Creating an interaction analysis dashboard


Interaction analysis is looking at how visitors interact with your website or other digital property. Examples could be click through rates on rotating homepage banners, % of page scrolled, online tool/feature interaction, video play rates and pathing reports. With so many interaction possibilities being tracked and spread across multiple reports, this feels like a good opportunity to create a consolidated view in a dashboard.

Why should you bother?
Over a period of time your website can become a virtual dumping ground for the latest fad marketing trend such as "Like" and "Tweet" buttons, moreover you may have many interactive gadgets and controls but does anyone know if they're being used or is it just unnecessary clutter? By creating a dashboard dedicated to interaction you can educate your UX team on what's working and what's not. And with a data engaged design team a Digital Analyst is more likely to get buy in for proposed optimisation and experiments.



Making the dashboard
For the purpose of this example we'll be using the following software (others will do the trick too): And for our interaction analysis example we'll take Apple's homepage. As of this writing their UK homepage looks like this:


We'll be taking a screen capture of Apple's homepage and adding to our dashboard, it helps to include a visual representation of the user interface, without this the dashboard data is more challenging to interpret. In the example below I've added numeric labels with corresponding chart titles to make reviewing of the data super easy, regardless of analytic level. For some light analysis there's a country option (top left) that allows going one dimension deep. And here's what it looks like in Excel:



And that's it. Hopefully this gives you some ideas. Over a period of time you can build out a dashboard to cover important pages and funnels, some pages can take a while to fully document but the effort is worth it IMO. If you have any comments, questions or feedback please leave them below. And you can follow new posts from this blog on Twitter, Email or RSS.