I had an interesting experience about a month ago when I partnered with a UX resource on my team and presented a heuristic review for one of our clients, looking at their product pages and what could be done to improve them. It was a quick project, about 40 hours in total, but my UX resource gave some very good insight to what could be fixed. A few of the suggestions he made were items I had thought of as well, but many I hadn’t. For the ones that I had thought of, because UX isn’t my background and I sometimes have an uneasy time telling what would work or not, I tend to not add them in my recommendations. A lot of what was said was very tactical and actionable, and items like that would be great to include in an analytics analysis.
I had the idea of creating a brown bag series with the Analytics and UX team where each session a member of the analytics group would partner with a UX person ahead of time and do a little prep-work on a current analytics-clients website, discussing goals, objectives etc… Then during the session, the pair would talk through the site, as a mini-review, giving advice on what could be done to help improve the goals. I believe this will be a great way for the analytics group to see what UX does, and vice-versa, because it applies to their specific-clients work. The analysts can then take the pointers from the session, apply it to the data, and make recommendations based on that because they will feel more confident in what they are suggesting.
I'm going to be setting up the first sessions in a few weeks, I'll let you know how they go...
