Measuring Rich Internet Applications

Site owners look to analytics data to help them answer key questions about the effectiveness of their rich Internet applications (RIAs). But understanding user behavior within RIAs is tricky because RIAs have more trackable actions and change the meaning of metrics like page views and engagement, so it's harder to know which metrics matter in an RIA world. To top it off, tools for collecting RIA data fail to meet developers' needs. Firms can best understand RIA effectiveness and performance by: 1) using the full portfolio of tools to evaluate RIAs, especially qualitative tools that can be applied early in the process, and 2) building a solid plan for RIA measurement with measurement best practices like giving stakeholders time to define data needs, capturing metrics requirements alongside functional requirements, and describing what action people are going to take based on the data before its collected.