Some of you have heard me speak at a conference, I always have a deep passion and excitement when I talk about the “Trinity”. I wax and wane about it and go on and on about how fantastic the “Trinity” is.
But it took a comment from Lisa Seaman to make me realize that I had not written about the “Trinity” on this blog. So Lisa asks wisely: “I’m not sure I ever got what the “Trinity” is.” My fault Lisa, here’s a post just for you. : )
A couple of years ago we were grappling with the challenges of “web analytics” : ) and how to solve them. My thinking about web analytics at that time was that the traditional way of doing it was very much dead. So what is the solution?
After a few days of thinking a “new” way of thinking about decision making on the web coalesced. The output was this little slide with three core components. That “mindset” got the name Trinity.
Trinity also became the moniker that was given to the strategic approach that was applied in order to build out a world-class web decision making platform.
At the center of the Trinity is the reason it exists:
The goal of the Trinity mindset is to power the generation of actionable insights. Its goal is not to do reporting. Its goal is not to figure out how to spam decision makers with data. Actionable Insights & Metrics are the uber-goal simply because they drive strategic differentiation and a sustainable competitive advantage.
The first component of the Trinity mindset is Behavior analysis, what we traditionally consider clickstream data analysis.
We collect all the clickstream data and the objective is to analyze it from a higher plane of reference. No more measuring HITS. Do Click Density analysis, massive segmentation, search (both internal and external). The objective is to get really smart about clickstream analysis and get to really truly inferring the intent of our site visitors.
People usually expect too much of the clickstream data. The best we can do with clickstream data is infer intent, and we have to make peace with it.
The second component of the Trinity mindset is Outcomes analysis. I fondly call it the “so what” element.
This is critical for one simple reason, at the end of the day when all is said and done what was the outcome for the customer and the company.
I encourage you to ask a simple question to the site owners: Why does your website exist? (You might be surprised how many can’t answer that question quickly.) This element of the Trinity exists to measure how well is the website doing in meeting the goal of its existence.
In the simplest of terms this is measure Revenue for ecommerce websites (not just how much but also why did we make as much as we did) and measuring Conversion Rates smarter. But for support websites this is measuring Problem Resolution and Timeliness.
Every website should have a clearly articulated outcome, if you don’t have the capacity to measure all nuances of outcomes the recommendation is to give up on measuring Behavior (clickstream) all together. Why sink time into that? A bit extreme? Yes. Necessary? You bet your bottom.
The third component of the Trinity mindset is Experience. Think of it as “why did they behave the way they did!!”.
This is perhaps the most critical element to me, if I had to pick just one element (and it is hard to choose amongst your children : )) I would pick Experience. This is us attempting to get into the head of our customer. This is the Why. This is the warm hug when you are stymied and tortured by your clickstream data and you want to tear your hair out.
There are many different ways to understand the experience of customers on your website. There are surveys you can do. I am a huge believer of experimentation and testing (let’s have the customers tell us what they prefer). Doing Lab Usability testing is another great option. We love Follow Me Homes, a concept advocated by Scott Cook the founder of Intuit under his impactful Customer Driven Innovation mindset.
All these experience methodologies decked against one single purpose: Getting companies to listen to the Voice of Customer.
Now we can assemble the three components and the core center and voila you get Trinity:
The Trinity mindset empowers you to Understand the customer experience so explicitly that you can influence the right customer behavior which will lead to win-win outcomes for the company and its customers.
That last part is important: Trinity aims for win-win.
If the right version version of the product for you is Basic and not Premier then our job as site owners is for us to help you figure that out and buy Basic. We could make more money in the short term if you buy Premier today. But you will get it, use it, get frustrated as it is too advanced for you and you’ll never buy from us again. But if we help you buy the right for you version Basic then next year you’ll be back for Premier. Trinity aims to solve for the long term.
So there you go, it is just that simple. : ) [Lisa does it make sense now?]
Each element of the Trinity is supported by a tool and different methodologies and sustainable processes and, most importantly, key people skills. Just having the mindset does not solve the problem (though I guarantee it will put you on the right path). Executing on the Trinity strategic approach means creating the right organization structure and a move evolved culture. But these are all topics for a future post.
What do you think? Do you agree with the Trinity mindset? Too complex? Perhaps too simple? Is your website leadership executing against such a mindset? Please share your feedback via comments.
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Avinash,
This is a nice way of thinking but I think that it is too simplistic for some types of websites (namely membership-based websites with long life cycles). This approach is very session centric and assumes that a user's relationship with your site can be broken down and understood in the context of a single session rather than their ongoing history with your website. That type of thinking is fine for ecommerce, support, and some content sites because you can think very narrowly (i.e. this person came to my site with a purpose in mind and because they clicked on this link that means they were trying to complete this goal and if they did not complete that one goal in this session, then we were not successful).
Lately, I have been trying to point out that when working on websites with long life cycles, you need to take an approach where session based analysis matters less because you are working from hundreds of sessions per user. I think that while the Trinity mindset is a great approach for websites with short or infrequent lifecycles and certainly moves us past an unactionable hits and impressions POV, it is not for all types of websites and should be prefaced as such. With the rise of membership-based websites (thanks web 2.0), I think that it becomes necessary to indicate what type of site a particular mindset or approach works best for.
Otherwise a great post. I think it is important for every analyst or analytics group to have a guiding mindset.
Chris: You take ecommerce sites, support sites and "some" content sites out and what do you really have left on the web? A few "small" web 2.0 sites, who really cares!! : ) I am of course absolutely kidding, had to pull your leg. : )
You are right about session based thinking, waaaayyy to limiting. But there is nothing in the Trinity mindset that encourages just session based analysis. Most powerful insightful analysis, regardless of purpose of site, is pan-session analysis. (I have a post coming on two such metrics on Monday.)
Trinity is a mindset and a way of thinking. "Don't get stuck in clickstream tools and expect insights, drive yourself to have a robust and deep understanding of outcomes and by God if you are not into understanding customer experience hard core then you are not going to get a competitive advantage on the web."
Even if you dip your little toe into this mindset you will very quickly leave "individual sessions" mindset behind because Trinity encourages broader and more holistic thinking and puts "customer" experience (pan-session if you will) first.
Does this help?
You make a great point, thanks for taking the time to comment.
Great post. I would argue that the "so what" is the last step in the process.
Thus, presenting the issue in this order:
1. What's happening
2. Why is it happening
3. So what?
leads directly and without any hard leaps in logic to the most important question, namely,
What are we going to do about it?
This could be exactly what you mean, but by referring to the Outcomes as "so what" I get a bit confused when you jump back to "why".
Just my $0.02.
Meanwhile,
If you haven't already looked at it, you might enjoy Barbara Minto's book, The Pyramid Principle. I had the opportunity to attend a multi day training with her personally when I worked for a previous employer. I can see that you would very much understand and agree with her approach to logic in speaking and writing. :)
Best regards,
Melinda
Melinda: Blogging at mid-night has great benefits, lining things up right is not one of them. : )
I think you can start anywhere you want and jump into a mine field of questions.
But, akin to the yellow arrow in the last image, the process tends to be:
Understand Experience
Influence Behaviour
Leading to (right) Outcomes
Rinse and repeat.
This would line up with your 1,2,3 nicely I think.
Thanks for posting your comment. I appreciate the tip about Ms. Minto's book, I'll check it out.
Great post.
Our Trinity here is Behavioral Analysis, Attitudinal Analysis, and Testing. I always thought of the latter as being in response of what we discoved in the first two, so I never felt 100% comfortable with making it the third pole.
I like your second one, "Outcome", even though it is still pretty much bahavioral, but at least it has the merit of distinguishing amongst behaviors (here put as "valuable actions" I would say).
From what I have been reading lately, it seems that the Web Intelligence/Insights field is on the verge of producing its Novum Organum… Keep up the good work!
Avinash,
No worries about midnight blogging. :) Your response challenges me to present my thoughts more clearly, however.
Is it really possible to influence outcomes without understanding why things are happening? Is it that my 1&2 are combined as sub headings under your 1?
If that's a correct assessment, I respectfully suggest that trinity's not the right word for what you're talking about. Calling these a trinity (definition: the sum of one and one and one, e.g. all equal), and representing these concepts as a 2-d triangle implies that there are equal relationships between the three concepts, all equally important. In reality that is not true of course, because there are dependencies here. One must understand customers before making decisions, etc.
A couple of ideas with the goal of making the relationships between these concepts more obvious visually: Perhaps This is more like a circle, the classic continuous improvement cycle of measure, test, measure, iterate, ad infinitum; or a pyramid, where the base is understand experience (i.e. What happened and why?) and then make changes, get results.
I offer these suggestions because I'm a huge fan of your posts on selling your ideas interally so I suspect you'll appreciate the nuances of this kind of discussion. If not, just tell me to bug off. :)
Sincere regards,
Melinda
Melinda: Your challenge to my response to my challenge to your response has challenged me to think. Nice. :) [Oh and I would never tell any of our small band of merry readers to bug off, that would not be accretive to the quality of the conversation here. So do please bug.]
Short Answer:
I understand completely your point on using the continuous improvement cycle visual or the pyramid (this one is a bit more compelling). But it’s the “equal-ness” yet dependent existence that seems to keep me away from the pyramid.
Long Answer (to your multi-faceted question):
Here is the first line of a wikipedia article that comes close to why I might have choosen the name: The word "Trinity" comes from "Trinitas", a Latin abstract noun that most literally means "three-ness" (or "the property of occurring three at once").
I do believe that while there are dependencies between each, and there are very strong ones, these three are equally important and exist all at the same time and they can’t be silos.
I’ll give you an example: In our case we can measure Customer Satisfaction and if we are increasing “Net Promoter” or “likelihood to buy” over time and that in of itself is valuable and golden (because if you are not doing well the open ended VOC will be illuminating). But we can also take all the “unhappy” people (low CS) and see what they did on the website by using ClickTracks (behavior) or measure Navigation or Content ratings for people who buy different products (outcomes).
On your other point…..
In my mind Behavior is mostly your "what's happening" and just a smidgen of "why it is happen".
Experience is mostly "why it is happening". You can get some causality of Why from ClickStream or Outcomes but the Why I am interested in, and advocating, has all to do with people and perceptions and their needs and complex reactions etc. So the Why is almost all Experience in the Trinity.
Ok hopefully I have done enough to challenge your challenge to my challenge to your comment. Your turn now. : )
Another great post Avinash! You make me want to go back and re-think how I do analysis for IBM and my other clients. I am really glad I read your blog as there's stuff I get here that I don't get in anyone else's approach.
Using Trinity is a very helpful way to represent what is happening on site and what it means. While your talking about segmenting traffic to the nth degree, Trinity is a segmentation, it and of itself, your putting certain parts of web analysis and insight into one leg of the triange, and some in another. In that sense, Melinda's comments are also valid.
Aside from what type of site you have, or if sessions are the right way to measure interaction, it's more likely than not that most sites will not have all the tools needed to do all three parts of the Trinity equally as well.
For my current employer, I don't think we do step 3 as well as we could, and I think our web analytics hampers us for step 1.
Sure, Trinity is an ideal, after all, I know that, but we don't have all the right tools to get to the Trinity approach and make it fully work – the way you have outlined it. I wish I could make bread out of water and make analytics out of nothingness – but if you don't have the right tools and there right organizational setup – the Trinity approach is going to be very hard to actualize, analysts will have to work it out, for themselves, as best they can. That's what I do.
What this post reminds me of is that the journey is the goal. You know, from geometry that if you have two sides of a triange you can get the third side by induction (if that's the right term – it's been a long time since 9th grade Geometry). As long as your analysing web experience as Trinity, get two sides and you figure out the third. Here's what I mean – but maybe my approach is a bit simplistic
case 1: You have ClickStream analysis plus Customer Satisfaction (but you don't know how many orders you got)(that's hard to imagine, btw). Can you figure out the order part, pull it out of the analytics somehow? Probably.
case 2: You have Clickstream Analysis/segmentation and the number of orders but no survey data on customer satisfaction – can you derive that from the analytics and customer behavior on your site? Probably.
A lot of times, just organizing your experience will create the questions and the answers – that's been my experience.
Marshall: I partly agree with you. You are thinking of Pythagoras' theorem, which states that for any right angle triangle:
a2 + b2 = c2
where a and b are the two sides of the right angle triangle. Of course if you know c and b you can compute a and so on.
But in the Trinity there is one absolutely necessary part of the "triangle" (where a Pythagoras' theorem type inspiration won't apply).
You are right, if you have Experience and Outcomes I think you can live without Behaviour (sub-optimal but you can).
If you have Experience and Behaviour you can hypothesize that if those two are doing great then Outcomes must be good as well (again sub optimal but if clickstream is good and Customer Satisfaction is high then sales have to be high, or atleast normal).
But if you have Behaviour and Outcomes then you can't say for sure that Experience is ok. For one simple reason: With 2 to 3% conversion rate Outcomes represents a minority of site visitors and with the limitations of clickstream data you won't really know that you are solving for all your customer segments (that you have high Customer Satisfaction across all customer segments and high Net Promoter scores).
So Experience is absolutely killer and if I had to pick only one element of the trinity to have that would be it.
Would you agree? Thanks for reminding me of my geometry lessons!! : )
Hi Avinash,
I do agree, that's why I offered two examples instead of three. The triange thing sorta lends it self to your post – but it's not a perfect analogy.
Great discussion. I think the WebMetricsGuru says it best…"it's not a perfect analogy." I see where you're coming from, but the triangle choice may confuse some of your audience. So you make want to take some time to explain what you mean by this in the preso.
I say this because while I might agree that the trinity is an excellent goal, it will never happen all at once in reality, and there is a process to follow in looking at the data. If one was going to start building this trinity from scratch in a comopany, one would have to start somewhere–all parts of this triangle are not equally important all at once.
Of course given my questions, I should present a better analogy, but so far I am coming up blank and I apologize for that. But I have a feeling that you'll chew on this feedback and find something even more compelling, or compliment it with a brief explanation in the presentation.
Your blog is incredible, by the way, I'm so glad someone is thinking about these issues at a high level. I really appreciate your insights.
Sincerely,
Melinda
Hmm, this discussion is becoming a classical example of epistemology. Let us not take the model for the object! For example, I see behavioral/web analytics and attitudinal/Experience analytics as different dimensions of the same thing; conceptualizing them seperately and representing them in a model/geometric form is just a tool. In my case, I represent those analytical dimensions as pieces of a pie (ah! again unable to escape from a visual representation!).
Anyway, my point is that I do not believe analyzing the Experience (motivations, satisfaction, purposes, etc.) is optional to the behavioral analysis; it is mandatory to conduct both. Simpy put, I am afraid that such a model would suggest that sny of its part is optional.
Just wanted to leave you some "Experiential" data and tell you that I love your blog. Thank you.
[…] The hardest thing you’ll do in your life as a Web Gal / Guy / Marketer / Analyst / Researcher / Jack is identify what constitutes success for you when it comes to measuring Outcomes for your website. […]
You need to be able to track social media effectively for client showcasing and its effectiveness for traffic/links/sales (if any)/ and mainly branding i.e how many times its mentioned in good circles.
Great model to transpose onto the above.
P
Avinash! Thanks so much for your insight!
As a newbie to the UX field, I am seeing firsthand how this concept is changing my field. I myself, specialize in UX and SEO because the 2 disciplines truly complement each other, and not to use them together is a critical mistake in developing and executing business strategies as they relate to web activities.
Please check out my blog on this very subject. I cited you as a primary resource in my article, so I would be honored to get any feedback from you! quotient.net/blog/2012/6/25/converging-user-experience-design-with-a-seo-strategy/
The post is really helping me in making my assignment. :)
helping me in making my assignment.