Jeremy Streich: Web Applications Develoer, UW-Milwaukee

The modern web design fashion is to whole sale redesign when things get stale. Marketing “refreshes” are par for course when people begin talking about “brand identity.” That said, wholesale redesign of site based solely on the opinion of the highest paid person in the room’s opinion is fool hearty and can cost visitors, enrollments, and graduating seniors. We’re moving towards data driven design and user experience, as much as possible. Starting with setting measurable goals and simple card sorts all the way through to split and multi-variant testing to improve conversions. Motion in this direction is slow, because of constraints of time, people, politics, and last minute projects. We haven’t been able to use all our tools on a single project yet, but we hope to eventually make it standard operating procedure. We, as an industry and we as development team, started with using analytics to pat ourselves on the back, and give useless impressive looking numbers to people writing grants and reports. This was and is the most common use of web statistics. A raw number like the number of visitors who visit any site is useless without context, a comparison, a measuring stick, or even a goal to reach. Streich will talk about where analytics started, where we are now, how we got there, and where we want to go. What we have in our favor, what obstacles we overcame, and where we are still fighting ahead.