Don't redesign your Web site blindly - analyse usage data first

Shawn Morton Builder.com

Published: 22 May 2003 13:06 BST

One of the most important components of any Web redesign project is usage data. The good news is that data is readily available. The bad news is that many Web managers and their designers still rely heavily on instinct or personal preferences instead of taking advantage of data to drive their redesign decisions.

Why analyse data?
The great thing about developing products for the Web is that you can see, in real time, exactly how your customers interact with them. Armed with that usage data, you can increase click-through to key areas and, with luck, raise Web-based sales.

For example, let's say your manager wants you to redesign your company's Web site because sales from your site's catalogue haven't been as high as expected. Your manager thinks the problem is that users can't find the catalogue, so he wants to spawn a pop-up window showing products from the catalogue every time a visitor hits your home page. You don't like the pop-up idea and suggest drawing more attention to the Catalogue tab.

Without usage data to analyse, any decisions you and your manager make will be pure speculation. Maybe users can't find the link to your product catalogue. Maybe users are just using your site to gather information about products. Or maybe your company's sales forecasts were too optimistic. At this point, any of those maybes is as good as the next, and none of them is going to allow you to say, with confidence, that a new design will be better than your current one.

With time and resources being in short supply these days, you can't afford not to get it right the first time. Let's see how to get started collecting usage data.

First steps
Fortunately, laying the foundation for gathering helpful usage data isn't as difficult as you might think. You can do some things now that will help you set a baseline for your current site's usage and enable you to make informed decisions about how to improve it.

The first step is to make your URLs easy to track. Sure, you could just measure page views for particular URLs or filenames, but that gives you only some of the data you need. What if there are three ways to get to the same page? How can you determine which path a user took? You need to be able to distinguish between those three links to get a more complete view of how users navigate your site. Let's use Figure A as our example Web page.

Figure A