Category Archives: Analytics

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.

This week…

It’s been a little while since I’ve done a Week in Review!

This was the first week with the Web Team’s new designer, Justin McDowell. He’s getting himself set, which makes me realize how much I’ve already figured out in just four months. 🙂 Also, how helpful my previous experience at Pierce College was, and how helpful it is to have two family members who attended Evergreen.

But now we can start to set up common processes and systems, toss out old stuff, start big new stuff. So that’s very cool.

This week I worked quite a bit on OARS (Online Academic Records System) — some personas work, which I find I really enjoy both the research and the writing. (I was a creative writing major at UPS. Go figure.) And also some UX work with the very first bit of the system. I’ve never done UX design in Excel, and yet for this piece it was exactly the right tool. Since, really, it’s just a table. The OARS project team has a cowork/meeting one morning a week, and we mostly worked on that — clarifying from what I’d done and what the lead developer had done, and getting to something that made sense to the whole team, and that we think will be good for students…someday.

I also did lots and lots of Google Analytics reporting, which can be mind-numbing, but then there are flashes of insight. Those are kind of delightful; it even included discovering that something I’d done was actually helpful to our site visitors, measurably so!

There’s been one incredibly dull project that’s also incredibly necessary to move some other projects along. TBH, it’s sort of nice sometimes to just have something quiet and routine to do.

decrufting

I’m thinking that’s actually what I need to focus on inside Cascade. There’s a lot of cruft, a lot of built-up weirdness. I’m not quite sure how to start with that, except maybe by using the Sites feature and rebuilding the main site entirely from scratch. (Eeeep.) Which involves some planning: what pieces of content are native to Cascade? Which ones “live” elsewhere? Should the elsewhere bits be imported as actual Cascade assets, or just displayed & linked? What kinds of content are being created? How can they be made easier? Etc., etc.

Analytics help (some), although partially by pointing to the need for some content that doesn’t yet exist. Really, that clear explanation of who we are, what we do, what the (current/prospective) student might do (either while here or afterwards).

The catalog; the “academics” page; the “studies” page. Those are the core of what’s used on the site. (The main site, anyway. My.e.e, admissions.e.e, library.e.e, and blogs.e.e — those have their own issues. The most important bit in blogs is academic computing’s site; admissions needs to come back into the main site (IMHO) and my.e.e is a whole other thing.)

Speaking of which, I really need to get better data on the admissions site.

Yak shaving, of a kind

I need to set up an experiment in Google Analytics…which as it turns out is super-easy. (Much better than the old version!) Except I need to have a goal set up to be able to launch the experiment. And for this particular project, I need to have automatic event tracking set up. Which I just started testing yesterday. So I have to wait for people to visit the pages with the test and either download files or visit external sites. Sigh.

I guess if I get to the middle of next week and it’s pretty clear that the test isn’t working, I can set up the tracking manually on the specific links that I need tracked. Which isn’t a great option, but whatever works?

On the other hand, it’s not entirely ready to launch for other, unrelated, reasons. So I can be patient.

(FWIW: Yak Shaving. I don’t know why I was thinking that post was by Tim Bray, when it’s actually by Seth Godin. Maybe I got to it from Tim Bray, waaaaay back in 2005?)

Google Analytics thoughts

I’m adding a tracking code from my own account to this blog, to be able to share that info with other blog users. (Got a request to get reports. Seems like ppl being able to look at their own reports would be more sustainable, possibly more useful.)

At the same time, I’m working on analytics things for the main site. I really want to get automated event tracking working; it’s funny, I’d gotten used to that being part of a module in Drupal. I found a decent-looking bit of JS, but it works with the newer asynchronous setup, which means changing the template, configuration sets, etc., etc. 🙁 Need to figure out the best (least cumbersome + not breaking stuff) way to switch over.

I’ve also got a huge year-over-year report that I’ve built by hand…which was useful, but holy cow labor-intensive. Took me most of July to figure it out with June’s data. That’s not sustainable. The best idea that I have so far is do something like that once a quarter, and then spend the rest of the quarter exploring what comes out of it; either researching why something might have changed or changing content to improve a stat. Or both, I guess. It really is all about turning numbers into action.

That and I also need to get better funnels set up.

Sigh.

Had to remind myself yesterday, when I was in a bit of funk, that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. I’m planning on being here for a while, certainly, and sometimes it’s better to take my time and really figure something out. Certainly better than freaking out.