calls, product management calls, and we spent time organizing and planning. The new UX person was calm, cool, and collected, like he had done this many times before.

We landed on one of the hottest days in the southern, gulf coast part of Texas and went straight to the customer conference center. We got settled in and I remember Jeff, the author of this book, was taking time to map out where in the room he was going to interview people. He actually moved the chairs around to find the perfect spot for the other attendees to listen, take notes, and for the interviewee to feel comfortable.

The next day, during an interview, a customer leader said something that really sparked Jeff’s curiosity. Jeff asked if he could take us to where that part of the work was getting done. We then got a two-hour tour of the customer’s facility. I had never seen a requirements person make such a pivot during a meeting, but Jeff did, and it injected us and our customer with more enthusiasm about getting the research right.

The next few days were filled with empathetic interviews, lots of post-its, and a few value stream mapping exercises. Once we returned to our home offices and after a few days of crunching through the research we had collected, Jeff and I saw what needed to happen. We quickly went into design mode and wireframed out an application. What would have normally taken months of back-and-forth with the customer, we clocked in at just under two weeks. We designed a business system that would help the customer solve their unique business challenge.

After we briefed the customer, the only additional item they wanted was for the system to have a mobile sidecar application so that executives could access information on their phones. We wouldn’t have been able to understand the problem and how to remediate the challenge if it wasn’t for Jeff’s well-honed skills in UX research and design thinking.

This story happened while Jeff and I were working for GE Aerospace. I was the CTO of Military Solutions and Jeff was the lead UX Designer in an external-facing software division. We have several stories like this and Jeff has decades of them. Early on in Jeff’s tenure with us I realized that he has a unique ability to get a group of people to recognize the real problem, maneuver that group to promote ideas and then to find solutions that exceed their expectations. He has a collaborative, scientific and empathetic approach that gives customers (and users) a sense of relaxation, fact-fullness and empowerment during his UX design thinking process and workshops.

My journey around user experience started off in the dot com era where we had interface designers, information architects, content strategists, and a cadre of other folks to elicit requirements. However, all these folks were hyper focused on their specialties and quite often I, as a software professional, had to act as a mediator of these captured requirements. Fast forward to today and I see the following:

Too many tech projects are successful failures: Many tech projects are completed correctly, but they don’t meet the business’s desires or outcomes. I call these projects successful failures, and they’re all too common in business today.

User experience (UX) can help projects succeed: UX is a discipline that can greatly increase the chances of a project meeting or exceeding expectations.

UX has become more commonplace in recent years: Experience and a learning mindset are what will set UX professionals apart.

I am delighted that Jeff has put this book together; Jeff’s book is filled with deep insights into the UX discipline. It’s not a high-level overview, but rather a comprehensive guide to everything you need to know to help projects and the businesses they support succeed. From user research to design thinking to analytics, Jeff covers it all. He also shares his own personal experiences, which gives you a unique perspective on the UX field. If you’re serious about UX, then this book is a must-read. It’s the perfect resource for anyone who wants to take their skills to the next level.

Travis Wissink

Sr. Director, GE Aerospace

Contributors

About the author

Jeff Hendrickson is an honors graduate of the FIT design school who began his international career designing clothing and textile lines – one with a former classmate that showed in NYC to global acclaim.

A downturn in the clothing industry saw him go back to school to study technology, and it’s in technology that he’s remained, working his way up from designing small websites to leading UX teams for enterprises spread across the globe. He’s logged many miles on jets, crisscrossing the planet to teach design thinking and help companies discover new ways to serve users and customers.

Jeff currently lives in Cincinnati, OH, where he continues his work in the UX field, while he paints, publishes, teaches, and produces bartender cocktail competitions and art festivals under his company, Alchemy Entertainment Group.

About the reviewer

John Coria is an experienced design leader with 18+ years of experience in creating, facilitating, exploring, and implementing UX and UI concepts to drive results for customer-facing and technology-focused organizations. He has an extensive and proven track record of passionately reinventing the way customers use technology by leading and implementing design vision and strategies, articulating and presenting ideas to teams effectively, and working across organizational boundaries. He also enjoys building and managing high-performing and cohesive design teams by leading, developing, training, and providing effective coaching to attract and foster talent, while supporting a culture of collaboration, creativity, and innovation. As a roadmap builder, he is a visionary who is enthusiastic and flexible, with the ability to influence through conviction, thoughtful strategies, and a commitment to culturally aligned, value-focused, brand loyalty success, while setting new standards in executional and operational excellence.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part 1: Introduction to UX Analytics

1

Understanding the Fundamentals of User Experience

Getting familiar with UX

Busting the myths about UX

Understanding the differences between UI and UX

Who does UX?

Understanding the functioning of a UX Team

Summary

2

Just What Do We Mean by Analytics?

What UX analytics entails

Quantitative metrics example

A qualitative metrics example

Understanding the impact of analytics on successful UX projects

Exploring the common types of metrics

Quantitative

Qualitative

Quantitative versus qualitative metrics

Summary

3

Using Analytics Effectively for Successful UX Projects

Knowing the goal before getting started

Understanding how analytics is like a roadmap

Mastering quantitative and qualitative analytics

Doing the readout – showing stakeholders the findings

Using visuals is better

Using a story structure to explain data

Being succinct and not verbose

Being prepared to back up everything with more data

Involving design, development, and engineering teams

Summary

4

Achieving Success through a Repeatable Process

Discovering the power of a repeatable process

People and roles

Data

Tools and applications

Processes

Understanding how people think

Laying the groundwork – the importance of a strong foundation

Documenting it all

Summary

Part 2: Goals

5

North Star Statement – Your Greenlit Marching Orders

The North Star statement writing formula

Segment definitions for CPR

Implementing a logical CPR process

Testing the statement for feasibility

The need for iteration with research

Summary

6

Change Management: It’s Not Just about the Systems, It’s about the People

Understanding the hard truths

Change management and mental models – stakeholders

Change management and mental models – individual contributors and users

Taking baby steps to finish strong

Designing a solid rollout plan

Evangelizing the benefits

Understanding who else the change will affect

Summary

Part 3: Research

7

Design Thinking: Understanding the Core Problem-Solving Tool in a UX Practice

Exploring the core processes of design thinking

Setting the scenario

The team facilitator

The primary interviewer

Attributes of successful interviews

The role of the core team members during iteration

A real-world example of design thinking

Mastering the fundamentals of discovery session facilitation

Tone matters

Time-keeping for focus

Summary

8

Interviews and Personas – Best Practices for Quick and Efficient User Understanding

Getting comfortable with an interview protocol

Dissecting the stakeholder interview and persona

The stakeholder interview

The stakeholder persona

Grasping the user interviews and personas

The user interviews

The user personas

The importance of interviewing one person at a time

Sometimes things don’t work out as planned

Summary

9

Surveys – A High-Level, Broad-Stroke Tool for Quick Direction

Defining your audience

Knockout questions

Writing and rewriting the questions

Writing opening-level questions

Refining and rewriting the questions

Gathering and synthesizing the resulting data

If statistical significance is required

Summary

10

UX Metrics – The Story of Operational Measurement

Quick review of quantitative and qualitative metrics

Quantitative metrics – counting things and inferring quality

Visualizing research results for maximum influence

Donut charts for capturing qualitative metrics

Utilizing ‘why’ and ‘how’ in managerial decision-making

Using basic math to pivot to qualitative metrics

Summary

11

Live by Your Data, Die by Your Data

Data – the beating heart of business

Understanding and utilizing taxonomy

Getting a sense of the scope

Scoping breadth and depth

Finding database information

Finding out what matters

Understanding how your stakeholders want to see data

Visualizing the KPIs for quick decision-making

Investigating gaps and missing data

Finding and fixing data problems

Summary

12

The Tools It Takes to Gather and Consolidate Information

A brief overview of UX analytics tools

Evaluating and selecting tools

Determining what is best for your needs

Quantifying findings for reports

Quantitative data scenario for an application

Summary

Part 4: Strategy

13

Digital Transformation – An Enterprise Use of UX Analytics

The need for digital transformation

Rolling out a digital transformation effort

How UX analytics supports the plan

Monitoring and evaluating user data

Statistics on user expectations

Continuous monitoring for early problem detection

The leadership team

If you’re on the leadership team

Managing up

Working with your teams

Breaking down silos

Working with your peers

Supporting your leadership team

Being a supportive teammate

Unlocking the relationships between the roles

Tackling the need for new/additional changes

Summary

14

Content Strategy and Analysis – an Analytics-Based, User-Centric Approach

Understanding the difference between content and data

Content performance analysis

Using a taxonomy to understand content structure

Exploring a few taxonomy tools

Utilizing your analytics work for content strategy

Summarizing your research work

Writing a current-state content story

Summary

Part 5: Tactics

15

Deliverables – You Wrapped the Research, Now What Do You Present?

Importance of standardizing deliverables

The art and science of designing insightful standardized reports

Delving into parts that can be flexible but not compromised

Mastering the research readout

Tone and eye contact

Summary

16

Data Visualization – the Power of Visuals to Help with Cognition and Decisions

Data visualization for quick insights

Understanding basic data visualization types

Static versus interactive visualizations

Static visualizations

Interactive visualizations

Understanding levels of detail

Moving toward predictive and prescriptive analysis

Predictive analysis

When you don’t have data scientists at your disposal

Prescriptive analysis

Summary

17

Heuristics – How We Measure Application Usability

Getting to know application heuristics

Exploring the Nielsen Norman Usability Heuristics Platform

Visibility of system status

Match between the system and the real world

User control and freedom

Consistency and standards

Error prevention

Recognition rather than recall

Flexibility and efficiency of use

Aesthetic and minimalist design

Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors

Help and documentation

Making use of other types of evaluation

Cognitive walk-through

Feature inspection

Pluralistic walk-through

Cognitive dimensions framework

Wrapping up

Summary

In conclusion and thanks

Index

Other Books You May Enjoy

Preface

UX Analytics is a field that recognizes the significance of understanding human behavior and emotions when it comes to designing user experiences. It goes beyond mere metrics and embraces a people-centric approach. By delving into this book, you will acquire essential skills, knowledge, and techniques to establish a top-notch UX Analytics practice.

This comprehensive guide will equip you with the strategies and tactics required to effectively collect, analyze, and interpret data, enabling you to make informed decisions that enhance the overall user experience your customers expect. Additionally, it emphasizes the importance of empathy in comprehending user needs and desires, allowing you to create meaningful and impactful design solutions.

Additionally, this book will walk you through the entire UX Analytics process, from setting goals and defining key performance indicators (KPIs) to implementing various research methods and tools. You’ll gain insights on user interview best practices, usability testing, and techniques for gathering qualitative and quantitative data. By mastering the art of data analysis and interpretation, you’ll be able to uncover valuable patterns, trends, and user preferences, enabling you to make data-driven design decisions that lead to improved user satisfaction and business success.

Overall, this book aims to help readers effectively leverage analytics to improve user experience. While stressing the importance of data, it also covers potential limitations and pitfalls. The book offers an invaluable, comprehensive resource for implementing UX analytics to drive better design. Key takeaways include the fundamentals, repeatable processes, practical guidance, and real-world applications.

Who this book is for

This book is for product managers, UX researchers, designers, and anyone involved in UX and business development, both in management roles and as individual contributors. If you are looking to master the methodologies, principles, and best practices for driving product design decisions through UX analytics, this book is absolutely the right pick for you. While a basic understanding of user experience principles is beneficial, it is not a prerequisite, as everything you need to know will be explained.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Understanding the Fundamentals of User Experience, explains the importance of knowing what UX really is, and what its not. This chapter will help readers understand the broad scope of UX to improve user acceptance and usability of a software product.

Chapter 2, Just What Do We Mean by Analytics?, talks about the need to use analytics to understand user behavior of a software product. By learning the meaning and different types of analytics, readers will be able to design the correct research and interpret the findings with greater accuracy.

Chapter 3, Using Analytics Effectively for Successful UX Projects, teaches the importance of analytics and that analytics relies on the correct type of research to bring them forth.

Chapter 4, Achieving Success Through a Repeatable Process, shows how to spin up new projects quickly and efficiently. This chapter teaches how repeatable processes are sustainable and allow others not directly involved to understand quickly and follow the process at a broader level. They also set the team up for success by providing the framework for future projects.

Chapter 5, Northstar Statement - Your Greenlit Marching Orders, dwells into creating the Northstar statement in collaboration with the cross-functional core team. It takes input from every facet of the business to ensure that the project will meet the goals of all, including, business, product, and engineering.

Chapter 6, Change Management - It’s Not Just About the Systems, It’s About the People, focuses on how a properly staffed and well-trained change management team will help ease in the disruptions that a new application will unintentionally cause. It teaches the readers to prepare the workforce for the change well in advance of the release by making training videos and holding short, guided practice sessions with the power users.

Chapter 7, Design Thinking - Understanding the Core Problem-Solving Tool in a UX Practice, takes you through step-by-step processes and best practices so that you can become a respected facilitator of design thinking.

Chapter 8, Interviews and Personas - Best Practices for Quick and Efficient User Understanding, explores the different levels of interviews to get and solidify the ask from management, then to test that ask against managers and individual contributors. Understanding the ask from business stakeholders and the problems or new goals from the bottom up and the top down is critical to a successful project outcome.

Chapter 9, Surveys - A High-Level, Broad-Stroke Tool for Quick Direction, solidifies the importance of moving out into the market and getting a broad sentiment of the problems you’re trying to solve for. It explores the topic of surveys, which are a way to do this quickly and more efficiently than is often possible through in person interviews.

Chapter 10, UX Metrics - The Story of Operational Measurement, explores quantitative and qualitative metrics, understanding the ask, and determining the best type of metrics to gather and report.

Chapter 11, Live By Your Data, Die By Your Data, dwells on how a UX Analytics practitioner must become intimately familiar with all measurable aspects of their business so that they can support the goals of the management teams. It teaches the broad perspective of the data first, with an understanding of who it’s important to and why.

Chapter 12, The Tools It Takes to Gather and Consolidate Information, gives you a brief understanding of some of the best tools available in the market - with links to the sites – so that you can do your own due diligence to determine what would be best fit for you, your company, and the work you do.

Chapter 13, Digital Transformation - An Enterprise Use of UX Analytics, covers best practices for digital transformation including change management, corporate sponsorship, and a strong, cross-functional core team of leaders to keep it moving.

Chapter 14, Content Strategy & Analysis - An Analytics Based User-Centric Approach, talks about how content is just as important as data and research. Content is the structure that is visible to users and therefore the face of the company. Hence, the capturing and storage of, and the access to content is a key aspect of digital business.

Chapter 15, Deliverables - You Wrapped the Research, Now What Do You Present?, ties everything together and teaches the importance of packaging it all as deliverables, that are agreed on by the core team, and can be adjusted based on analytics and other research as the iterative process moves through.

Chapter 16, Data Visualization - The Power of Visuals to Help with Cognition and Decisions, shows how by visualizing research and analytics, you can deliver information in a form that allows for quicker understanding and decision making.

Chapter 17, Heuristics - How We Measure Application Usability, delves into heuristic evaluations and their significance in the context of delivering effective UX Analytics outcomes. It helps study and learn usability heuristics so that designs can mirror most closely the way that humans expect applications to work.

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Tips or important notes

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Part 1: Introduction to UX Analytics

In order to carry out any User Experience (UX) project successfully, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of what UX truly encompasses and what it does not. Misconceptions in the corporate and enterprise world often lead to unrealistic expectations that don’t align with the core principles and direction of UX as a discipline focused on creating better experiences. Additionally, grasping the meaning of analytics plays a vital role in comprehending how and why analytics are applied in UX projects.

The significance of analytics cannot be overstated, as they rely on the right type of research to provide valuable insights. Furthermore, incorporating repeatable processes into UX projects is crucial for sustainability and success. These processes not only enable broader team understanding and streamlined collaboration but also establish a framework for future projects, setting the stage for continued achievements. This part has the following chapters:

Chapter 1, Understanding the Fundamentals of User Experience

Chapter 2, Just What Do We Mean by Analytics?

Chapter 3, Using Analytics Effectively for Successful UX Projects

Chapter 4, Achieving Success through a Repeatable Process

1

Understanding the Fundamentals of User Experience

Let’s start off with one basic but extremely important understanding –User Experience (UX) does not equal User Interface (UI). UX encompasses a user’s entire experience in interacting with your software product. They do this through the UI; the content, buttons, cards, links, and so on. If those are designed correctly and make the job of the user simple, easy, and intuitive, then the user has a great experience. In this context, UI supports and is part of the UX. The UI either allows for a great experience or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, then your job is to do the research and provide the analytics that uncover the current problems so that a solution can be devised and incorporated.

In this chapter, we will be covering the following topics:

Getting familiar with UX

Busting the myths about UX

Understanding the differences between UI and UX

Who does UX?

Getting familiar with UX

When we think about UX, we need to understand the breadth of the discipline. When we talk about it and evangelize it within companies that are new to UX – such as in a 1-2 on the maturity model – we need to always refer back to the user or the customer. Another key point to remember is that Return on Investment (ROI) must always be proven.

This will result in a focus on the direction of the product and engineering groups within the organization as well. By showing depth in the research, and if your team is involved, the solution discovery process findings, you’ll be paving the way for a smoother full-cycle process of UX > Product > Engineering.

As a group of professionals who uncover or discover a hypothesis and then test its efficacy, UXers use methods and best practices to uncover the truth, which can be either positive or negative. Companies just starting down this path will incur expenses in management and individual contributor roles to start with.

So, what are the fundamentals of UX? In loose order of importance, they are research, design thinking, iteration, reporting,