Quantitative vs qualitative research
It’s not enough knowing WHAT is happening. In order to make it better, you have to know WHY it’s happening.
Ask any senior management if they use user research and testing and you’re likely to get a “Yes, of course”. Probe a bit further however and you’ll likely to hear “We rely heavily on analytics”. There is a widespread belief amongst most (but not all) senior management that analytics = user research, and that if their site has analytics installed, all is gravy.
And analytics IS important. Whether you use GA, Omniture or other analytics programmes, finding out what is happening on your site is crucial to your site’s growth. How else do you find out what content your users are looking at, where in the purchasing funnel they drop out, and how many pages they look at on average?
Analytics can tell you a lot. It can tell you the what, and the when, and the where…
But it can’t tell you the why.
It can’t tell you whether your users are reading the content they are reading because that’s what they like, or because that’s the content they can find. It can’t tell you if your users are dropping out of the purchasing funnel because they find the funnel too long, or they get distracted by other things on the site. It can’t tell you if your users are only reading one or two pages because your carefully selected “What to read next” modules are not that interesting to them, or because they simply don’t see them.
Analytics can tell you a lot, but it can’t tell you everything.
Luckily, once you’ve got your quantitative what, when and where’s from your analytics, getting a clue to the why’s is easy. Ask the users. Get the qualitative research to back up the quantitative research. Identify a pain point for your users and then get usertesting.com (or their free version Peek), set up a poll or survey with Hotar on your site, go out and get someone to use your site, anything. But find out WHY it’s a pain point. You can only find a solution to a problem if you know what the problem is.
So next time a senior manager tells you where their site has problems, ask them why. And if they can’t tell you, it’s time to ask.
*other testing software is available…