Hi everyone, I'm Marko Hurst. As Lou mentioned, I'm the new co-author of the book Site Search Analytics. Currently I work at Roundarch as a UX Lead and lead the Web Insights Group, (analytics).

As I'm sure most authors would be, I'm very excited to have an opportunity to tell you about the things that keep me up at night such as climate change, our current financial crisis, and of course SSA. Fortunately for you, my rants in this blog & book will be confined to the later and more importantly how it can help you become stronger in your practice and produce better work products, whether you are Visual Designer, IA, IxD, Strategist, and even a Web Analyst.

In addition, I am of course looking forward to working with Lou, well, because he's Lou. And as he mentioned previously, I'm a "quant". Meaning that I approach about everything in and out of work in terms of mathematics & probability. Yet, my years of work in the consulting and agency world have given me a common language with him and most of you - User Experience. The interesting thing about this shared language, is that I approach almost every problem and project from almost the opposite end of the spectrum, yet I strive to end up in and around the same space that you do. It's like the difference between those that find religion and those that find a bottle - we are both trying to get the same place just through different methods. Lou, like most UX folks, is trained in or generally works with "small" data sets which are traditionally gathered via qualitative methods. While we "quant jocks" on the other hand, tend to deal with very large data sets (knowing that Excel breaks at 65,536 rows of data kind of data sets) that are gathered through web analytics, business intelligence, databases, or similar technologies. But at the end of the day our goal is the same - to produce the best and most effective User-Centered Design possible.

Like many things today the term "2.0" has gotten attached to almost everything and "Analytics 2.0" is no exception. Unlike those that are just marking hype, Analytics 2.0 has some very real shifts in how we fundamentally go about and think about doing analytics. The main difference is trying to understand the "why". What I mean by that is quant data only tells half of the story, specifically "what" a user did. It cannot tell me "why" a user did something, (user behavior), I can at best only infer their intentions. In order to understand "why" a user did something you need qual data, and the best of both worlds collide when you combine them to provide a (more) complete picture of your users.

We expect this book to give you all that need to get started and more to better understand data and improve your work products. But what would happen if we could do more than just that? What if we could start a change in the industry that was so powerful it could change how people went about doing and thinking about their work. Those might be some pretty bold questions, but I seem to remember a particular "Polar Bear" book that did just that. Instead of simply applying or borrowing a few methods from one field to the other, what if we could bring them closer together to fill in the gaps that exist in each and could show you how they truly compliment one another? What if down the road these two fields began to truly merge? What if?

I welcome you thoughts, comments,etc. on this and anything else that is keeping you up at night :)

In addition to this blog you can read a little more about me at my personal blog and an interview I just did with Pek Pongpaet.

p.s. It's not pajamas, but one my favorite t-shirts has a picture of Thomas Bayes on the back with Bayes' theorem printed across the chest. (see post). Quant Jocks Unite!