1 Bottom-Up discovery is often overlooked

I really appreciate the approach you are describing to getting a better understanding of your visitor’s intent. Internal Search is one of the view things customers do on many sites and it is a direct indicator of how a site is not serving a certain segment.

I believe getting a feeling for what visitors are missing is often the first step in creating changes to a site’s design, that can then be validated by measuring outcomes. It’s very much along the lines of what any scientist is doing when he is working with lots of data: coming up with a hypothesis during the discovery phase, where you immerse yourself in data and formulate what might actually be happening, before you then use a quantitative method to measure if you’re right.

A lot of that first phase is about lookng at available numbers, but it is also about having hunches and developing ideas. I wish we had more tools that helped us along those lines.

posted at 12:54 pm on September 23, 2009 by willwill

3

I’s a nice and useful way to use Excel for site search analysis, and quite varying from the other methods presented today. I did not believe before that there were so many different techniques for that issue.

posted at 12:12 pm on September 29, 2009 by patrick_l

4 As an MSU alum...

…I was pleasantly surprised to come across this article. Great to see the MSU community taking a part on A List Apart.

Keep up the great work.

posted at 05:06 pm on November 1, 2009 by bugsyrocker

5 Great!

Nice results. As a person who is also acquinted with MSU community, it’s good to see the them taking roles on A List Apart.

posted at 09:26 pm on March 9, 2010 by Dena Tasarım

6 Conversion optimization is hard to pin down

Hi there

Thanks very much for your insights. As someone who often gets lost in data, I appreciate your tips on how to wade through it in a way that makes sense.

Using the bottom methodology that you describe has already given me a wider perspective on conversion optimization

posted at 07:48 am on September 12, 2010 by seoasia

7 A suggestion

Every good site manager or designer probably formally, or informally, almost certainly engages in bottom-up analysis at some point. I wonder how many “community managers” do … ? I can think of more than a couple examples of website community managers who’d really benefit from a rethinking of their strategy, to shift their focus from “brand building” to “meeting user expectations and needs” by identifying what people are actually seeking.

posted at 06:35 am on February 18, 2011 by websitebuilder

8

I had never given much thought to using site search statistics to help me determine how to best arrange the layout and images (as in your campus map example).

Thanks.

posted at 06:15 pm on March 7, 2011 by Jrtayloriv