THE NEED TO WEED Top task management @ Microsoft Office Online April 7, 2009

THE NEED TO WEED

Top task management @ Microsoft Office Online

April 7, 2009

www.customercarewords.com

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Questions & Answer Session

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Speakers

4

Gerry McGovern: Founder & CEO, Customer Carewords

Laurel Hale:Excel Content Publishing Manager

Maya Subramanian:Business Development & Strategies Analyst

Meet the Google guys!

Google News!Google Primes for Mobile Search SurgeGoogle launches iGoogle Artist ThemesGoogle Lets AdWords Users Buy TV AdsGoogle Ads Street View To Driving DirectionsGoogle looking to map the abyss

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New Improved SearchGoogle is delighted to announce the launch of our new improved search. It’s now even easier to search on our website. Read More

WELCOME TO OUR WEBSITE!!

Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 11

Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 12

Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 13

Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 14

Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 15

2552004

168200653%

139200717%

119200814%

City Council has ~ 22,200 pages of contentThe top 200 pages or 1%

account for 80% of the total page views

Sales per thousand dollars

Ideal Site

Gap

Land’s End

Macy’s

Newport News

User Interface Engineering (UIE.COM), 2005

Number of pages to purchase

Gap

Land’s End

Macy’s

Newport News

User Interface Engineering (UIE.COM), 2005

The Need to Weed

Maya Subramanian

The Story of a Web Site

Not too long ago, there was a Web site…

…with a simple vision statement:

“Give your customers what they

want”

“Help them find what they need”

The vision quickly becomes…

Publish lots of cool

content to the site

And, the authors start publishing lots of good pages…

…and the site manager says, “Page views are going up, but we can do better!”

And the authors focus on creating more, better, faster…

Soon, the analytics team walks in, and interrupts, “Wait a second here…”

Satisfacti

on is not

moving

up!

???

Not what I want!

Don’t like it!

It turns out the customer isn’t happy with the growing site…

Can’t find it!

Content issues? Revise it.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, and try again!

So, the team decides to fix things…

Search not working? Add keywords. Lots of them. To every page.

Navigation not working? Redesign the site. Add links. Put them on the

home page.

Get this. Now!

I think this is what you really need.

You said you want this. Here you go.

But, things don’t get much better.

Success indicators still stay flat.

…and keeping the site fresh and relevant gets harder and harder… ??

??

??

Lesson 1. Recognize dissatisfaction.

Measure it. Report it. Share it.

Don’t like it!

Love it!

It is not sufficient to only work towards increasing satisfaction…

…in fact, lowering dissatisfaction is more critical.

So, what needs to be done?

Publish more satisfactory pages

Increase page views of satisfactory pages

Remove dissatisfactory pages

Minimize the page views of dissatisfactory pages

Satisfaction

TuningDissatisfactio

n Tuning

And, time to let go of some outdated concerns…

“I’m sure some users still use it!”

Many, many more users seem to be hating it…

“Taking things away isn’t the right thing to do. We should fix them.”

Weed NOW. Publish something good as soon as possible.

The publish queue…

“OK, they are not useful, but certainly there is no harm in just leaving them there?”

There is. It prevents users from finding our good pages.

But still, it meant doing things that…

….have never been done before

….are counter-intuitive

“How do we remove

pages???

“How do we reduce page

views???

We decided to experiment.

Goal: Reduce the number of dissatisfactory experiences with Excel content.

Action: Remove problematic pages from the site. If they can’t be removed, reduce their

usage.

So, did it go as planned?

Top Experiments and ResultsLaurel Hale

A little background…

The team:My team creates, publishes, and manages the Excel content on Office Online.

We were given a list of dissatisfactory Excel pages to analyze.

The project:

And were given these rules:1st option--remove the page—NO REVISIONS.

Not taking action was NOT an option.

2nd option--reduce the page views by hiding the page from search, removing links, or retitling.

#1 Remove Pages from SiteWhat was happening?Customers searched for “remove conditional formatting”

…but, what they were really trying to do was get formatting feature to work right!

They found a topic named, “Remove conditional formatting,”…

Remove Conditional Formatting

Result? “THIS HELP DOESN’T WORK!!!”

What we did…

We had 2 topics—

“Remove conditional formatting” (containing just the procedure)

“Format text in a variety of ways based on conditions” (containing comprehensive information about applying, removing, and changing conditional formatting)

So we removed the shorter topic. Remove

Conditional Formatting

What happened?

Now customers could find the more comprehensive topic.

And, they didn’t miss the removed topic!

That meant one less dissatisfactory page, and a lot fewer dissatisfactory page views on the site!

#2 Remove Links to PageWhat was happening?

This topic was doing poorly…

Inside that topic, they see a link to this topic, and go there…

…only to realize this topic is about Excel server, not Excel…

First, customers search for and find a general topic on PivotTables…

Studying the traffic, we realized…

…and get very, very mad at us!

What we did…

We removed the “See Also” link to this topic from the general PivotTable topics.

We also removed it from the Excel Table of Contents

And what was the result?

Page views fell by over 77%

Dissatisfaction fell by over 15%

#3 Hide Pages from SearchWhat was happening?

The wrong customers were finding the function topics.English teachers, who wanted to add numbers…

…were finding the IMSUM function.Aarrrgh!I’m not a Math teacher!

Administrative assistants, who wanted to print address labels… …were finding the

ADDRESS function.Jeesh! What’s this?This Help is terrible!

Students, who wanted to set the print area…

…were finding the AREAS function.What’s that?

???

But when the right customers found the function topics…

…they could move on with their work.Sometimes they sent positive feedback; sometimes they said nothing!

Ahhh!Just what I need!

What we did…

…we knew we couldn’t remove the pages, so we decided to…

…to limit access to those who really needed it.

…put a fence around the function topics…

To build the fence, we hid the function topics from Search, so that...

when customers searched for “sum numbers”…

…the basic topic appeared at the top.

A category listing topic containing the link to the IMSUM topic appeared lower in the Search results…

…so that those who are really looking for function help can find it.

What was the result?

After reviewing customer feedback for 6 months…

…and fine-tuning our “weeding,”…

…novice users didn’t miss the hidden topics…

…but the right users still find them!

…and the dissatisfactory usage of the function topics dramatically decreased!

Dissatisfactory function reference page views decreased by 42%...

Now, with only the right users finding them,many function topics actually get good ratings!

but satisfactory page views increased by 423%!

BEFORE

BEFORE

BEFORE

BEFORE

AFTER

AFTER

AFTER

Summary of our “weeding” work…

Here’s a breakdown of our weeding activity:

HIDDEN FROM SEARCH

REMOVED FROM SITECHANGED TITLE

REMOVED LINKS

Our weeding involved over 50% of the pages in the Excel content set.Our initial pilot project ran from June through early September 2008.

After all that “weeding,” the total number of dissatisfactory page viewsfor the entire Excel content set significantly decreased!

When we compared the BEFORE period to the AFTER period, we found that total page views increased 27%, while dissatisfactory page views decreased 53%.

AFTER6 months afterweeding,dissatisfactorypage viewsdroppedto barely 3% oftotal page views.

BEFORE6 months beforeweeding,approximately10% of all pageviews weredissatisfactory!

Let’s wrap up…Maya

Lessons learned• Can’t succeed by tending to satisfaction alone

Ongoing weeding is crucial

• Cross-team collaboration is a must for success.

Team > sum(individuals)

Lessons learned (contd.)• Customers don’t notice when poor pages vanish...

or, when they become harder to find!

• We have fewer pages to manage…

…which means more time to invest in top tasks.

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