The true purpose of usability is to make money through your site by converting visitors to customers, this in turn makes the designer money as their clients are well chuffed and the cycle of client recommendations gathers momentum. Alan goes on to say that the three characteristics of good usability are obvious, obvious, obvious and that usability trumps features every time.

The below slideshare presentation contains an audio track.

One of the silly limitations in Google Analytics has been their decision to restrict you to setting a mere 4 goals per profile. An obvious work around was to create sub-profiles of your main analytics profile and go crazy with as many goals to your heart’s content. Thankfully Google have removed this restriction and as of today they are rocking a 20 goal limit on profiles!

Google Analytics today introduced a few very tasty “engagement goals that allow you to measure user engagement and branding success on your site”. They have also tackled the problem of tracking mobile visitors to your site that don’t have JavaScript enabled. Finally, another really exciting feature coming soon is the addition of Business Intelligence to Google Analytics.

Google have introduced time based goals. These goals give an indication of how long visitors are spending on a page. For example, you can setup a goal conversion of < 2 minutes on a certain page in an attempt to measure its appeal or success. If the page in question has content that takes approximately 4 minutes to read then what does it mean when more than 80% of your visitors are on that page for less than 2 minutes? Does it mean that your content is convoluted? Does it mean that that your content is so good that the visitors got their info and bounced?

What if you have setup a time based goal conversion that shows that visitors to your site are spending far too long on a page? Should you make amendments to your content? Make your site’s content more navigable?

Like anything you’re trying to measure, be sure to hook into as many data sources as possible to understand your visitors. For the two above examples you should look to add more data to the mix by digging down further and coupling your time based goals with things like bounce rates, keyword referrals, and visitor paths.

Another cool addition to the goals feature of Google Analytics is Pageview based goals. These guys gather analysis on when a visitor exceeds a certain number of pages. Very handy for tracking your visitors and figuring how how compelling your site content is to them. Check out Justin Cutroni’s post on New Google Analytics Goals for a more through overview of the other goal additions to Google Analytics.

It’s also fantastic to see that Google Analytics can now track virtually every mobile website and mobile device whether or not the device is able to run JavaScript or not. The only restriction is that you have to add a server side snippet of code to your site. But it’s a worthy hurdle to jump to cover all visitor bases.

And finally, the best for last:

“We’re launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.”

Check out his video for more info on the soon to come intelligence engine. Really exciting stuff for all of us analytics nerds.

Oh, and in other Google Analytics news, I’m now a Google Analytics Qualified Individual having passed my exam last Sunday.

There are a few reasons for my switch:

• I wanted to use a ‘proper’ CMS rather than a blog with hacks to look like a CMS
• I want to get exposure to another platform for creating content
• I want to test out Frog CMS
• It’s my blog, er… I mean site, and I’ll do what I want! M’kk?

So you hate Wordpress now then? Eh?

Nope. I still love Wordpress and I use it on a LOT of websites. Wordpress is by far the best platform for blogging.

So now you love Frog and you’re going to annoy me until I make the switch too?

Nah. Overall I am very impressed with Frog so far but there are things that I am already concerned about. For example, the rich text editor in the backend. It’s a bit odd and breaks conventions.

I’ll post a few articles (not blog posts) about my encounters with Frog in the coming days and weeks.

On Thursday night, out of nowhere, a crack on the screen of my Nokia E65 yielded my phone completely and utterly borked.

I was incommunicado… until I got setup with a new phone courtesy of Damien (thanks). While having a new phone was great, there was one problem. The phone numbers I had on my E65 didn’t get carried over to the new phone. I’m not sure why, but all new Nokia phones seem to save your contacts on the actual phone rather than the SIM card. And because I couldn’t access my damaged E65 I had no way of even accessing my 200 or so contacts. Not good!

I visited Meteor, my phone provider, yesterday to ask if they have a system whereby they can retrieve contacts from damaged phones. No, was the answer. I was surprised. The Meteor employee said that no such thing existed. Mmm. :/

Surely there must be some way of connecting your phone via the provided USB cable to your computer and then backup your contacts and various other pieces of phone data? What are my options, if any?

I decided a few months ago to re-vamp my blog. I have moved all the posts that were on here over to cormac.wordpress.com to serve as an archive and I’m going to start from fresh again. I have a good few things to tidy up on here, including finishing off this theme, but bear with me while I get my house in order in the coming days.

Thanks, and apologies about the lack of postings.

Cormac