Monthly Archives: November 2012
Google Search Appliance webinar
Looks like a lot of this is aimed at internal/intranet search. (which makes me wonder if there’s a Banner integration.)
– SharePoint integration (no relevance for us)
– multilingual (does that have any use for us? translation could be helpful, I think. will want to ask about that for potential international students)
– PDF preview (which is pretty sexy)
– assist & suggest, dynamic navigation with entity recognition (controlled vocabularies)
– searches file shares?
– moderated social settings, subject matter experts can recommend results at the point of search w/out having to do manual keymatch, with a moderation queue.
– search of subject can also include a list of experts.
– search across sites (sharepoint, wiki, etc) and other repositories (document mgmt, database, filesystem)
– entity recognition is like filtering – by author, creation date, file type, or attributes set on the back end
– pull info about experts from LDAP (or Sharepoint profiles) to build a profile page. (this feels a lot like intranet in a box)
– that answers the translation question – individual can choose to translate previewed PDFs from any (supported) language to any other.
Gut check: overkill for our needs unless we did something REALLY big with it internally.
Gerry McGovern webinar
quantifiable task completion to see results
choose the top tasks (a survey) – took 6 weeks putting it together – gathered from employees? to be answered by customers/potential customers. “often your gut instinct is totally/dangerously wrong”
[how do you intrduce this survey in front of site visitors?]
“continuously improve the small things” (cisco)
4 tasks got as much of the vote as the bottom 49 tasks. (OECD site)
we have to say what we’re focusing on, but more importantly, what are we NOT focusing on?
often an inverse relationship between importance of task and the amount of time being spent on it by staff. ouch. “often the tiny task are political”
same as OECD with Scottish Enterprise: top 5 get same level of interest as bottom 50, etc with Enterprise Ireland, Innovation Norway.
“supertask” – Get funding, book a flight, etc.
brng the top tasks to the top of the architecture
[do the same thing for my?]
people want to do things themselves, not call a sales rep or customer service.
“have to break the culture of launch & leave”
“evidence of actual behavior”
identify top task, measure them continuously, loop of continuous improvement
Cisco: top 3 tasks get as much votes as the bottom 40+. checked with internal data: matched with metrics. list of survey is overly long on purpose, btw.
even potential customers had the same questions as current customers. (is that so for students?) ppl are coming to websites to “take you for a test drive” because they know what they’re going to be doing later.
“download software is our ‘book a flight'”
in 2010, took 15 steps, ~800 seconds (ea step?).
2012: 4-7 steps, 60-100 seconds
end of formal presentation
first few questions are terrible, this one guy wasn’t paying attention to the presentation & is nitpicking.
missed some questions while doing survey (which is very like the one he talks about in the presentation)
cost of projects they work on: $25-50K. (!) [altho it strikes me that there are some of these techniques that can be done without spending a ton of money.]
“the stranger’s long neck” – his book
“get rid of all the navigation you can get rid of” – plus naming navigation around the tasks, then focusing into that task’s navigation.
“we’re really in the stone age if we’re measuring visits [pagehits, time on page]” – what activity but none of the why. harder to measure, but worth doing.