Surveying the opposition

By Bill Raschen

You may not realise it, particularly if you’re enduring a grim day, but you have an advantage over me. It’s likely that you have an advantage over the British Government also, since, as is probable, you’ll be reading this after the British election on May 5. If so, you’ll know how the election panned out, and who the winners and losers were. It’s information that many, from a pre-election vantage point, would give good money for. What were the issues that really concerned voters? What was important to them, and how did it influence their decisions?

Similar questions will also be of relevance if you’re responsible for a large corporate website or intranet. What do your users think of the services that you’re providing? How can you gauge their views in order to improve matters, or (just as important) to provide evidence to impress senior management with?

The simplest method of doing this, as Gerry McGovern1 said recently, is to get face-to-face with your users. Make sure that you (and your staff) are visible to colleagues, and ask for their opinions. Your co-workers will appreciate it, and they may even give you some useful advice. McGovern uses the example of management at branches of McDonald’s, who are seldom to be found in a backroom office. Putting your intranet cohorts into a smart team uniform (or even awarding them stars for long service) may be pushing it a bit, but in general, he makes a worthwhile point.

A more technical methodology for checking on how colleagues are using your online services will be to analyse the results of online statistical packages such as WebTrends. If one is cynical about it, then the analysis of usage statistics can be rather like predicting the future by counting tea leaves – there is an element of interpretation involved. Nonetheless, some sensible conclusions can be made. For example, what are the most frequently accessed files? More importantly, are there sites or pages you’d expect to be high up in the rankings that are instead languishing in obscurity? If so, it would be worth investigating why. Finally, is overall usage of the resource over a period of time reflecting the numbers of staff within the organisation? If usage is static, yet staff numbers have risen, then you may have a problem.

Discussion of these methods brings one quite neatly to what can be described as a hybrid of the two: a user survey. Whether you decide to opt for an online or a paper-based survey, it’s wise to be aware of one or two caveats. If you get the chance, set the questions yourself (hell, you know the resource better than anyone else, don’t you?). Moreover, it’s worth being aware that filling in a survey will always bring out the curmudgeonly worst in your respondents. If push comes to shove, you may have to remind senior management about this foible of human nature as well.

More practically, user surveys should provide you with some very useful (and painfully honest) feedback if they allow respondents to remain anonymous and are conducted on a regular basis. If colleagues think there’s room for improvement in an aspect of the service you’re providing, then you can expect to be told about it here. Just grit your teeth and take notes. And, just as importantly, a survey such as this will give your users the chance to suggest improvements to the resource: improvements that you can work upon accordingly.

There is one further important mechanism for gauging the views of your users: the use of workshops or seminars. These are particularly worthwhile if they have a specified aim (for example, the proposed redesign of a site’s navigation structure), and have added benefit if you compare and contrast the results of several workshops: for example, checking whether different groups of colleagues hold similar views.

By judicious use of the methods outlined above, you should build up a good picture of how your target audience is currently using the web services you provide, their likes and dislikes, and what they are asking for. Being a receptive listener won’t necessarily win you any elections, but it will help to win you the vote of your users.

1. Gerry McGovern, ‘New Thinking’, 25/04/05: The Number One Skill for Managing a Website