Reading TeaLeaf

Sorry to have been away so long. Complications of various kinds. But now I'm back, and with tea.

Have you seen TeaLeaf? It's a snazzy app that sits athwart your Web traffic, sniffing and recording every user's session. A bit disconcerting, that. But its benefits are undeniable. It stores thirty days (or more, at your discretion) of user transactions, at the user level. It aggregates them too. I've long been a proponent of continual usability checking. Our profession seems to put all its emphasis on initial design and testing, while utterly neglecting Web analytics and other red-flag functionality that can signal usability leaks. Traditional Web analytics is good, but it isn't always granular, meaning that its results are en masse, not at the level of the individual user. It's great for marketing departments, but not as good for usability concerns. TeaLeaf shows the actual user transactions - where people go, what they click, what choices they make, and whether their conversions are successful.

For example, you can lose users at any turn in the road, but especially during checkout. Many visitors drop off when money becomes an issue, and understandably so, since they had no intention of paying anyway; they're just here for the experience, or the knowledge. But others experience technical problems or usability pitfalls. TeaLeaf generates a report on who converted and who didn't, and then you can track out why the failures happened, following every user's trail.