actionable analytics & visual information

I worked with Alex on some of the empirical aspects of her work...This was fascinating work, a different approach to our analytics. Alex was one of the most analytically sophisticated managers I've ever worked with, and she taught me a lot about the application of that technique to user experience analysis.

—G. Sawyer, Business Intelligence Architect, Memory Lane

Alex combines a passion for user-centric web usability with a strong statistical skill set. She provides actionable insights on the how & why of customer behavior, which helps shape everything.

—D. Fenigsohn, Marketing Manager, Memory Lane
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The terms creative and analytics don’t often get paired, but they have been repeatedly with me. My background of experimental methodology and research (academic as well as professional), cognitive psychology, and strong statistical skill set have made me the “go to” person for analytics in most of my jobs. Accomplishments include but are not limited to:

• Apply social network analysis to user-generated content and behavior.
• Develop a holistic UX quotient.
• Design, implement, and run online and in-person usability, user experience, and focus tests, performing A/B and multivariate analysis as appropriate.
• Get tapped to be part of the core actionable analytics team for Texas Instruments, determining what and how best to measure web engagement metrics, retail success, user behavior, and more.
• Provide solid research and actionable analysis on usability, content strategy, user behavior, road map business case development, SEO, and much more. See an example of how engagement, social network, and statistical analysis resulted in a strategy that drove targeted user-generated content up 134%.
• Present meaningful, visually clear and compelling data and recommendations to various audiences, ranging from developers and creatives to C-level executive management.
• Organized, ran, and presented web/social network analytics portion of in-house Measuring What Matters seminar, Classmates, 2009.

Applications

• Web metrics
  Omniture SiteCatalyst (ClickMap, ExcelClient), Visual Sciences (Web Side Story) HitBox/HBX (with Report Builder, Active Viewing); Usability Sciences’ WebIQ (I love this); Yahoo Web Analytics; Google Analytics; DoubleClick, Atlas tagging; Accrue; Netrics SurfReport; Data Warehouse (Classmates proprietary)
• Competitive, customer satisfaction
  Comscore; Quantcast; Compete; Survey Monkey; DatStat (survey-obtained data)
• Testing and beyond
  Process Testing Tool (Classmates proprietary app); SPSS; Pajek (social network analysis software)

Relevant training

• Experimental methodology (academic)
  Formal academic courses (enhanced by personally running out-of-the-class experiments), earned while obtaining my summa cum laude (4.0/4.0) B.S., psychology: Experimental Methodology; Applied Statistics; Experimental Statistics (Sniffy the Virtual Rat + SPSS), Learning and Cognition (enhances test design), Counseling (graduate level course; helps in eliciting meaningful information from usability and focus group test subjects).
• Usability and visual information design
  Jakob Neilsen’s World Usability Tour, 2001; Edward Tufte’s Presenting Visual Information; various Mathematica online courses.
• Extensive self-development
  I am always, always improving and evolving my analytic and visual presentation skills, even outside the workplace. E.g., Robert Simmon, lead visualizer of NASA’s Earth Observatory (he writes the Elegant Figures blog), recently commented positively on my attempt to optimize the visual presentation of a climate-related graph.