What Web Analysts Can Do for Human-Computer Interaction?

Fostered by the emergence of web technologies and of new streams like ubiquitous computing, social media or mobile technologies, a lot of attention has been directed to the field of Web Analytics in order to learn about technology usage behavior of end-users, such as customers or employees of enterprises. Going beyond the scope of online marketing and business intelligence, Web Analysts can be of relevance for typical Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) activities, i.e. designing user interfaces for new business software or evaluating the usability of an existing solution. Thus, this paper aims at elaborating the usefulness of Web Analytics for the HCI domain. Therefore, we conducted an empirical study in order to gather working tasks and professional competencies of Web Analysts by analyzing international job advertisements. Consequently, we draw conclusions on how Web Analysts can support HCI activities with regard to this task and competence profile. It shows that Web Analysts can be of use in HCI practice, i.e. within the usability engineering lifecycle, in HCI research, e.g. for typical design science approaches, and whenever users interact with web-based software applications. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.