Agencies compete with Amazon.com, whether they like it or not. Here are five steps to making your users happy.
Each quarter, federal agencies are in a competition, not just among themselves, but also with private industry. The game? Score as high as possible up the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a gauge developed by the University of Michigan for judging how satisfied users are with Web sites of all stripes. The group’s assessment is an important measure for agencies because it describes how well they’re interacting with citizens online. The latest results, released last September, show agencies could do better.
Collectively, agency Web sites scored 73.5 on ACSI’s 100-point customer satisfaction scale. ACSI considers 80 points or higher a mark of superior customer satisfaction. Many commercial companies made the 80-point club, but only 13 agency sites did [www.gcn.com, Quickfind 526]. The fact is, sophisticated operations such as Amazon.com have trained users to demand more from all Web sites, including government sites, particularly when it comes to usability. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to make your site friendlier. And they don’t require a ton of work.
Follow these techniques, culled from agencies that have used them, and soon you’ll have a bead on your constituents. And maybe your site will be the Amazon.com of government.
Step 1 analyze those logs
Each time a visitor hits your site, the Web server records what pages were requested, when they were requested and what address they were shipped to. Once aggregated, the data in these logs can help Web managers sculpt their sites to better meet user needs.
A working group of the Interagency Committee on Government Information known as the Web Managers Advisory Council formed a task group to determine what were the best ways to use these metrics. Chaired by the Library of Congress’ Joe Pagano, the group has begun creating a list of best practices for Web metrics, as well as a standard format for reporting metrics.
But there are also plenty of free tools available to make sense of the mountains of accumulated data. The open-source Analog application compiles logs into text reports, showing things such as the most popular pages, how much bandwidth is used and when during the day the Web server gets the most traffic.
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