Data is only half the story

Here at Rypple we’re all about improving. Of course we are; our mission (and service) is all about helping you to improve.   We want you to get the feedback you need from the people you trust in order to improve professionally and personally.

Part of the Rypple philosophy is that getting better is a process, not an event.  Which means: get better a small bit at a time, constantly.

This idea is not new.  It’s called kaizen and it means “continuous improvement” in Japanese.  Kaizen was brought to the manufacturing environment by Toyota and has since been adopted worldwide.  We think kaizen should apply to your professional approach as well.

So we follow the philosophy at Rypple.   We monitor our effectiveness constantly, and change *one* practise weekly to help us improve.

Over the past month we stepped up our analytics efforts in order to better understand how people use, interact, and behave with Rypple.  We use data to drive weekly iterative service improvements.  We started with baby steps – identifying what we want to know, matching that to what we can know ‘out of the box’ from Google Analytics, and then making sure we all have constant visibility into those metrics.   Google Analytics rocks.

But…. to me and my usability/UX background, all of this data feels a little empty and cold. It’s too heavily focused on the ‘what’ users are doing with no human insight into the ‘why’.

So we know all sorts of data about how our bounce rate is X% from the home page, our users spend Y mins on average in the application, etc. Knowing this is incredibly valuable, but knowing ‘why’ and how to address it is even more so.

Which means: while I’m submerged in the numbers and the statistics, I’m busily working away on a plan to get closer to the human element, to get the feedback I need to improve usability and the overall user experience here at Rypple. Armed with the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, we’ll be well on our way. Stay tuned.