The UX Libraries Vancouver Group had a presentation on Google Analytics and a few lightning talks. Continue reading “UX Libraries Meetup: Notes on Google Analytics Talk and Lightning Talks”
Tag: Google Analytics
LibTechConf 2014: Connecting the Clicks
Presneted by Ben Durrant
Our Patrons are Confused! Continue reading “LibTechConf 2014: Connecting the Clicks”
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
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
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.
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.