(Book Review) Researching UX: Analytics, 1st Edition

Overview

Review Published: July, 2018.

From author, UX designer, and analytics consultant Luke Hay comes a how-to guide for using analytics in your UX design projects.

From explaining the importance of analytics in UX projects, to providing specific tools and techniques for gathering data, this book serves as an extensive guide for optimizing the user-experience of any existing digital product.

Rating:

4.5 / 5

(Great Content, Presentation is Engaging)

What does this score mean?

Difficulty:

Intermediate to Advanced (Everything is well explained, but content is quite technical).

Length:

176 pages.

Where to Buy It:

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What's Good

A comprehensive guide; from overall goals to specific technical considerations, this book covers a lot of ground and is one of the most comprehensive I’ve read on the subject of using analytics in UX design efforts.
Worthwhile resources; in addition to including various follow-up articles articles (included in the text) and a glossary of terms, this book includes detailed information on the various analytics suites available and some examination of how to use the most critical features (mainly for Google Analytics).
Well-organized & approachable; while there are a lot of technical terms used, the author explains them comprehensively while keeping a conversational tone, and each main section is broken down into digestible sub-sections that are handy later on for quick referencing.

What Can Be Improved

Needs a broader conceptual framework; while the specifics of a UX analytics approach are covered in fantastic detail, the book does miss discussing the overall strategic approaches you could use to establish the goals you want to measure (check out “UX Strategy” and Google’s HEART framework for helpful resources in this area).

The Bottom Line

Crucial for UX optimization; this is an essential guide for understanding how to set up, measure, and validate analytics findings when you need to improve the user-experience of an existing solution.
Best for intermediate-to-advanced UX designers; this book is mainly for UX team leads (or anyone spear-heading a product optimization effort), and while beginners will definitely get something out of this, it’s probably best for them to wait until they have a strong understanding of UX strategies and practices first.
A “must buy” for UX & product leadership; this book is a key resource for anyone looking to guide their product team through a complex design optimization project, and for around $29 it’s hard to see this as anything but a steal.