Matt Lane
This article was first published on the Council’s intranet in January 2017
We’ve been trialing a few tools to better understand how staff are using StaffNet. We’re going to use these same tools on the public-facing website wellington.govt.nz in the near future.
Click tracking
Even though we use Google Analytics for analytics on most of our websites, Google Analytics does not do a good job of precise click tracking. We have been trialing a tool which creates heat maps of all of the places that people click.
Simply seeing this information (some of which is similar to Google Analytics) in a visual format can make it clearer, more compelling and reveal insights.
You can view all of heat maps we’ve collected here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzbmGt8axRq-RVpBTFVjR29hWlE
Micro surveys
The Council’s intranet (like the main public-facing website) has a large quantity of varied content. This means that information architecture, content strategy and readability are extremely important. However, after a website is first launched it organically changes overtime. This can mean that while content was well organised and relevant at launch, it can (but doesn’t always) degrade. It is important to have multiple mechanisms to get feedback from users to see that content is still useful and usable. One of these mechanisms is micro surveys.
You can see all of the feedback we received here: https://drive.google.com/open?id=14DnaBSvyWbiGZGmiL5Qo0Pw1Cd-gfdQmziNI-f6BVrk
Online chat
Online chat is increasingly popular on the web. In a Wellington City Council context, online chat might make a lot of sense because:
- we have a great Contact Centre, and
- there may be times of the day where there are troughs in telephone inquiries but peaks in web inquiries.
In addition to people in the Contact Centre responding to online chat, in the near future, it may even be possible to automate the resolution of common inquiries using chatbots.
We trialed online chat on StaffNet for the last two working days of 2016:
While we are now more confident with the tool, we are still unsure how popular online chat will be on the main website. If we go ahead with it, it would be a restricted trial (eg only exposing a small percentage of users to chat and turning it off and on at different times of the day) while we work with the Contact Centre on the process and resources needed.
The limits of online tools
All of these tools (and some others that we are going to be using) are great ways to allow feedback to come to us that wouldn’t have otherwise. However, there is no substitute for face-to-face, task based usability testing. In 2017, one of our team’s goals is to be getting in front of real-life Wellingtonians using our online services.
