Speaking

Need someone to speak about how you can learn about your users with web analytics? Want to hear about how you can actually measure some of that UX activity you just did? I can help you with that. Contact me at mike at michael-beasley.net.

Here are some of my previous speaking engagements.

Put Humans at the Center of Design

Tuesday, March 22, 2016, TEDxYDL

There are a lot of things in this world—websites, apps, gadgets,
paperwork, and more—that’s really hard to use. It’s not your fault if
you have a hard time using them. They should have been designed
better! Michael Beasley discusses the importance of designing
technology and services around human needs and capabilities, and how
people are doing just that.

Web Analytics for User Experience

Tuesday, February 9, 2016, ConveyUX
Wednesday, June 3 and Friday, June 5, 2015, UX Lisbon
Web analytics are an important part of the user research toolkit. This source of quantitative data can help us find problem areas to investigate through other means or provide more context for other data sources. When you bring together data from web analytics, interviews, usability testing, and other sources, you can form a more complete picture of what your users are doing.

This workshop will give you a solid foundation and starting point for using web analytics. We’ll look at some of the key ways UX people can use the data to understand user behavior. Most of the examples in this workshop will use Google Analytics, but what you learn will apply to whatever analytics tool your organization uses.

Topics in this workshop include:

• How to infer intent from the way users get to websites
• How to analyze the paths users take through their websites
• The basics of segmenting usage data to focus on just the right users
• How to understand quantitative data

In this workshop, you’ll practice interpreting real-world examples of data. This workshop is for people with little or no web analytics experience. Access to web analytics data is not required, but will help make the concepts in this workshop more meaningful.

Bringing Together User Experience and Web Analytics

Tuesday, March 25, 2014, New York City UXPA
Do you need to quickly get data about how users move through your website? What they’re searching for and what they find? “Hard numbers” to convince stakeholders that a problem is worth solving? This talk discussed why web analytics should be an important tool for user experience professionals to add to their toolkit.

Web analytics gives us access to data about what all of our users are doing. When we pair those data with qualitative observations, we can tell powerful stories about users’ behavior. Web analytics can help us communicate our findings and our value to stakeholders, test the effectiveness of designs, and discover problem areas in websites and apps.

This talk addressed questions like:

• Why should a user experience professional learn to use web analytics?
• How does web analytics change how user experience works?
• How do UX needs differ from how web analytics specialists approach analytics?
• This talk is geared toward user experience professionals with little or no experience with web analytics, and for web analytics specialists who want to learn more about how to work with UX people.

Video: https://vimeo.com/90276122

Categorizing and Characterizing User Needs By What They Search For

Friday, July 13 2013, UXPA 2013

Analyzing the phrases your users search for can give you valuable insights, but simply looking at the handful of most common search queries can be misleading. This talk covers a practical approach to analyzing a large set of search keywords, categorizing them according to their meaning through an iterative approach, and then characterizing the behavior of the users that fit into the categories you discover. We will discuss process, ways to interpret common patterns in search queries, and how to interpret some high level site usage metrics to understand how the different categories of users interact with your site differently.

Categorizing Search Terms to Gain Insight Into Users’ Information Needs and Behavior

Tuesday, July 9 2013, UXPA 2013

Analyzing what your users search for can give you valuable insights, but simply looking at the most common keywords can be misleading. This tutorial teaches attendees a practical approach to analyzing a large set of keywords, categorizing them according to their meaning through an iterative approach, and then characterizing the behavior of the users that fit into the categories you discover. We will discuss process, ways to interpret common patterns in search queries, and how to interpret some metrics to understand how the different categories of users interact with your site differently

Measuring How People Use Your Pages with Web Analytics

Friday, September 7 2012, Plain Talk in Complex Times 2012

Is your site getting through to your users? How to the people coming to your site consume the information there? Web analytics tools can give you insight into what pages people visit, how long they spend there, and what they do next. This talk briefly introduced how web analytics works and how people use these tools before moving on to a brief tour of how to look at data in Google Analytics.

 

Finding the Right Things to Measure with Web Analytics

Wednesday, June 6 2012, UPA 2012

As a user experience professional, how can you use web analytics data to measure how well a site works for users and show the effectiveness of your work? This presentation describes a method for cutting through the complexity of web analytics by finding a way to link business goals to users’ tasks and then to specific, measurable behavior in analytics. This will make web analytics more useful to you and help you communicate more effectively with business stakeholders.

There are a wide variety of metrics available to you, from pageviews to bounce rate and more, and they are open to interpretation with regard to user motives. That’s where the concept of analytics goals comes into play, by giving you a way to easily measure how many users are performing certain actions.

It is essential to isolate specific actions that users could only have completed intentionally, ones where you can be reasonably sure they are fulfilling their own goals (and the business’ goals). This talk will discuss an approach to eliciting specific actions that are relevant to users and measurable with web analytics, and therefore appropriate to evaluating the usability of a website.

This presentation will be grounded in real-world examples. It is geared toward people familiar with analytics, but it will be understandable for the analytics-curious, with just enough of an introduction to web analytics to provide context.

Attendees at this session will:

• Understand what can be measured with web analytics and what cannot be measured
• Choose measurable user behavior that reflects the usability of a
  website as well as business goals

Using Google Analytics for User Experience (Half Day Tutorial)

Friday, June 8 2012, at UPA 2012

This tutorial, for experienced UX professionals, introduced web analytics and covered basic and moderately advanced techniques for analyzing user behavior using Google Analytics. Participants learned how to analyze user demographics and technological profile, how they got to your website, and how they navigate  websites through practical examples and exercises.

 

Web Analytics for User Experience

October 10, 2011, Internet User Experience

Web analytics is a valuable tool for user experience professionals. The quantitative data from web analytics can help us tie our UX work to measurable goals that are meaningful to business stakeholders. We can use the data to measure whether our work is successful, to easily keep an eye on how the website is working for users, and a way to talk about our work with stakeholders. It is In this half day tutorial, Mike Beasley will introduce you to basic concepts in web analytics and how to use Google Analytics, and how to use web analytics for user experience work.

Participants will learn about:

• Common metrics (in other words, what can you measure)
• Choose what to measure and why
• Finding out how effective your website is
• How to measure engagement (and what this means)
• How to learn more about your users
• Running experiments to see how new designs work

You will get hands-on experience with Google Analytics, so please bring a laptop. This tutorial is aimed at novices. You can come with no experience with web analytics at all, but you’ll probably get the most out of it if you’ve looked at analytics, played around for a few minutes, and realized that you’ve got a lot to learn. User experience practitioners and anyone else that wants to try to measure the user experience with analytics will get the most out of this tutorial.

 

Design+Business July Workshop: Google Analytics

July 22, 2010, Detroit AIGA

How can you ensure that your website is working for its users and delivering on business goals? Web analytics is one of the ways! Mike Beasley, user experience analyst at Pure Visibility, will discuss how you can use analytics to measure the effectiveness of your site, analyze user behavior, help you make decisions about how to improve it, and test your designs.

This talk with focus on Google Analytics, a free and relatively easy-to-use web analytics tool, but the principles will be the same no matter what analytics tool you may work with. You will leave this talk with knowledge of how to communicate with business leaders, sales and marketing, and IT about how web analytics can help you improve your site, as well a foundation for starting to use it to do analysis.

No Google Analytics experience is required, but you will get the most out of this talk if you have access to a Google Analytics account and a laptop so you can follow along.

What Makes an Effective User Experience Professional and Team: The UX Practitioner Perspectives

February 23, 2010, Michigan UPA

The Michigan chapters of UPA and CHI (currently in formation), in conjunction with the University of Michigan School of Information Career Development Office and Student CHI Chapter, invite you to a very special evening networking and panel session. Five industry UX practitioners will give short position presentations on the skills that make a successful practitioner and team. This will be followed by panel and audience Q&A discussion,and then a networking reception. Come to network, learn, and position/reposition yourself for success in this exciting field.

LEARN what user experience industry professionals are saying about what it takes to succeed in the field.  Make sure you are developing the skills and competencies that will grow your effectiveness, currency, and marketability.

Introduction to Usability: An Interactive Discussion

February 10, 2009, Michigan UPA
If you are interested in learning the basics and benefits of user centered design and how to introduce it into your organization, then Introduction to User Centered Design is your chance! Mike Beasley, User Experiologist at Pure Visibility and the president of the Michigan UPA, and Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus, Owner and Principal of UsableWorld, will lead a discussion that gives you the opportunity to pose your questions to a couple of user experience experts. You can learn about such things as:

• What IS Usability? Can you touch it? Can you measure it?
• How can you incorporate it into your organization?
• “Usability,” “User Experience,” “Human Factors,” “Information Architecture?” What’s the deal with all these names?
• What can my website analytics tell me about the usability of my site?
• How you can use user tasks and goals to organize your website.

After an introduction to the basics of usability, they will open the floor to questions. You will set the agenda for this discussion through the questions you bring, so come prepared!