14-Nov-06 8:00 PM  CST  

Measuring Rich Internet Applications--Interview With Avinash Kaushik 

Interview Summary:

"Measuring Rich Internet Applications"-- How to approach measuring Ajax and Flash applications. Benefits of using rich internet applications (RIAs). Limitations of traditional analytics packages for RIAs. Interview with Avinash Kaushik, Director Web Research and Analytics, Intuit.  (Avinash blogs on Web Research and Analytics at www.kaushik.net/avinash).  Interview date—October 25, 2006 by Wendi Malley with the WAA Research Committee. Time--39:22.

MP3 File

Time (min:sec)	Podcast Contents
0:00	Introduction
1:00	About Rich Media
2:30	Q: Which rich media applications do you use?—javascript, flash, ajax, rss, blogs
3:50	Q: How do you implement tracking for ajax/flash applications? Google maps and GMail are built on Ajax. Using Flash shopping cart application instead of 4 step process. Zillow.com also an example of RIA.
5:50	Implementation: Intuit partners with allurent.com for flash checkout experience
6:24	Experimented with Ajax navigational elements and merchandising. Intuit believes in customer driven innovation. Using RIA to solve customer problems.
7:20	Difficulties with using conventional metrics to track RIA. Page is dead. Using two methods for data collection—page tagging and ATG event logging
9:20	Q: How did you define success of these events? With RIA, pages are smart. Need to ask, Why are we creating this experience. What facets of the customer experience are we trying to improve? ID the core business events in this experience. How many people entered this experience? How many completed, what was the outcome?
12:05	Intuit integrated survey data with RIA data. Define needs up front, build the hooks to get the data, integrate data with voice of the customer
13:00	Q: What are some examples of KPIs which define success of these applications? Task completion is great KPI. For people that use the RIA, what is the impact on conversion rate?
14:40	Checkout funnel RIA. What was the impact on customer satisfaction if using RIA?
15:40	Q: How do you integrate new RIA metrics with the rest of the site metrics? You want to extend the current data capture and data analysis to also measure new RIA. Example, do different people have different success rates with your RIA? Need to integrate sources of traffic with RIA. Not everyone is ready for RIA.
19:15	Q: How much time should be spent on measuring RIA? It depends on your sophistication. We spent more time in planning than in developing the application. Over time it will be faster. RIA are hard to update, maintain once they are launched.
21:45	Plan on testing. AB testing of RIA showed the HTML version performed better than the rich application in one case.
22:55	Q: Were there any limitations of your tools or things you wanted to measure but couldn’t? We went into measuring these applications with the mindset that traditional analytics tools wouldn’t apply to rich experience. Pages are dead. What is a path anyway? Left traditional analytics metrics behind.
24:50	Intuit has “Critical Few” mindset. What are the most important metrics to measure success? Keep things simple, focus on the critical few.
26:30	Q: Were you using current tools to measure the RIA or did you step outside the box? For data capture we used tages and ATG event logging. To analyze the data, we did custom work to slice/dice the data.
28:20	Q: Why use RIA on the site? What is the business value of RIA? Pages are dumb. RIA/Ajax allows companies to bring the interactivity of desktop applications to the web. It makes it easy to complete a task, are intuitive. People have a richer experience.
31:15	Q: Why did HTML win over the rich application in your test? We are not our customer. We embedded so much “coolness” in the RIA that it wasn’t intuitive. Business event data would not have shown the problem, but voice of the customer did. Are customers ready? Do they have the bandwidth? Only way to be successful is to test.
33:50	Have to have culture that wants to understand customers and customer experience. Yahoo has Ajax home page that is so cool, smart yet felt like a static home page.
35:30	Q: What is the impact to the business for implementing RIA? Customer comes to the site for many reasons. Building RIA for task completion and customer satisfaction. When the RIA is done well, customer satisfaction goes up and more people make it through the process. Zillow.com is dominant because of their rich experience

 

Research Committee Project: Measuring New Media

In the 2005 Membership Survey, WAA members expressed a strong interest in better understanding analytics best practices. This Research Committee project, Measuring New Media, tackles the impact new media and technologies (Ajax, flash, RSS, blogs, streaming media, podcasts) are having on our sites and on our analytics. Measuring New Media interviews experienced analysts to uncover best practices and lessons learned with these new media technologies. Presented in podcast form, Measuring New Media's interviews address questions as:

• Can we determine the business impact of new media?
  
• Can we determine adoption/operational performance?
• Are new media metrics being integrated into existing site metrics, and how?
• What measurement challenges do analysts face with these emerging technologies?

 

For additional information on this Best Practices article, please contact:

Jim Humphrys
(410) 506-4559

Source: Web Analytics Association

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