1. Who are you and what do you do?
I’m Marko Hurst and I lead the analytics practice, the Web Insights Group, at Roundarch, a UX & Technology consulting firm in NYC. My goal on any given project is to align business goals (strategy) with execution and then ensure those goals are met or exceeded through various optimization techniques using web analytics &/or business intelligence platforms. In my “spare time” I also blog about analytics @ Marko Hurst.com, work/play with artificial intelligence, and train in mixed martial arts (MMA).
2. Can you explain analytics to us in a way that my diverse group of readers can understand?
Sure, I hope some potential clients read your blog then as too. The practice of Web Analytics, like many things in the technology world, are both Art & Science, just heavily weighted in Science. Traditionally, web analytics is thought of and often practiced by simply the tracking of user data across a website. These would include site metrics such as Pageviews, Bounce Rates, Unique Visitors, etc. Some of the much cooler and more useful things I can track are: where users actually clicked on a screen, if a user scrolled down a page and how far, based upon specific user actions I can trigger different content or screen elements to change (Visitor Segmentation), and with some work and the right tools I can (mostly) follow a user’s path from start to finish on a website.
At the end of the day the purpose of whatever data you are looking at, or ignoring, is to provide you and your business with some type of action, actionable insights, that you can use to further and better you business. For instance: Does a 98% Bounce Rate on your website mean something is wrong? First of all, looking at a single metric, Bounce Rate, as a single metric with no context or by itself is where many people get into trouble. That being said, if that 98% is on your homepage or a campaign landing page, that is a strong indication that something is probably very wrong. Yet if that number is on a Confirmation/Thank You Page where it’s a natural exit point for a user to leave your website, then it’s a good thing. What I just described is called Analysis, which requires human intervention. As opposed to having the tool regurgitate the data back out that it just took in, that Reporting. Notice the subtle yet very distinct difference. One leads you to actions you can take to improve your business, the other is a mind-numbing activity that rarely if ever provides any value.
3.You’re also working on a book I hear, can you tell me more about that?
I’d love to. I’m co-authoring a book with Lou Rosenfeld, Site Search Analytics: Conversations With Your Customers, due out in 2009, which the talk on the street has it pre-selected to be on the New York Times best Seller list (just kidding). The book takes a look at one of the most often forgotten and useful pieces of information that is available to the UX and Analytics community – your customer’s search queries. Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.
The book of course teaches UX professionals, especially those without mathematics degrees, various techniques and methods of how to analyze and synthesize large data sets to improve your design, information architecture, marketing, & even functionality. It also teaches a little about how search engines work and how to design &/or work around them to produce better search results.
The other part of the book, which Lou & I find the most important aspect is what actually brought us together to write this book in the first place. We see a gap in the UX world in that very few practitioners know how to use or can even understand large data sets, in addition UX is in large part if not solely in qualitative measures and methods. The exact opposite is true for web analytics. It is nearly entirely based on quantitative measures, and most analyst while they may understand qualitative data, generally scoff at it since it’s not statistically relevant. We see a future where these worlds collide and complement each other on many levels are we’re trying to bring these practices closer together.
4. Tell us a bit about the Netflix contest you’re working on?
Two years ago today NetFlix announced a contest that will run for four years. What they want to do is improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences via their recommendation engine. The prize itself has a yearly prize of $50,000 and a $1million prize to whoever can increase their current engine by 10% or more. Two years later with nearly 40,000 different registered teams the best algorithm is still a little under 10%.
I’ve always been kind of a math junkie, so a friend of mine who’s a developer got together of course to have a go at it. Together our team is “Muay Thai Mathematics”. For a two man team that doesn’t just spend all day working at this we were doing decent in the beginning, but once the results began to get consistently higher we’ve fallen off. The fun part is that most teams are pretty open about the methods they use and will help you with to some degree of disclosure. The other and the personally more fun part is working with and developing hybrid machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithms.
5. I hear you are also a avid muay thai fighter. Can you tell us about that? Do you think your martial arts training compliments your line of work and vice versa?
I had taken martial arts as a kid, but when I saw my first Muay Thai (Thai Boxing) fight and was instantly hooked, it became an obsession. Fighting got into my blood and there was nothing else I wanted to do and within a year I began competing in the amateur circuit until l I joined the US Marine Corps several years later. When I got out I took up Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). I don’t compete anymore, but wherever I move I always find a studio that trains professional fighters to go “play “ with and keep in great shape. For anyone whose has never done Muay Thai before, it is not for the light of heart. It is very brutal, it punishes your body, and is simply unforgiving once you step in the ring. For those who think you can do it I encourage you to try, but by comparison my three months of Marine Corps Boot Camp was physically easy, and Marine Boot Camp is no joke.
As far as how it influences my life and work I like to describe it like this…
Western thinking is to do things in a line, i.e. very methodical, linear, and logical, we can thank the Greek philosophers for that. Asian thinking on the other hand, is to do things in a circle, i.e. understand the whole picture, see all the parts, know how they all work together in balance, and they can thank Confucius. I recognize and use both every day, it is the ability to not just think strategically & tactically, but still move seamlessly between them . My fighting style is very technical; I love to fight guys who are bigger than me, (mostly because it embarrasses them), but it’s because big guys tend to over rely on their strength I can pick apart his weaknesses and capitalize on his mistakes. The same can be said for my work, whatever the challenge, however complex the issue is, there is always a way to solve it, always a way to make it better than it was, and you should always be improving – Kaizen. I’m not Superman, so I don’t always win and I don’t always fix every client issue, but I always learn from every experience and that is something that I bring to my practice, my work, and my life every day.
For more Marko you can follow him on Twitter and his blog
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Brainball – a battle of wits to see who can push the ball to the goal using their brain waves. The idea is you propel the ball by being relaxed. If you stress out or get excited, the ball doesn’t move. This presents a dilemma because you get excited as you push the ball forward with your brain waves. Kinda neat.
Toyota concept green cars – or what could be best described as little more than eggshells on wheels. I wouldn’t be caught dead on the roads with any of these.
The Immersadome was kind of a cool concept. It projects images onto a dome that you put over your head (like a hair dryer?) for a truly immersive experience.
I thought this was really cool: Xerox Solid Ink. In an effort to be green, Xerox has these solid ink cartridges. There’s no empty cartridge box. And what’s really cool about it is that they come in different shapes that fit the slot for each particular color. It’s kinda like a baby’s toy cuz you know, people are just too dumb to figure those things out nowadays.
Oh, and Eric Natzke’s work was on display. They also had those cool gelaskin covers for your iphone and itouch with his artwork for free. I took one.
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