Richard Light wrote:
> They don't, and of their very nature cannot, tell us anything
> useful about the informational or educational effectiveness
> of our museum web sites, nor about the enjoyment they might
> or might not bring.
I think they can, but you need to drill down to the page level and look
at things like the search terms people used to get to our sites (what
did they expect to find?), the search terms they used on our sites (what
can't they find in our navigation or information architecture?), or
dwell times on pages (which content do people stick around to read,
which objects have 'visual velcro'), etc. But this takes more effort
than skimming over diagrams and total counts, and I don't know of many
(any?) peers with the time to do this.
(More on visual velcro at http://www.aam-us.org/pubs/visualvelcro.cfm)
> Surely it's much better to acknowledge this, and use other
> mechanisms such as surveys to get the "right" information,
> than to squeeze unreliable conclusions out of the "wrong"
> information by ever-more-sophisticated analysis.
As the joke goes, 87% of statistics are meaningless/made up.
There was a useful distinction between diagnostic and reporting
statistics at the London hub workshop on Monday that can help when
thinking about the usefulness or otherwise of web stats.
cheers, Mia
Mia Ridge
Database Developer, Museum Systems Team
Museum of London Group
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London. N1 7ED
Tel: 020 7410 2205 / 020 7814 5723
Fax: 020 7600 1058
Email: [log in to unmask]
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