Measuring the progress of the Global Business Support Finder

Last month we released the public beta of the Global Business Support Finder, a new digital service to help service exporters expand their business globally.

Now that it’s been live for a month, we’d like to share how we’re measuring performance, insights so far, and how we’re using the insights to improve the service.

A photo from the team’s fortnightly retrospective

How we’re measuring performance

We’re following the Digital Service Standard, which says we should measure the performance of our service. This is so that we use data to make decisions about how we improve the service.

We measure the performance of the Global Business Support Finder:

• qualitatively — through user research sessions and analytics tools
• quantitatively — against the four key performance indicators (KPIs) defined in the Digital Service Standard

The four KPIs in the Standard are:

1. user satisfaction, which measures ease of use and understanding of the information
2. completion rates, which measure the percentage of users who successfully complete the service
3. digital take-up, which measures the growth of unique visitors
4. cost per transaction

We have the tools to measure the first three KPIs, and we’re exploring how we can measure the cost of supporting the tool for each user interaction.

Since the team started in alpha in January, we’ve completed user research with 29 users. Of these, five were since we released the public beta in April. We’ve met with a diverse range of users across Australia, in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Wollongong and Brisbane.

We’re also using Hotjar to understand how users interact with the service and where they get stuck. It helps inform improvements. For example, it can identify:

• engagement with content on a page
• user experience issues
• site-wide trends around how specific elements are used
• where users drop-off in the journey

What we’ve learned so far

Over the past month we’ve learned a lot about how people are using the service.

Users have given us a 3.8-star rating, which has steadily increased since we released public beta. On a 5-point scale (very difficult to very easy) the tool weighted an average 3.6 on ease of use, and 3.3 on understanding the information.

Potential areas of improvement identified by user feedback include having more industry information, and expansion of the services list. So we’ll work on creating content in those areas.

Our completion rate since release has fluctuated and varies depending on promotional activity. It’s currently at 47%.

A screen shot of the ‘Arts and culture in Taiwan’ page in Hotjar. It shows where people are clicking on the page. Red indicates a lot of clicks.

What we’re doing with the feedback

Since we released the public beta in early April, we’ve released 34 updates to the service. Here’s what we found and how we iterated the service based on that feedback:

• Online feedback and user research sessions indicated that users couldn’t find their service, so we added ‘my service isn’t listed here’ to the drop-down list. This allows the user to get information about their chosen market, even if we haven’t yet created content about their service. After this change, Hotjar indicated a decrease in the drop-off rate.
• User research and online feedback identified content gaps relating to grants and tax incentives. We’re currently exploring how we can best provide this information to users.
• User research indicated startup/scaleup content wasn’t resonating, so we’re simplifying it.

What’s next?

In our next few sprints, we’re focused on:

• improvements for users with accessibility needs
• A/B testing on the results page checklist
• working with other government agencies to incorporate new content into the service

We’ll continue testing with users to understand client pain points and user needs. In particular, this sprint we’re focusing on testing the design of calls to action.

Promotion of the service will also continue, to help us get feedback from a larger pool of users.

If you would like to provide feedback on the Global Business Support Finder, please email us or jump into the service and use the in-built feedback tools.

Louise Evic is a Subject Matter Expert in the Global Business Support Finder team, working on analysis and insights for Austrade’s digital services.

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