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Your website management strategy in 1 chart (part 2 of 2)

First iteration strategy: Focus only on the top 5% of tasks

In Part 1 of 'Your website management strategy in 1 chart', we showed why the most effective web strategy might be to focus only on users' Top Tasks – even if only for a while.

Supposing you can’t ‘ignore’ the other 95%?

Sometimes it’s also not politically expedient to actively ignore the bulk of your organization’s work. Sometimes you just have no choice. So here’s a refined strategy – still in 1 slide:

Let’s look at that new strategic component:

If your website is typical, then much content is low priority. Some will be out of date. Some will have no owner or author. Probably, there are pages and content that no-one even knows are there. Some pages are never accessed. Some content is never read. Some content supports tasks that no-one ever does. Some content is necessary because of the need to provide an alternate language, or because it is required by law, policy, etc. The bulk of most website content supports infrequent and low priority tasks.

And all of this low priority content has a number of major detrimental outcomes:

The point of the strategy is still to focus on the top tasks. This means not focusing on content unless it serves a top task. This also means that the only attention you should pay the other 95% is when it damages users’ top task performance. What you’ll find is that by enabling excellent performance on the top 5%, you will naturally start to archive, remove, re-work, and push down in the navigation all that other content – starting with the content that is most damaging to users’ top task performance.

Evolving your website strategy: Looking for 'quick wins' in the next 5%

If you still feel a little nervous about taking such a strong stance with management, or if your bosses prefer a more nuanced strategy, then perhaps this slightly more subtle approach is for you:

The priority remains the same – the top 5% of tasks. But this version allows you to put together a separate (but coordinated) project, looking for what ‘quick wins’ might be in the next 5% of users’ top tasks. There may be secondary tasks that are important to your users, and where performance can be improved with relatively little effort – perhaps bringing a list of links to those tasks up a level, for example.

The strategy’s long-term secret

This is the strategy’s long-term secret: you never take your eyes off the top tasks. You start at the top and work your way down, but you never take your eyes off the top tasks.

Once the users’ performance on their top tasks is excellent (as measured by completion rates, completion time, etc), you check regularly to ensure that it stays that way. That's because other projects in your organization might damage the vital work you’ve already done, and because websites, left to themselves, tend to decay. And even once you’ve got the top tasks working well for your customers, when you get to dealing with the next-priority set of tasks, you need to make sure you’re not undoing your earlier good work. It’s more a process of benchmarking and continuous improvement, than a one-off ‘project’.

Another related secret is that you should assign responsibility for users' top task performance to a senior manager or managers. Managing by top tasks instead of by the technology, tools and content requires a change in mindset. But that’s another story...

Related articles and references

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We conducted a large number of Customer Centric Index (CCI) projects over the past year that measured those factors that were really annoying customers on client websites or intranets. Invariably the two largest contributors to a negative experience are poor search results and confusing menus and links. People are having difficulty with the basics, difficulty finding their desired content.

Findability of content is a critical precursor to website usability. If people can’t find the content or application how can they make use of it? How can they accomplish their tasks?

Ignoring findability can be very costly. It prevents your website from acting as the self-service asset which it was intended to be. In fact it can become a liability in terms of lost sales, reduced use, and increased customer dissatisfaction. Poor findability wastes your visitors’ time, reduces task completion rates, lengthens task completion time and sometimes results in costly errors. Worse yet it can drive people away from your website, never to return.

If people have difficulty finding their desired content they will take the easiest path forward. If they have a choice, they will move on to a less frustrating website – usually only one or two clicks away. If there is no alternative website, they will use your website as little as possible and resort to other means, such as phone and personal contact, to accomplish their tasks. Obviously the latter strategies defeat the purpose of having a self-service website and can be very costly to your organization.

The following quotes are from some of our recent task performance testing projects. They provide a sense of some of the frustration many customers are experiencing.

We often find people going to great lengths to avoid or minimize their use of a website that makes it difficult for them to find their desired content, even in situations where they also believe the content to be very valuable. Many people will get help from others, bookmark the page, and never explore the full richness the website has to offer. They never find out about the great new content or added capabilities.

How would you, as a store owner, feel if you spent a lot of time and effort setting up displays at your front door, bringing in exciting new product displays, etc. only to find out that most of your customers are parachuting directly into one or two spots they’ve visited before, conducting their business and leaving? All your efforts at the front door or on aisle displays would be wasted. That is what bookmarks do.

When we told people in a recent project that they could not use their bookmarks to accomplish certain tasks they reacted as if we had chopped off one of their limbs, making comments such as:

Findability is key to your success on the web. When it is lacking, people quickly become frustrated and negative feelings develop. Here’s how one test participant expressed his frustration:

“I compare <intranet website> to taking every piece of information ever compiled by someone in some role that is then dumped into a large trash bin which we are to dig through until we find what we want.”

• Your user is in "get there" mode
• Link visibility and usability guidelines
  

Search performance indicator

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