At work, we’re trying to get the most value from our site’s visitor statistics. We’ve been using both Nielsen//NetRatings and Google Analytics for a while now and these tools are great. Just a month or so ago, we added Crazy Egg to our toolbox.
What makes Crazy Egg stand out from our other tools is not that it collects data that the other tools don’t, but rather how the collected data is presented and visualised.
With the volume of traffic we get to our site, we just run Crazy Egg for a couple of hours on a particular page, and can immediately see areas of the page that can be improved; e.g. we can see that many users are clicking a particular image that has no link. So we put an appropriate link on that image, and save our visitors some frustration/confusion and we save them a click.
It’s also quite interesting to note that across the board, people don’t mind scrolling. You can see where people of particular window-sizes clicked. Plenty of small-window users were using the links in our footer; they had to scroll down to see it.
Crazy Egg is free to use on up to 4 pages and for 5000 visits per month. We used the free plan while we trialed it, but have been convinced of its value, and so have since upgraded.
Redesigning a corporate web environment
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009The Challenge
I’ve got this friend who is responsible for a corporate front-end web environment with almost a dozen browser-facing web applications. Pretty much all he can do at the moment is change static content in the antiquated and wildly inappropriate CMS. Changing anything significant requires implementation of an expensive one-off SDLC waterfall-type project with a business case, requirements-gathering, PM, BA, dedicated test-resource – the whole box and dice. These projects often under-deliver, with scope being reduced en route to avoid budget and deadline blowout.
He’s not happy with the way things are.
He’s got it into his head that it would be far better to create an easily-manageable front-end, with a unified, standardised UI under the control of his front-end web team. Key aspects are simplicity, speed, cost-efficiency, and trust – none of which can be used to describe the current state of affairs.
Some ideas
I was talking to my friend, and he said that at a high level, he’d like to abstract the various applications from the UI, where possible, by means of API/Web Services/etc. On the front-end would be a web application framework – He’s thinking Symfony or similar. He believes he has sufficient developer resource on his team to build/maintain/support this.
Some other ideas he’s been tossing around, in no particular order:
blendscale?More ideas…
… are welcome. He needs all the help he can get. While it’s all very bluesky (with pie) at the moment, he needs to turn it into a watertight, bulletproof, business case. And soon.
Posted in Commentary, Design, User Interface | 5 Comments »