Overview

Much user experience research is geared toward understanding how people could experience your site or estimating how they would want to. But it's difficult to understand how they are experiencing it. Satisfaction surveys can get at what people feel is working and not working, but people's predictions and preferences are not good predictors of their behavior. Contextual inquiry can reveal issues in the way people use your site, but only one person at a time. Usability testing can uncover many likely problems, but suffers from the problem of projecting people's behavior in a laboratory environment versus real life. None of these actually tell you how people are currently using the site, what problems they're really having with it "in the wild." Knowing users' actual behavior closes the loop that started with the research and profiling you did before beginning the development of the site. Without it, you never know whether your designs really work.

Fortunately, there are two sources of information you probably already have that reveal your users' current experiences: customer support comments and Web server log files. Merging knowledge of people's behavior and opinions with your other understanding of your users and your company can reveal deep patterns of behavior and help you make their use of your product more efficient and profitable for everyone involved. Unfortunately, both of these sources feature large data sets that need analysis before they can be useful. While they're a gold mine of information about user behaviors...