Take your intranet on the road (or to the canteen)

"Roll up, roll up" - is it time to get out and meet your intranet audience and see what they really think? Image: dhammza

Before we begin: this post is aimed at folks with intranets to run, but I think the lessons can be applied to external sites too...

The beauty of running an intranet is you can easily meet your audience in the flesh, but it can still be easy to hide away in the office and not take advantage of this great opportunity.

A few months ago I was working with the UK Parliament Intranet Team (Maria, Liz, Alex and Ros). They were in the middle of a big piece of work to shift the entire intranet from a department and team structure information architecture to a task based model. And rightly so.

What was so impressive was the level of engagement they had with the intranet´s userbase around Parliament.

The headline event of this consultation was the hosting of a day-long presentation stand in the busy Portculis House (opposite Big Ben) where many MPs have their offices. You know the sort of thing… a few hanging posters, some flyers, free pens…

The aim was to meet the intranet´s users in person and discuss and gather feedback on the upcoming changes.

Afterwards I asked the team why they thought it had gone so well (it clearly had) and if there was anything they would have done differently. These were the key points:

1. Be clear about what you want to achieve

If you´re not focussed on your reasons for setting up a stand you will struggle to get useful feedback. This ambiguity will come across to the visitors at your stand and they´ll be unsure what you expect from them. Focussed examples could be:

• “We want to change the design of the intranet and we need feedback on our prototypes.”
• “We know the HR section of the intranet is not great and we want to find out what our audience need from that section.”

It is important to communicate the purpose of your stand at all stages, from the advertising (email invites, bill-board posters, oral invitations, etc) to the way you start conversations with people at the stand.

There is no harm in spelling it out with a big call to action… at Parliament they had big posters and a great looking scrolling presentation on a TV with words like this: “Use the intranet? Help us improve it by telling  us what tasks you perform.” Most people can get their head around that and give you some useful feedback in 60 secs.

2. Advertise your stand and spread the word

Obvious really, but that is what the guys at Parliament did really well and it made the difference to numbers on the day. This is especially important if you can´t get the busy spots, outside the canteen for example.

You run the intranet so advertise the session on the homepage and make it sound interesting and worth the effort popping along, remembering to be clear about the purpose of the session and who it is aimed at.

And put a bit of pressure on your intranet friends around the organisation to spread the word for you and bring along their colleagues.

3. Time, location, and set-up of your stand

Think carefully about the best day and time of day to run your stand to get the most impact from your effort. That will largely depend on the location of your stand, so using the canteen entrance example it will obviously be best at breakfast and/or lunchtime. Ask the advice of the person who arranges the booking, they will have a good idea.

As for the actual stand, you do need to look the part if you want to be taken seriously. At Parliament they got one of the web designers to knock up a colourful poster design which they had professionally printed. They also had a simple, but professional, scrolling presentation on a big screen to turn heads.

Tip: A really simple, but effective technique is to have a bowl of sweets on the stand. It was amazing how many people at Parliament would come over to get a free lolly. And once they have taken one, you have every right to ask them: “Do you use the intranet…?”

4. Lots of lovely, and not so lovely, feedback

If you ask for feedback, you had better be ready to capture it.

Because the Parliament guys had clear objectives for their stand (What are the most common tasks our intranet users want to perform?) they asked that question on pre-printed forms with a nice big box to scribble the answer in. They had a few more fields to capture the name and audience group of the user, e.g. MP or MP staff, but kept it minimal and focussed. A nice touch was a branded ballot box (fashioned out of a printer paper box and glued on flyers) for folks to cast their completed forms. Very apt for Parliament.

Now not everyone wants to or has the time to fill out a form so try to complete it for them as you talk. Sometimes they may have already left the stand, but capture as much of the useful stuff as possible and pop it on the pile. This isn´t scientific research so don´t get too hung up about completing every field.

By the end of the session you will hopefully have some great data that starts to answer your questions.

You will also get negative feedback, and often warranted. But this is the juicy stuff (mostly) and you have the perfect opportunity to ask them what they think it should be like or why they don´t like something. It can be really tough to publicly open yourself up for criticism, but it´s vital you don´t become defensive and miss the opportunity to better understand your users.

5. Set expectations or it will come back to bite you

If you aren´t careful you will hear this line 6 months after the session: “…I told your team about this months ago and no one has bothered to do anything about it.”

Asking people what they think is not the same as saying: “we are going to act on what you think”. But don´t presume everyone who comes to your stand gets that. Be clear from the start that this is part of a bigger process… you are looking for trends… you are gauging opinion… however you want to say it, don´t let them think you are going to act on everything they say. That would be crazy.

6. Now do something about it

What you do with the findings of the session will depend greatly on what you were trying to find out, but I would suggest these actions:

• have a wash-up meeting with everyone on the stand to discuss how the session went: key themes, immediate concerns, actions (with owners), lessons learnt for next time…
• process the data on the feedback forms ASAP – if your session was trying to identify the most popular tasks on the intranet (as in the Parliament example) run the numbers and pin up the results on the wall for everyone to see
• send round an exec summary of the session to your team and other key people, spelling out what this means and next steps
• get a follow up news item on the intranet homepage thanking those who came along and tease them with some of the findings and what you plan to do with them…  and if you have the time to send these people an email even better

7. Few last tips for running a successful stand

• ask the people who come to your stand if they are willing to be consulted in the future – these are often the perfect people to demo prototypes to or conduct user testing sessions with. Tip: don´t shy away from asking the most critical people, they are often the most rewarding people to work with
• rotate the people on the stand - it gives people a break but it also means more people in the team gain the invaluable experience of meeting users face-to-face (this again worked well at Parliament)
• get your boss along and helping out, sure they are busy, but they need to hear this stuff and it gives the rest of the organisation a good impression of a united team effort supported from the top

If I´m honest, I was actually a bit sceptical when asked to help out on the stand at Parliament and wasn´t convinced it was the best use of my time. But I was wrong. If done properly it is a very efficient way to better understand your intranet, it´s purpose and the people who use it.

As ever, let me know how you get on.

Liam

DIY web usability testing

I’m not sure why, but website usability testing is often seen as something beyond the remit or experience of web teams.

I simply don’t buy this. I think anyone can run these sessions for nothing and come away with great insights that’ll improve their site.

Usability testing on 10 Cents pence a day

My user testing sessions are based on Steve Krug’s fantastic Usability testing on 10 cents a day guide. I really recommend you download it: 16 pages that changed my whole view on what’s possible with DIY usability testing.

The gist is: user testing can be a cheap, painless and highly rewarding exercise when it is run by the people who run the website.

Run your own usability test session

If you don’t do any usability testing or use a third party to do it, please give this a go. It’ll take about two hours to prep and perform. I’m confident you will feel it was time well spent.

Pick your audience

You should already know who your target audiences are. Pick one to test. I’ll go back to my Foreign Office days and pick British holiday makers for this example.

Now list the 3-5 most common tasks they come to your site to do. In my example:

• Task 1: get the latest travel advice info for the country they’re going to
• Task 2: contact the British Embassy for help because something has gone wrong abroad
• Task 3: get a replacement passport because it has been stolen while on holiday

Recruit your guinea pig

Invite a (non-web team) colleague or a friend at a loose end for a 45 mins session. Try to choose someone who is articulate and easy going.

Ok, ideally you want to test with someone from your target audience – a ‘real’ end user – but I don’t think this really makes much difference when you’re starting out. Once you have an established usability testing programme in place which has already identified the big problems with your site, then it may be worth paying an agency to hire these ‘real’ users.

You need a ‘Test Lab’

Book a room with a networked PC and three chairs. And that’s it! You’ll survive without the eye motion tracking camera for now.

Ask another colleague to observe and take notes of anything significant (you’ll be busy leading the session).

Tip: Try to get the person responsible for the areas you’re testing to be your note taker – they need to see this with their own eyes. In my example: I would (and did) invite the Head of the Travel Advice web team to do this.

Video recording the session can be really worthwhile – a 60 secs compilation of the best / worst bits can have real impact on other web team colleagues. But don’t get hung up about doing this for the first session. If you do record the session make sure the note taker marks the time on the camera with their notes – it saves a lot of time later.

Get into the room 15 mins early to check everything is working ok and the chairs are arranged – two at the PC for you and the guinea pig and one a few metres behind for the note taker.

Running the session

I think the key to having a successful session is ensuring your guinea pig is comfortable with the situation and understands what is and isn’t required of them. Let’s be honest, it is a pretty artificial situation.

I try to introduce sessions with these points:

• I will ask you to try and perform some common tasks
• I need you to think out loud as you perform the tasks. Example: “I think I want to click this link here because it has the word passports in it.” Some people find this quite weird to do and may need prompting if they go quiet
• I’m not trying to test you – I want to see where you are having problems because that will help us to improve the site for real users
• I want you to be honest about your experience and not to worry about offending anyone if you want to be critical

Ease them in with a simple task and then work through the tasks on your list until your time is up. I wouldn’t recommend any more than 45 mins.

At times they’ll get stuck and confused, but try not to jump in with the answer, no other user has the benefit of your knowledge when they come to your site.

And if they go off on some unlikely journey to complete a task, let them, just ensure they continue to think out loud so you know why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Hopefully you will find it really enlightening and gain some important insights into the usability of your website. I’ve never run a session that didn’t identify issues – often things you would never expect unless you had seen them with your own eyes.

The key is to capture what you’ve witnessed, make sense of it and its significance and work out what you need to do about it. That’s when the real work starts!

Oh, and don’t forget to buy your guinea pig lunch as a thank you.

Let me know how you get on.

Liam

Putting social network traffic on the map

If you want to monitor social media networks, there’s a wealth of free tools out there to tell you how many people are using what #tags on Twitter when and such like but one issue that UK application developers have yet to solve is how we, as British web people, filter out traffic and chatter from elsewhere.

Monitoring matters!

I’ve been doing some social media mapping on swine flu – trying to gauge the public’s mood – to foretell whether they are about to rush to the supermarket en masse, stock up on tinned beans and hibernate or whether they’re still going out, getting drunk, sharing saliva with strangers and comprehensively ignoring government hygiene advice. Such information helps organisations like the Department of Health target messaging effectively.

Following the trend

So yesterday I watched as ’swine flu’ loitered in the trending topics between the like of ‘Cristiano Ronaldo‘ and ‘Real Madrid’….I assumed that most of the English Ronaldo-related chatter would be from the UK, so the fact that swine flu, which is from everywhere, was not beating this in the trending topics led me to summarise that despite the WHO being on the brink of declaring a pandemic, the UK was more shocked at Real Madrid paying £80 million for that arrogant **** (I’m a Liverpool fan….)

If you want more detail though, searching for terms like ’swine flu’ amongst the daily din of chatter chucks up a diatribe of results from all over the English-speaking world. There’s the occasional ‘blimey gosh’ or ‘wassup’ that helps indicate what nationality the tweeter is, but you’re doing a quick trawl on a dashboard like Netvibes there is no way you can check such info.

Advanced searching

Twitter’s advanced search enables you to search tweets from a radius of a specified location, however entering United Kingdom does not produce all the UK’s tweets  – users don’t tend to put ‘uk’ in their location, they usually just out their home town – great if you’re monitoring a campaign in a small local area, but not nationwide.

One way of overcoming this is to whack in somewhere smack in the middle of Britain, like Leicester, and extending to the radius to 500 miles (specify English text only!). But still, how many users actually specify their location?

I’ve found some great tools for monitoring trending topics like Tweetstats and Twirl which are certainly useful, but so far I’ve yet to find a UK-made tool which shows traffic from the UK.

And that’s just Twitter! As for Facebook, the Lexicon tool seems about as good as it gets, but still no geographical segmentation available.

I’d love to hear whether anyone has found a more effective way of doing this.

Perhaps things will change with the arrival of the UK-made Audioboo…and at least that has the benefit of accents!

Taking the bounce out of bounce rates – part #1

There's more to bounce rates than your homepage. Photo by Aldo Risolvo.

Do you know which pages your visitors first see when they come to your website (other than your homepage of course)?

And do you know how many of those lovely visitors actually stick around long enough to do anything?

In my experience many web teams and managers don’t really know the answers to these important questions. And yes… I’m guilty of this too.

Bounces are missed opportunities. At worse they indicate poor user experience – the sort that damages the reputation of your site, brand and organisation. So not good.

This is the first of two posts that will look into bounce rates and ways to improve the retention of visitors to your site.

Not really sure what all this bounce rate talk is? Wikipedia has a pretty good definition of bounce rates.

Try this now: identify your bouncing pages

In 5 mins you will have a much better idea of where folks are arriving (and quickly departing) from your site. That doesn’t solve the problem but it will trigger a bunch of actions to start reversing this unwelcome trend. We’ll look into some of these in part #2.

Open up your stats package and run the most popular entry page report over the last few months – any decent stats package will have some variation of this. If your pacakge doesn’t I suggest you start using Google Analytics – it’s free, easy and bloody brilliant.

It’s this report in Google Analytics: Content > Top Landing Pages. It even includes the bounce rate for the top pages. Got to love Google!

Ok… no prizes for guessing which page is #1 – your homepage. Well forget about that for now, it’s had enough of your loving care and attention.

What about the other pages on the list? Are they what you expected? These pages are so important to you – they can make or break the user experience. Do any of them have a horrible looking bounce rate?

What’s a good/bad bounce rate?

I really don’t have a definitive answer to this – how long is a piece of string. I’ve read that 50% is pretty normal, but it will vary from site to site and page to page. The important thing is you start to bring that number down.

Tip: get the avg bounce rate for your entire site to see which pages are above avg.

Which pages deserve your attention?

The easy thing to do is list the top 10 or 20 pages with the worst bounce rates and tackle them first.

But which is worse?

a) a page where 20% of site visits begin with a bounce rate of 65%
b) or a page where 2% of site visits begin with a bounce rate of 90%

I would argue (a), because far more visitors are actually bouncing from this page (even if the bounce rate percentage is lower).

The point is: you have limited time and you need to spend it where you will make the most impact.

From this quick excercise you will probably have a list of 2 or 3 popular entry pages with worryingly high bounce rates. These are the pages to focus on first.

Coming up in Part #2

Part #2 will focus on what can be done with these pages to dig a bit deeper into why they are bouncing so much and actions you can take to reverse this trend.

Stay posted. And as ever… let me know what you think.

They’re under starter’s orders… and they’re off

Hello. After months of threatening to launch our own blog, we’re finally up and running.

We’re a bunch of web professionals [squad list coming soon] who know a thing or two about running websites. And we think it’s time to share some of our experiences and insights with a wider audience.

“Another blog – just what the World needs”

Fair point. We know there’s already loads of good blogs and sites dedicated to specific aspects of the web. We are happy subscribers to many of them.

But we think there is a gap.

Jack of all trades, master of none

If you run a website you’re expected to know so much stuff: editorial, design, technical, social media, evaluation, resource management. But that doesn’t mean you’re an expert on each (how could you be?).

So if you run a website, how much time do you have to think about evaluating your site? How many hours can you spare to look into the latest social media tools? Do you have two free days to review the accessibility of your site? So much to do, so little time.

And that’s where we come in…

If you only have an hour or two a week to dedicate to these things we’ll share ideas (always based on our own experiences) of how to best use that time. If we learn something the hard way we’ll pass that on.

Our regular posts will address real issues and suggest clear actions for you to take to improve your site and your web skills.

And of course… we want to get your comments and follow up questions.

Our first steps

Managing Websites is a work in progress, and something we have to fit around our busy lives.

But as we develop our strategy and build our site we’ll share the experience with you to prove we practice what we preach!

In time we want to become a popular resource of info and advice for fellow web manager types. A site worth telling others about.

Thanks for reading.

Liam