UIEtips: Activity Analytics for Web Apps

In today’s UIEtips, I talk about analytic tools and the insights of what they can capture.

Here’s an excerpt from the article

Tools like Google Analytics or Webtrends are very powerful for content sites, where the only things a user does is visit a page, click on another page, or leave the site. These tools can deliver insights on which pages people visited and in what order.

However, web-based applications are more complex. When implemented with something like a model/view/controller approach, it’s not uncommon for one “page” to serve many purposes. A single page can change dynamically depending on the view and model involved, even though its the same page. In a traditional analytics tool, that one page will show up inaccurately, without giving any insight on about what actually is going on.

Similarly, these tools can’t detect non-page interactions, such as lightboxes or pop-up dialogs. Sophisticated user interactions go unreported.

The result is the team can’t trust the reports from the tool. Once the team loses confidence in their reporting data, its value is greatly diminished. A different approach is necessary.

Read the article: Activity Analytics for Web Apps.

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Do you use Page-based Analytics? Or have you implemented your own Analytical system? What insights have you gained?