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As far as you know, how popular is this method in user research? What do you think of this method? Normally who are doing this job? People from UX team or other teams? What tools do they usually use for data mining?

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Welcome to UX! Could you please elaborate on what you mean by data mining? What problem are you facing that you want to solve? How can we help you? – Rahul♦ Aug 26 '11 at 13:39
Thank you Rahul. By data mining I mean finding user's behavior pattern through web server log, for example, the click stream, the visiting path, etc. – pinkhq Aug 30 '11 at 14:00
I think it would be helpful if you made the question more specific - and added your comment about what you mean by data mining into the question. Focus on just popularity/utility, or roles, or tools. – Jonathan Sep 30 '11 at 23:04

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  1. Some tools allow you to view a Heat Map of where people click on your pages over time (e.g. Google Analytics or CrazyEgg). You can analyse to see where people are clicking on your pages based on installing the analytics. You could also use your logs if you can back-correlate to screen positions.

  2. A/B testing allows you to show different versions to different people. You can record which they view and then datamine the results.

  3. You can go beyond to testing a whole range of options. For example Google conducted a link color experiment. I recall reading a rant by an ex-google UI designer about how they weren't willing to take risks, but I can't find the link. Instead read this 37Signals explanation of how they test.

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I'm not sure how others use the word data mining, but generally it seems when I hear it, people are talking about very unstructured research methods, eg trying to uncover "hidden" relationships between variables. In your answer, I would consider #2 and #3 to be very structured, and only #1 sounds like data mining to me personally. – Jonathan Sep 30 '11 at 23:01

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