> User Research

Measuring Website Traffic
How best to measure web traffic for both your own site and that of competitors is a difficult to answer. Here you'll find tips as well as tools that can help you begin analyzing your web traffic and trends.

How to design effective Online Surveys
Online surveys are a great tool to find out what visitors think of your site, however their completion rates can tend to be low so how they're built and designed plays an important part of conversion. Learn more about about these surveys with some tips on how to optimize their impact.

Stakeholder Interviews- Issues and Topics for Consideration
Stakeholder Interviews- Stakeholder interviews are a good opportunity to understand the business and business goals of the website you are designing and increase the designs usability. Main topics covered and questions asked in stakeholder interviews should include business background, goals of redesign, brand information, desired features of website, details of competing sites.

Considering Edge Cases
Edge Cases- There are both pros and cons to exploring edge cases when determining your website's design. While they can reveal problems that were not apparent at first glance, they can also distract from the main goals of the design. It is best practice to avoid focusing too much on edge cases in order to ensure increase website usability.

Website Tracking Analysis
Your website's tracking logs can be a powerful way to discover design & usability problems in your website. Analysis of this data is typically most commonly used to measure the popularity of specific web pages and content. But if you're willing to do a little detective work, you can uncover "leads" on specific usability issues that may be biasing which content your users are selecting.

Web Stats, Log Analysis, and Usability
Every web server collects data that can be used to perform log analysis and generate web stats. Log analysis and web stats are generally used to measure web site performance, but are also very useful for identifying usability issues and successes. Performing log analysis and to create before and after web stats can also help to measure the success of a usability fix, or compare solutions.

Creating Personas
Personas are fictionalized portraits of typical users that are used as a design tool to figure out who your key users are, and how your product should meet their needs. They can be extremely helpful in making decisions relating to functionality, site objectives, interaction design, global navigation, and more.

Card Sorting
Card Sorting is valuable for learning how site users categorize content in their minds. This is a great first step to take before creating or revising your basic site structure. Card Sorting: A Definitive Guide will tell you most of what you need to know. You may also want to take a look at Usability.gov's quick Card Sorting FAQ.

Focus Groups
Focus groups are useful for exploring your users opinions, attitudes, and percieved needs. Usability.gov's Focus Group FAQ is a great place to start learning about them. Since focus groups were initially developed for use in marketing rather than usability, Jakob Nielsen's article on The Use and Misuse of Focus Groups is also valuable reading.

Online Surveys
Online surveys are a great way to gather general information about your users as well as specifics on key issues. Usability.gov's Online Survey FAQ is a great place to start. You may also want to check out The Role of Online Surveys in the Usability Assessment Process and some practical Web Survey Considerations.

Task Analysis
Task Analysis examines users' goals and analyzes the steps they perform to achieve them. Understanding these goals and processes (especially if the latter are not optimal) will give you insight into user needs, capabilities, and thought processes. Usability.gov provides a quick Task Analysis FAQ, and UsabilityNet provides a more in depth information on Task Analysis.