AndyEdmonds

TheRarestWords.com is a impressive little web hack with a nice global and enthusiast artisan. The application attempts to identify the rarest words on the page.

Why would you care? First, understanding where you veer from the mainstream is quite interesting. It's a great way to find mis-spellings, people's names, and other less pedestrian rareties.

The beta of Open Office 3 is a big step for Mac users, removing the need for X11 or the aging NeoOffice port. I tried out the spreadsheet app for some basic data crunching tasks.

I was pleased with the design of the charting workflow. Click through to Flickr for the 4 image sequence. On casual inspection, it seemed a bit easier to work with than the multi-path 2003 Excel or the new 07 Excel.

We launched the Stomper Scrutinizer within the video series called Going Natural 2 back in December, and now it's time for GN3.

One of the challenges with the current complex site designs is that multiple links to the same destination tend to appear on the same page.

This does not allow you to understand how your allocation of real estate is being used without resorting to really fancy analytics packages.

To solve this problem I developed a script that upon every click, walks up the document object model (DOM) looking for a an attribute on an HTML tag of ui.

What do they have in common? Even with the recent opening of Google Website Optimizer, much like the iPhone, you still have to hack GWO to maximum value out of your testing.

Here's the problem: Google Website Optimizer restricts your understanding of the effects of your experiment to a single outcome variable, like a conversion.

Another little known gem in Google Analytics is the Time to Purchase and Visits to Purchase.

For MyWeddingFavors, where the purchase is an exceptionally meaningful one for our customers, some 40% of our sales happen on subsequent visits:
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A question on LinkedIn, now closed, asked "what are some hard to find but useful reports in GA?" While clicks to task completion is far from the ultimate metric, Google Analytics does suffer from some slightly onerous depth issues for specific data points.

Last week's SXSW panel on AB Testing: Designer Friend or Foe left me wishing for a more robust treatment of the experimental design issues around online testing. It was a great panel, and I appreciated the real world experience of the panelists, but aside from Micah, the approach was very much from a design world. This is fine, but issues came up that stats exist to solve, and the distinction between multivariate and AB testing was glossed over.

What fun! The SXSW conversation format is quite cool, though it really needs a dedicated space as our group size was limited by how far voices carried.

Drop a line in the comments if we promised to follow up on something I haven't posted. This is a work in progress, so check back if there are some empty items when you visit.

References during the chat

• Common Industry Format for usability testing, from NIST, now an ISO standard.
• Net Promoter - Would you recommend this product to others?