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

2. Audio pane – select audio mode. In the Audio pane, select either Use Telephone or Use Mic & Speakers. By default, you will be joined into the Webinar muted. If you select Use Telephone, be sure to enter the Audio PIN noted in your Control Panel. If you select Use Mic & Speakers you can join the Webinar via VoIP. You will need speakers to listen to the Webinar and a microphone to speak. Click Audio Setup to select Mic & Speakers devices. You can switch between using VoIP (Mic & Speakers) or Telephone during the Webinar session. Audio pane – select audio mode. In the Audio pane, select either Use Telephone or Use Mic & Speakers. By default, you will be joined into the Webinar muted. If you select Use Telephone, be sure to enter the Audio PIN noted in your Control Panel. If you select Use Mic & Speakers you can join the Webinar via VoIP. You will need speakers to listen to the Webinar and a microphone to speak. Click Audio Setup to select Mic & Speakers devices. You can switch between using VoIP (Mic & Speakers) or Telephone during the Webinar session.

3. Questions & Answer Session Use the Question pane. A.To submit text questions use the Questions pane. Questions & Answer Session Use the Question pane. A.To submit text questions use the Questions pane.

4. Speakers 4 Gerry McGovern: Founder & CEO, Customer Carewords Laurel Hale: Excel Content Publishing Manager Maya Subramanian: Business Development & Strategies Analyst

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11. Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 11

12. Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 12

13. Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 13

14. Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 14

15. Copyright © Gerry McGovern: www.customercarewords.com 15

16. 255 20042004

17. 168 20062006 53%

18. 139 20072007 17%

19. 119 20082008 14%

20. City Council has ~ 22,200 pages of content The top 200 pages or 1% account for 80% of the total page views

21. Sales per thousand dollars Ideal Site Gap Land’s End Macy’s Newport News User Interface Engineering (UIE.COM), 2005

22. Number of pages to purchase Gap Land’s End Macy’s Newport News User Interface Engineering (UIE.COM), 2005

23. The Need to Weed Maya Subramanian

24. The Story of a Web Site Not too long ago, there was a Web site…

25. …with a simple vision statement: “Give your customers what they want” “Help them find what they need”

26. The vision quickly becomes… Publish lots of cool content to the site

27. And, the authors start publishing lots of good pages…

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

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

30. Soon, the analytics team walks in, and interrupts, “Wait a second here…” Satisfactio n is not moving up! ???

31. Not what I want! Don’t like it! It turns out the customer isn’t happy with the growing site… Can’t find it!

32. Content issues? Revise it. If at first you don’t succeed, try, and try again! So, the team decides to fix things…

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

34. 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.

35. But, things don’t get much better. Success indicators still stay flat.

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

37. PauseListenAnalyzeChange

38. Lesson 1. Recognize dissatisfaction. Measure it. Report it. Share it. Don’t like it! Love it!

39. It is not sufficient to only work towards increasing satisfaction… …in fact, lowering dissatisfaction is more critical.

40. 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 Tuning Dissatisfaction Tuning

41. And, time to let go of some outdated concerns…

42. “I’m sure some users still use it!” Many, many more users seem to be hating it…

43. “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…

44. “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.

45. 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???

46. 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.

47. So, did it go as planned? Top Experiments and Results Laurel Hale

48. 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.

49. #1 Remove Pages from Site What 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!!!”

50. 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

51. 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!

52. #2 Remove Links to Page What 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!

53. 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%

54. #3 Hide Pages from Search What 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!

55. Administrative assistants, who wanted to print address labels… …were finding the ADDRESS function. Jeesh! What’s this? This Help is terrible!

56. Students, who wanted to set the print area… …were finding the AREAS function. What’s that? ???

57. 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!

58. 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 thefunction topics…

59. 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.

60. 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!

61. …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 AFTER

62. Summary of our “weeding” work… Here’s a breakdown of our weeding activity: HIDDEN FROM SEARCH REMOVED FROM SITE CHANGED 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.

63. After all that “weeding,” the total number of dissatisfactory page views for 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%. AFTER 6 months after weeding, dissatisfactory page views dropped to barely 3% of total page views. BEFORE 6 months before weeding, approximately 10% of all page views were dissatisfactory!

64. Let’s wrap up… Maya

65. 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)

66. 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.

67. Q&A

68. Questions & Answers Would you like to know more? Visit our website: www.customercarewords.com or Email: info@customercarewords.comwww.customercarewords.cominfo@customercarewords.com Customer Carewords has a network of partners across North America and Europe. Our partners have deep experience with creating customer-centric, task-managed websites utilizing Customer Carewords. Contact us to talk to a partner. To submit a question: 1.Type your question in the Questions panel. To submit a question: 1.Type your question in the Questions panel.