Tag: analytics

Code4Lib Day 2: Afternoon Notes

De-sucking the Library User Experience

  • Jeremy Prevost, Northwestern University

Libraries hate library users. If we didn’t, our websites wouldn’t suck.

Discovery

  • if a user can’t find it, why do you own it?
  • spend a lot of money on acquiring resources or access to them
  • want to allow them to find them
  • Good: works like Google from the user’s perspective
  • Bad: needs to know how it works to make it work e.g. need to know MARC; can only find known items
  • live examples: Ex Libris Voyager vs. Primo
  • Voyager: no relevant results even using boolean ‘AND’
  • Primo: can use boolean or not, relevant results – de-sucked!

Requesting Item

  • Request information/user experience also sucks
  • Prepopulated info, request item if not available – de-sucked!

Renew Item

  • consistency
  • made interfaces consistent – de-sucked!

Mobile

  • not going away
  • no mobile until mid-2007 for iPhone
  • jQuery mobile – Apr 2010 – but updating two sites sucks, no support for tablets
  • Mar 2013: responsive design, bootstrap

Libraries don’t hate library users!

  • start with something that you would enjoy using

Slides

Google Analytics, Event Tracking and Discovery Tools

  • Emily Lynema, North Carolina State University Libraries
  • Adam Constabaris, North Carolina State University Libraries

How to track in-page events. Decide which events to track, push to Google.

Event Tracking Use Cases

  • hidden or externally AJAX events e.g. facets, tabs
  • internal links that occur in multiple places e.g. request item
  • external links

Examples

  • Catalog: click on tabs twice as much as everything else; full text used a lot; browse graphical < text because of placement; about half request item even though in 2 different places
  • Summon: trying to track what they could track. Paging more popular than facets

Implementation

  • GA API script
  • jQuery API
  • HTML5 Data Attributes: data-* for use by scripts
  • decide what to track
  • basic technique
  • Summon gets harder. Have to get it in the code. more selectors

Debugging & Testing

  • set up safety net first
  • know the debugger
  • use the GA debug
  • test a lot

Actions speak louder than words: Analyzing large-scale query logs to improve the research experience

  • Raman Chandrasekar, Serials Solutions
  • Susan Price, Serials Solutions

Single unified index for all the items from all libraries’ collections.

RMF Goals

  • observe and log user actions e.g. queries, filters, click patterns
  • compute quality of search results e.g. user behaviour
  • analyze data to improve search results and enhance research experience

Data-Driven Documents: Visualizing library data with D3.js

  • Bret Davidson, North Carolina State University Libraries

Slides and resources

Why D3?

  • uses technologies that you already know
  • capable library – pre-built path generations, well maintained etc.
  • community – documentation, training available
  • might not because of learning curve, and don’t need something this complex

Examples

  • suma – space assessment toolkit
  • show visualization real time, tables, and CSV file

HTML5 Video Now!

  • Jason Ronallo, North Carolina State University Libraries

Yes! Also, slides/presentation.

Here’s Why

  • Flash video cannot be run on most mobile/tablets

How it Works

  • uses video HTML tag
  • use simple fallback – download if can’t view
  • problem: browsers cannot decide on single codec to use; codec war
  • solution: multiple sources: mp4, webm
  • use poster attribute as “screenshot” and don’t have to download video right away
  • add type attribute to say which format to use; can be very explicit
  • only one video per page please!
  • properties exposed in JavaScript
  • can add custom controls, more info for users
  • events that you can listen for e.g. timeupdate to update time in a video; update wording e.g. which floor
  • analytics: play, pause, seek, ended
  • can do visualization of engagement
  • can style with CSS
  • track for subtitles

Polyfills and Advantages

  • provide video controls
  • flash fallback
  • progressive download and range requests

Future of Media on the Web

  • DRM looks to be coming
  • Popcornjs – can do annotation
  • Web Audio API – mix audio, filters, etc.
baby and mother owl
Breakout Time

Code4lib Day 2: How People Search the Library from a Single Search Box

by Cory Lown, North Carolina State University

While there is only one search box, typically there are multiple tabs, which is especially true of academic libraries.

  • 73% of searches from the home page start from the default tab
  • which was actually opposite of usability tests

Home grown federated search includes:

  • catalog
  • articles
  • journals
  • databases
  • best bets (60 hand crafted links based on most frequent queries e.g. Web of Science)
  • spelling suggestions
  • loaded links
  • FAQs
  • smart subjects

Show top 3-4 results with link to full interface.

Search Stats

From Fall 2010 and Spring 2011, ~739k searches 655k click-throughs

By section:

  • 7.8% best bets (sounds very little, but actually a lot for 60 links)
  • 41.5% articles, 35.2% books and media, 5.5% journals, ~10% everything else
  • 23% looking for other things, e.g. library website
  • for articles: 70% first 3 results, other 30% see all results
  • trends of catalogue use is fairly stable, but articles peaks at the end of term

How to you make use of these results?

Top search terms are fairly stable over time. You can make the top queries work well for people (~37k) by using the best bets.

Single/default search signals that our search tools will just work.

It’s important to consider what the default search box doesn’t do, and doubly important to rescue people when they hit that point.

Dynamic results drive traffic. When putting few actual results, the use of the catalogue for books went up a lot compared to suggesting to use the catalogue.

Collecting Data

Custom log is being used right now by tracking searches (timestamp, action, query, referrer URL) and tracking click-throughs. An alternative might be to use Google Analytics.

For more, see the slides below or read the C&RL Article Preprint.

Code4lib Day 2: Discovering Digital Library User Behavior with Google Analytics

by Kirk Hess, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Why Google Analytics?

  • free
  • JavaScript based
  • small tracking image (visible via Firebug) = mostly users not bots
  • works across domains
  • easy to integrate with existing system
  • API

Some useful things in the interface:

  • heat map
  • content drill down – click on page and see where users went from there
  • visitor flow
  • events

Export Data Using API

  • Analytics API
  • Java or Javascript (assuming, anything actually)
  • export any field into a database for further analysis (in this case MySQL db)

Analyze Data

  • Which items are popular?
  • How many time was an item viewed?
  • Downloaded?
  • Effective collection size – see if people seeing/using
  • found typically, many things are not popular
  • discover a lot of other things about users

Next Steps

  • found, need to change site design
  • change search weighting
    • allow users to sort by popularity (based on previous data)
    • recommender system – think Amazon
  • add new tracking/new repositories
  • analyze webstats – hard to look at direct access

Moving away from JavaScript based since a lot of mobile devices don’t have it.

The event analysis code has been posted on github and adding events to link code will be added later to his Github account.