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Day 1 - Monday 1st March 2010 Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience with Lou Rosenfeld

Overview
Workshop outline
What you'll learn
Who should attend
Workshop schedule
Testimonials

Overview

Does your site have a search engine? If so, you're sitting on an often under-utilized pot of gold: search query data that describes what your customers really want from your site—in their own words. Site search analytics helps you understand and benefit from that data, enabling you to better diagnose and solve a multitude of user experience problems. The result: better content, better navigation, better search, better interface design, and a better user experience.

In this day-long workshop, Lou Rosenfeld—co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and the forthcoming Search Analytics for your Site: Conversations with Your Customers—will combine lecture, discussion, and extensive hands-on exercises to cover the basics of site search analytics. And he'll show you how spending even an hour a week analysing your search queries can help tune and improve your site and expose new opportunities for improving your business strategy.

Workshop Outline

The day will include...

What is Site Search Analytics (SSA)?
The Point of SSA
SSA Demonstration
Technical Stuff: the nuts and bolts of SSA
Exercise/Discussion: Pattern Analysis
Improving Navigation and Metadata
Exercise/Discussion: Failure Analysis
Improving Content
Exercise/Discussion: Session Analysis
Improving Search
SSA and UX methodology
Advanced Topics/Discussion

What you’ll learn

You'll learn to:

Understand search logs and relevant analytics reports
Ask the right questions of your query data
Identify where your site's search and navigation are failing, and learn how to fix them
Tune your content to your audience's needs and plug your site's content gaps
Enhance your site's navigation through improved metadata
Design better interfaces for entering queries and for presenting search results
Improve your search engine's configuration
Reinvigorate your user experience methodology by incorporating a method that's truly quantitative, and which helps improve your qualitative methods

We won't cover:

The technical aspects of analytics tools (such as how to install one on your server)
Search engine optimization; that's about helping people find their way to your site, while site search analytics is about helping them find information within your site

Who should attend

Web designers and user experience designers (information architects, interaction designers, usability specialists, content authors) will learn to use data to diagnose, prioritise, and address problems with their sites—and to integrate a data-driven user research tool into their broader design methodologies
Web analytics professionals will benefit from applying search analytics to improve performance in areas aside from traditional transaction conversion
Managers will be able to use real behavioral data to better understand their customers' needs—and may unearth new opportunities to enhance their organizations' business strategies

Schedule

The approximate schedule for day 1 is as follows.

Time	Activity
8.30-9.00	Arrive at the ICA for Registration
9.00-10.30	Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience (Part I)
10.30-11.00	Coffee and Biscuits
11.00-12.30	Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience (Part II)
12.30-1.30	Lunch (Catered)
1.00-2.30	Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience (Part III)
2.30-3.00	Coffee and Biscuits
3.00-4.00	Site Search Analytics for a Better User Experience (Part IV)
4.00-5.00	Q&A
5.00	Home/Pub!

Testimonials

"...your workshop helped us use our search engine as a better resource. Before we were looking at our monthly logs and saying things like 'isn't that interesting.' Today, we are adding some custom results for specific searches, and we are thinking about changing the layout of our results page to improve our site's usability."

—Greg George, Information Architect, Georgia State University

"I had some understanding of reviewing top searches before this seminar but it brought to light many other areas I had not yet thought of. With the information from the workshop I have been able to take this to the next step in our agency."

—Stephanie Edwards, Web Production Manager, U.S. Customs and Border Protection