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THE NEED TO WEED
Top task management @ Microsoft Office Online
April 7, 2009
www.customercarewords.com
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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!
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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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