Observing the User Experience

CHAPTER 13 Log Files and Customer Support

Much user experience research is geared toward understanding how people could experience your site or estimating how they would want to. But it’s difficult to understand how they are experiencing it. Satisfaction surveys can get at what people feel is working and not working, but people’s predictions and preferences are not good predictors of their behavior. Contextual inquiry can reveal issues in the way people use your site, but only one person at a time. Usability testing can uncover many likely problems, but suffers from the problem of projecting people’s behavior in a laboratory environment versus real life. None of these actually tell you how people are currently using the site, what problems they’re ...