Computer Empathy
- Article 17 of 25
- Infoconomist, May 2002
Companies are employing psychology profiling techniques to gain better insight into computer users.
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The desire to track the actions and reactions of visitors to web sites has led to a burgeoning market in web analytics software. Analysts at Aberdeen Group say the market is tripling in size each year and will be worth €4.5 billion by 2004.
The software is, in fact, relatively simple. Web analytics analyses web server logs to determine which pages visitors look at, how long they look at them, how often they come back, where they go next and what they request from the site – a technique known as 'clickstream analysis'.
That information can signal to companies when and where they need to modify the construction and/or content of their site. The goal, of course, is to hold onto visitors for longer and, more importantly, make them buy more. But while web analytics software can pinpoint when a visitor leaves, the current technology can't offer any guidance on why or suggest what may have prevented it.
A number of vendors are, therefore, working on a new offshoot of web analytics that promises to offer a better view of visitor psychology – the why behind the what – by employing psychological profiling techniques similar to those used in criminal investigations. By studying how visitors interact with a site over time, they argue, web site operators can build up a much more meaningful profile of their visitors.
Building a profile
One such vendor is UK-based Applied Psychology Research (APR). At the heart of the company's software is technology devised by the company's founder and chief technology officer, Daniel Brown, while he was a psychology researcher.
What is different about APR's approach, says Brown, is that its software uses profiling techniques to make generalisations about people that apply over time and with different levels of confidence. Not only do you need to capture some relatively straightforward and specific information about a person, such as what they say they want in a typical search enquiry, he says, but it is also important to build a profile of a person in terms of knowing the sort of thing that they want, rather than a specific, one-time example. “The aim is to dig deeper into customer behaviour,” he says.
Site Intelligence and its UK-based competitor, NCorp, are touting a similar solution, using both clickstream and search engine analysis to observe/predict the interactions of web site visitors. For example, UK car magazine Auto Trader uses NCorp's Ijen software on its web site to understand what is important to individual customers by analysing the searches that customers make and the results that appear to interest them. “We can find out if people are price-sensitive or if they prefer prestige German cars, for instance,” suggests NCorp CEO Nick Bidmead.
Davisor, a company based in Espoo, Finland, meanwhile, offers a Java-based profiling system for inclusion in other developers' software. It uses natural language processing, probability techniques and database classifications to create profiles of people viewing specific documents. But it also takes account of how much 'interest' the visitor seems to show in the document.
But does it work?
The profiles created by these programs can create good predictive models of future visitor behaviour. They also have the advantage of being anonymous – something that will appeal to privacy advocates.
Profiling – which does not require any knowledge of personal data other than the most general kinds, such as gender or age – is a far less worrying idea for the average consumer and far less likely to clash with European privacy laws. As APR's Brown muses: “Do I have a right to see not just what data a business has about me, but what it thinks of me? It's an interesting philosophical question.”
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