By

Andrew Nagy

Description:

As the late Steve Jobs would say, don’t listen to your customers, they don’t know what they want. Usability studies and live user analysis provide valuable feedback about your product or web site in terms of how the tool is used, but listening to the users about what they want out of the tool can result in a “whack-a-mole” scenario where you solve a problem for one user, but create new problems for other users. Analyzing usage data can provide a very different perspective on how live users actually use the tool and allow you to identify different personas and use cases. This talk will share how Serials Solutions collects and analyzes a dataset of queries and clicks generated by millions of users at hundreds of libraries around the world to find behaviors, patterns, successes and failures in the interface design and search algorithms and then how we leverage that to improve and redesign. We will share the details of our custom developed data warehouse system and how we leverage these tools to perform our analysis. We will also share with you before-and-afters that were developed based on the results of the ongoing analysis.

Andrew Nagy is a Senior Product Manager, Discovery Services at Serials Solutions. Since joining the company in 2008, he has played a key role with the development team that build and launched the Summon service. In his current role, he oversees the User Experience and Search component teams for Summon as well as it’s API.  With more than a decade of experience in web-based software engineering and product management, Andrew has managed national grant-funded software projects, developed globally adopted open source software, prototyped applications for dot-com start-ups and played a key role in the launch of the Summon service, which was awarded best-in-class from the Software and Information Industry Association. Prior to joining Serials Solutions, Andrew was a Technology Development Specialist at Villanova University, where he developed VuFind, an open source search engine for the library, a Digital Asset Management system and a multi-lingual bibliographic database. Andrew’s education includes a B.S., Information Management and Technology from Syracuse University, M.S., Computer Science and Master of Technology Management from Villanova University.