FREEDyourMind

ACSI E-Gov Index Results and New Online Transparency Research

The ACSI's quarterly E-Gov Index was released today and we saw scores hold steady from last quarter--73.6 on the study's 100-point scale. Problem is, scores dropped last quarter, so we aren't seeing a rebound yet. Personally, I think this has a lot to do with the fact that departments and agencies are in a holding pattern waiting for specific guidance on how to implement all the fancy Web 2.0 stuff that the White House wants them to do. And the White House has been collecting public input about what they should do.

The hot new thing in government is open government, transparency, collaboration, participation . . . watch how often you see those words in memos and news conferences and government tweets.

This brings me to the other piece of research we released today on transparency and e-gov. We've seen over the years that online citizen satisfaction plays a huge role in government efficiency and effectiveness. So we decided to test out whether it related to online transparency, collaboration, participation, and even trust in government, Turns out there is a huge relationship.

Online customer satisfaction directly impacts citizens trust in government. Not only that, online satisfaction impacts their likelihood to participate and collaborate with an agency in the future. Highly satisfied federal website visitors are:
• 49% more likely to trust the agency or department overall;
• 54% more likely to participate in communication with the agency online or offline in the future;
• 73% more likely to collaborate with the agency online in the future using interactive features such as wikis or blogs;
• 54% more likely to return to the site;
• 78% more likely to recommend the site;
• 77% more likely to use the site as a primary resource for interaction with the agency overall.

This strikes me as huge. Just by improving the website, you can impact trust, collaboration, and even cost-saving behaviors like using the site as a primary resource.

So how do you increase satisfaction? It's going to differ from site to site, depending both on existing strengths and weaknesses and on the site's mission. But in aggregate, we found that the top priorities are online transparency and online search. That means that focusing on those two things will have the greatest impact on online satisfaction.

So in short, online transparency leads to online satisfaction. Online satisfaction leads to trust, collaboration, participation, cost savings, efficiency, effectiveness, and a chicken in every pot.

We're really excited about the potential of this research. Stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.

CS Session Replay – 2 Months in!

This is a guest post from Drew Bennett, our senior product director at ForeSee results.

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This past May at e-Metrics we released an exciting new product called CS SessionReplay. In the most basic sense, CS SessionReplay makes movies of a customer’s site visit (as long as they respond to your satisfaction survey!) that you can watch and observe. It truly is the ultimate usability study – on demand, perpetual and directly linked to critical data such as satisfaction scores, custom question responses and future behaviors. You can look at those key audiences at any time and truly “sit on their shoulder” and see what they see.

We were thrilled at the time to bring such a compelling solution into the market place, and we all expected great things. However, if I’d tried to guess the full power of the tool in advance, I would have really underestimated it. Customers do interesting and unpredictable things on websites, and being able to get insight into their actual experience on the site is fascinating and serves up great and tangible opportunities for improvement.

On occasion, watching movies of user sessions reinforces what you expected. For example, a visitor gives very low scores to the search function on the website, then when you watch their session, you can see they had trouble with it. That makes sense but provides a great “real life” example to back up the hard data when making the case that search needs to be improved. It can also provide guidance for small site tweaks that you might have otherwise missed. In addition many times you can confirm that the changes you made to improve the users experience actually take hold, look at their scores and watch them use the improvement as you had hoped – confirmation that your focus and spending were on target.

In other cases it is amazing to see where people move between options and how they use your site, not in a usability lab, but in practice. Couple this with open ended comments, and it is really pretty eye opening. I recently looked at some open ended comments expressing concern about the availability and clarity of shipping information. When you review the site it lists two different options, within a matter of an inch the site listed two links “shipping info” and “freight fees”. In reviewing the movie the user moves their mouse in between the two, uncertain where to go. Once they clicked on one they went in a circle to get back to the original as it did not have the information they were looking for. This pointed out a somewhat obvious and potential opportunity for improvement – the customer was confused and indicated as much in their scores, comments and actions. The “total package” of information at your finger tips.

It is somewhat like seeing a concert “in the round”, you get to see all aspects of the customer, their actions, their attitudes and intentions as well as their direct comments leading to a comprehensive view of the customer. It truly is making the dream of a “full view” of the customer something more than a dream but an actual reality. As the old adage says “a picture is worth 1,000 words” but in this case I have truly come to believe that it is more of a picture and a 1,000 words creating a deep, full 3-D style view of your customer. Nothing could be better in helping to build and protect that most precious of all assets, your customers!

Are You an Elitest?

Kevin's post on whether elitism is the source of poor usability is getting a lot of attention this week. One of the commenters has a great point about watching the user experience before they even get to the site. It may not technically be site usability, but still useful and illuminating.

What mix of techniques do you use to improve usability?