Martin Garrix
Connecting a world-class music artist with his fans through an unforgettable website
Data analysis can tricky, that’s for sure. But once you set up the right parameters and benchmarks it can turn into a very insightful practice for designers.
There are multiple ways to interpret data, which then also depends on other data and metrics to get a grasp of what you’re looking at.
Luckily there are plenty of great tools to help us with that. Based on gathered data we can improve the user experience again and again in a sustainable way! For instance; if users bounce (that means they leave the page without any interaction) we can use this data to try and fathom why they left. But more importantly we try to figure out what we can do to help prevent this from happening next time around.
Having applied this thinking to a number of projects, we’re happy to share our thinking.
Some data analysis methods we use
Hotjar
Using [Hotjar](https://ww.hotjar.com) gives us useful insights such as where a user is clicking with their mouse. If a user repeatedly misclicks this could mean a section is unclear and we should iterate on it. You can also see where users hover over certain elements and see how far down the page they are scrolling.
Google Optimize
Google Optimize is a tool that allows you to deploy A/B tests on websites. It will create multiple versions of a page on the website and then test which version performs better. This can be useful for analyzing the effectiveness of different design and layout options, as well as for testing the effectiveness of different calls to action.
Ahrefs
[Ahrefs](https://ahrefs.com/) is an all-in-one SEO toolset that studies what users are looking for outside of your website. It tracks ranking progress, search keywords, brand authority and many more useful factors that benefits any industry. The platform contains a lot of information and data— at Yummygum we often use ahrefs as a guide for (international) keywords.
Read more of our thoughts on UX Design
Data safeguarding
Data is a topic we take very seriously. Users are able to opt out of any of the data we are tracking and can always view which data we are trying to track. It’s important to ask for consent before going through with the data analysis. Always be transparent with these practices, so that users know what information of them might be analysed, for how long and what we intend to do with it.
Overwhelming data
There’s a lot of data to learn from which can actually be quite overwhelming. Keywords, heat maps, bounce rates and frustrated clicks all originate from something.. but what? There are a lot of tools to help you, but knowing what to do with the data is a whole new level of expertise. Did we mention we could help you with that?
Data analysis is a constant loop: you design something, test it, analyse it, iterate, test it and analyse it over and over again. It’s never truly finished; there’s always something to learn.
Maxime Adrichem
UX Designer
Main takeaways
Embrace data, it can be a bottomless pit of ammunition to be used for your advantage.
Focus on privacy of the user first.
Don’t generalize findings too quickly, no human reacts the same.
