Bryan Eisenberg pointed out some research on his blog yesterday that I found interesting. It’s a quick survey designed around usability issues with your results then compared to the 20 thousand plus other survey attendees. There were only two items where I hadn’t gone with the majority, but those two were surprising and it just goes to show that no matter how good at this stuff you think you are, you are probably wrong! It’s why this kind of research is so interesting.
Steve is a well known analytics specialist, author and speaker. A pioneer since 2002, he established one of the first European web analytics consultancies (Aboavista), later acquired by Satama (now Trainers’ House) in 2006. In 2008 he wrote his first book Cult Of Analytics published on May 14th 2009. He currently serves as CEO at Quru and has presented and keynoted web analytics topics across Europe. These include The Internet Marketing Conference (Stockholm), The Search Engine strategies (Stockholm), IIH (Copenhagen), the IAB Finland (Helsinki), Media Plaza (Amsterdam), Design For Conversion (Amsterdam) The eMetrics Summit (London, Munich, Stockholm), Divia (Helsinki) in addition to sitting on dozens of panels.
Don’t think you chose the wrong one just because you didn’t vote with the majority. I was going to say something in my post but decided to hold off hoping someone like you đŸ˜‰ would come to this conclusion as well. Let me guess, one of them was the navigation the roll over versus the two rows? Don’t forget there is always survey bias. Ask yourself who is most likely to have taken this research. Is it designers and technical folk or people like you and me.
The rollover navigation (drop down) was something I expected to see scored lower than it was. What was surprising was the amount of people (75%) who voted in favor of the drop down menu as I recall.
You may be right about the audience, and certainly I’ve seen poor results in drop downs in analytics tests I’ve done. However the sample size (if it’s a true fiugure) does seem good.