As web analytics professionals, we tend to focus on trends, distributions, segments, etc. But sometimes the best insights don’t come from numbers or fancy visualizations. They can come from the experience of a single visitor.
Check out WG Moore’s article Web Site Analysis – A Study in Damage Control for a concrete example of this, where a page view-by-view analysis of a lost customer resulted in valuable insights.
EricB, currently at WebTrends, is now blogging about how technology trends impact analytics at inside analytics.
Welcome to the conversation, Eric!
Go to Google and type in the name of Yahoo’s Chief Data Officer. Check out the sponsored link.
Today I went to log in to Yahoo Mail, and was greeted with this:
Why the heck would Yahoo! choose this image? And what does it have to do with viruses?
Steve Krause, VP of Analytic Products at CNET, has come out of his cave and is doing some great writing. Web Analytics historians will appreciate his Personify Retrospective, but he’s got lots of Good Think on other topics too. Anyone who can wax poetic about high-definition lettuce gets my vote.
Welcome Steve!
I’ve always had a soft spot for DEMO, a no-nonsense look at emerging technology. For years, Chris Shipley’s been doing a great job picking the new and interesting stuff. Gauge/Accrue had our time at DEMO, and it was greatly rewarding for both the exposure and the contacts we made.
DEMOfall ’05 starts today. I won’t be there, alas. But I notice that Web veterans ATG will be, demoing a new customer service application suite.
for the first time in a long time, I feel like I have some real competition.
Yeah, working at Yahoo! can be like that. There are lots of amazingly smart, talented people here. Welcome to Y!, Dean.
Sucks about the fender bender though.
“Why feel lucky when you can be right?”
BusinessWeek online has an article about Larry Tesler, Yahoo’s new VP of User Experience, and the design of Yahoo’s front page.
It’s a perplexing read. For example, there’s the statement:
the front page has remained stagnant
Where apparently “stagnant” means unchanged since Sept 2004.
Contrast the “stagnant” quote with this one:
Yahoo researchers endlessly try to divine which are the most-used services.
Indeed, the front page changes in multiple ways every week, as the team tries new ideas. I know this because SDS runs the A/B test system that does all the analytics. In this way, “Yahoo researchers” are always trying new things. And “devine” is an interesting word – “study” is probably more accurate. The Yahoo front page is probably the single most instrumented, most analyzed page on the Web. When 44% of the Internet population sees your page every month, you don’t make changes for the heck of it.
Finally, let’s be honest: it’s not all about user experience. The art is about the design that balances user experience (or “delight” as Larry calls it) with the business needs of the site. The science is running the experiments on those designs, so the varied opinions give way to hard facts based on actual research.
If you haven’t seen it, the Web Analytics Association has several RSS feeds, for job postings, articles, events and press releases. And a feed that consolidates them all.
Most of the entries are for job openings. I considered posting all our job openings, but that seems excessive.
Within Yahoo’s data group, we’ve got over 70 openings. That’s not a typo. Over seventy positions, throughout software engineering, QA, product managers, statisticians, business analysts, and everything in between — and at all levels. If you’re interested in working in Sunnyvale or Pasadena, you love data in any capacity, and you appreciate a company with an executive commitment to use the data, you should check out the amazing things we’re doing. (hint: send me a resume.)
As a side benefit, you can tell your family where you work and they will have heard of the company!