Product Analytics: Applied Data Science Techniques for Actionable Consumer Insights

2. Building a Theory of the Social Universe

In Chapter 1, “Data in Action: A Model of a Dinner Party,” there was an example of how user analytics sometimes feels like a game of whack-a-mole, where disparate facts are woven together trying to create a cohesive story that is constantly updated with new information. To help you avoid the problems associated with analyzing data in this way, this chapter will walk you through the process of building testable theories. We’ll start off with the dinner party example, but end the chapter with three potential user analytics theories that can be tested. Every time we need to analyze a new social process in a web product, we should start with theory building. It’s the necessary foundation to derive actionable ...