Home > Web Content Managers Forum > Conference Call Archive > Meeting Minutes

Forum conference call March 15, 2007

Facilitator: Sheila Campbell, USA.gov

Approximately 25 Members on the call

Topic: Top Tasks

News you can use: Forum Listserv has grown tremendously to almost 1200 members over the country with both content managers and technical managers as well.

• This committee manages WMU, Webcontent.gov and the Listserv
• Workshop will be held April 24, 2007
• We have been doing some strategic planning on where our sites should be in a few years. We had an open brainstorming session discussing what will happen over the next 3-5 years. A lot of great ideas were shared at that session. We have just set up a Wiki where we are going to place those ideas and open it up to the Forum Members and get your ideas. We would love to hear what you think about the ideas.
• The Spring semester for WMU has started and is going well. Our next class will be on SEO by Bob Keating. Please sign up for the Webinar on Webcontent.gov.
• We have a new section on Webcontent.gov on Search Engines and we would love to have your feedback. If there is additional information you would like to have on the site please let us know.

Ways to inform upper management what we need to be our top tasks and gain awareness within your agency. Then the next steps would be to reorient your site based upon these top tasks and identifying what your customers truly need.

We want to know what are some strategies, are there some good models out there? What tools do you need?

We will start with Joe Pagano of the Library of Congress.

Joe Pagano: We try and look at top tasks based on our databases and interactive pages where people can either ask a librarian a question and we consider that information as important. We do not focus solely on the traffic. We look at the pages the librarians come to as well as teachers. We look at downloads of forms, rss feeds, video, audio and primary source material. Lastly we are trying to look at topical content, Women’s History Month, Black History Month – we want to monitor the information that is being offered to the public.

Nicole Burton: Make a matrix in excel or word and put in columns for your customer type and the frequency and then the top tasks and fill in the content. I recommend you look in your web logs and look at your links. Confirm with those business operations people in your agency and ask them what are the top tasks of you users. Conduct contextual inquiries. If you have a call center ask them for recent emails and comments. From this you can refine the types of customers you have listed. Also on the Web Logs look at the search terms used. Ask what did our customer want to do. Construct the stories of what your customers might be trying to accomplish based upon what the search terms are. Verify this data with your conversations with others in the agency. You will be amazed how you can define what your top tasks are by doing this. Please send us your strategies so we can post them on Webcontent.gov.

Q. How do you track, what do you do to track it. What tools do you use to track this

A. I think there are a variety of tools you can use. You should use both Quantitative and Qualitative tools to do this.

Q. What are the four metrics categories

A. Survey Vehicles, Log Analysis Tools, Quality Assurance Tools, Panels (Hitwise, Neilson Net Ratings) – more looking at internet traffic across the web. Of those four general categories I would say the traffic tool and the survey tool are the most important. Identify your audience and look at the task they are doing and also look at satisfaction of completing those tasks. ACSI is used by most agencies that will pull these two together. I

Q. How often should you look at this data? What is the strategy?

A. We basically do not have a regular schedule but we are in the process of looking more at events and away from page views. I think that is where top tasks extend. It’s the interaction with the user and look at all types of interaction and look at them at least on a monthly basis.

Q. We are having a hard time coming up with what constitutes a task on a website that is basically just providing information. How would we define a task on our site?

A. We provide educational material on our site and that is why it is important to measure the success of our users finding the information they need. That would be a successful outcome of your tasks.

Imagine why people come in to get the content, and use that to your advantage. It is a difficult challenge to measure the success of it but also note how much time they spent on the page and did they download it. If the person is taking the time to change the format of the page so they can interact with it the way they need to that is one way to measure success of tasks. This is all information that is collected from your logs if your site is set up to do this.

Q.Does anyone have any search logs out there?

A. Sometimes they tend to accomplish the task you think they were trying to accomplish their tasks and some times you have to go outside. Search logs are another way to find out what people are looking for. At SSA we have tried to organize stuff by tasks and by life events and that is working for us based on traffic. We were able to list content by life event. We don’t rely on this entirely but we found this to work best for SSA and this is something we have experimented with.

Q. At SSA you have different channels. How do you use the information from those other resources.

A. Not as well as we should. In one sense we are able to measure the types of cases are filed so we know what life events cause them to file the way they do so we try to bring that to the forefront. We have enough information to know why people come to SSA and we use that information to structure and organize our site and thought this is one way to capture and channel people to a certain material.

Q.How often do you look at the information you get?

A. We do not look at it once a month only because the reasons why people come to our site doesn’t seem to change over the years so we tend to only review this info once a month.

Q.How does HUD handle this?

A. Housing is one of our top tasks. Common sense is often the biggest help with this. Step back from your duties and your agency and look at your site with fresh perspective. Sit down with friends and family and ask them to show you how they click through your site and why the click the way they do. A mini usability test and get a fresh perspective. Another thing to do is write a mission statement for your website. It is not the same as your agency mission statement but should feed into it. Another thing you could do is poll your staff and find out which pages are used most often and make sure those pages are well written. We are in a unique position to connect the dots for people. We try to make sure when people come to our pages and try to figure out what a users next steps are and help them keep moving forward. Break the information into clear information and speak to a person from their perspective. Look at the big picture and make sure your sites walk people through the process. As government agencies we can provide this information and not only tell people where they can find the information but what they can do with it. Sort of a “Where do I go from here” approach.

Ask what is the customers purpose for coming to your website. Keep this in mind when organizing information and what is the sequence they need.

The ACSI question on the LOC survey is “what are you looking for.” Maybe we need to change it to What did you come here to do and it would be interesting information to collect in the long term.

Q. Are there folks out there who would like to share what they have done:

A. Montgomery County government has used information from their telephone logs and what they come to accomplish. If you look at our websites and they same two topics are in the forefront. We were able to define the top two tasks through our channels of live chat and phone calls. We always have a spike during the holiday season so it’s important to have that information on our site. We try to combine the data from different sources and even though we do not get the exact number we do look at the trends. What are the complaints you are getting? Take the complaints seriously and follow suggestions. Simply be creative and keep your ear to the ground and pull resources.

Note: Live help would be a great topic for a future call. USA.gov has launched a live chat and we are piloting it and would like to pull together some best practices for pulling this analysis together.

Q. What is the EPA doing?

A. Get out to your users. After the Gerry Mcgovern webinar I wrote down a list of questions to ask people to guide my thinking process. I try and grab people from meetings and try to chat with them to ask what they are looking for on our site and ask them what is helping them or preventing them from getting the information they need on our site. Getting out and talking to folks helps as well and using that information from logs.

Q. Nicole Burton can you talk about Contextual Inquiry?

A. The way it works is you think of yourself as apprenticing to your customer. In this case you might have an actual customer you can interact with or an operations person who can deal with your actual customer. You ask them to show you what they do. Show you a couple of common tasks that they do. And you sit next to them and watch them work and as they work you take notes and ask questions, you interrupt them. You work in their environment because you pick up an interesting amount of clues from their area more so than in a conference room. You might notice sticky notes, or the computer is slow. All of this needs to be folded into our design and structure of our websites. Taking the experience from the actually user. SSA has a training on contextual inquiry.

State of Maryland – we are in the middle of doing a statewide initiative and one of the challenges we are to get out to our agencies, trying to match our key search words to tasks and things people can actually do when they search on a particular keyword. It’s hard to find actual services on simply an information search. People are coming in from their own search engines and when people are clicking on actual words they are looking for services.

Q. What’s the process for you identifying the top search terms

A. Looking at the web logs and the ways to benchmark and what customers are looking at. We BEA Logic and webtrends and other analytic tools go through a tagging process. We use google analytics We make adjustments from there.

Q. What are some Quality Assurance Tools?

A. Broken link reports, Maximine,

Q. Privacy Issues for collecting this information about people?

A. You are not really collecting personal information rather behavioral information without collecting personal information on who they are.

Q.We have a section on Webcontent.gov where you can use tools to track what your audience is looking for. Are you looking for additional guidance or sample modes.

1. LOC: Joe Pagano – I wonder if it would be useful to have guidelines to see there are a range of ways of finding tasks especially considering the difference in agencies.
2. SSA: Again – have your mission statement and ask yourself why do you have your website. What is it’s primary purpose. By asking yourself this question you can begin to define individual tasks.

It’s something that you re-evaluate with respect to the trends and expectation of new interaction on the web, there’s u-tube where people themselves are being the content creators and it’s being reused and we need to be thinking about that two or three years down the road and will there be growing expectations for our sites to become more interactive.

It has been interesting to hear the range of experiences and knowing there is more than one way or more than one strategy for accomplishing top tasks.

We are going to follow a similar agenda as last year for our April Workshop. We want top tasks to be our theme for the next year. We are going to construct our break out sessions around that. If you have comments or ideas you would like to have covered at the workshop please let us know. Please email either Sheila Campbell, Sheila.campbell@gsa.gov, or Natalie Davidson, Natalie.davidson@gsa.gov.

Rachel Flagg of HUD is now the co-chair for our steering committee and also helps to plan these calls.You can feel free to contact her as well.

The April monthly call is TBD since it is so close to the workshop.

 

Page Updated or Reviewed: June 29, 2007