Aiding SBA.gov Pandemic Relief Efforts: Bixal’s Strategies for Deploying and Analyzing User Surveys

Earlier this year, U.S. Congress passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which offered a stimulus package and provided economic relief to U.S. citizens impacted by the coronavirus pandemic. During this time, the Small Business Administration (SBA) braced for a rush of users navigating the newly available financial aid.

Average daily visitors to the SBA site jumped more than 3,000% from April 2019 to April 2020, after the United States declared a state of emergency, and www.SBA.gov suddenly experienced a staggering 1.4 million users per day. The SBA remained adaptive to this increased demand through Bixal’s implementation of user surveys; these surveys were updated to further parse the needs of small business owners looking for relief from the pandemic’s impact.

The team’s foresight to deploy a revamped survey in February of 2019 ensured baseline pre-pandemic data — along with the ability to quickly expand with new questions. While several tools including Google Analytics provide a foundation for understanding user behavior, surveys from ForeSee helped Bixal fill in the gaps.

During this surge in demand for federal relief funding, Bixal leveraged these surveys to help the SBA adapt to changing user-journeys and demographics, expanding offerings to include 18 different languages and serve a broader, multi-lingual population. Users have submitted more than 20,000 surveys this year, and they now serve as the keystone of qualitative user experience research on the project.

How our survey solution works

The ForeSee interface allows UX leads to customize both the survey itself and the method of deployment to website users by way of a URL-targeted badge on the right side of the user’s browser window.

Some updates require involvement from the Office of Management and Budget, for which ForeSee representatives play a role in catalyzing the submission of relevant paperwork and approvals. Bixal facilitates communication regarding required forms between OMB and the SBA and ensures a smooth process. Theoretically, the website development team can “hard-code” this snippet on the site, but Bixal was able to remove dependencies and increase flexibility by running the survey through Google Tag Manager (GTM).

Whenever Bixal creates a new survey or updates an existing one through ForeSee’s interface, that change is then routed through a GTM tag containing the ForeSee code on SBA.gov, syndicating the update though the GTM console.

Sifting through a treasure trove of UX data

User surveys let the analytics team compare the number of users directed to various COVID-19 relief applications to the number of people on SBA.gov who categorize themselves as seeking different types of economic help. Survey submissions indicate more than 80% of SBA site users during the pandemic wanted access to Covid relief.

Entering spring 2020, Bixal had already built a robust dataset from SBA.gov surveys to evaluate how well the government agency was serving user needs. This baseline played a critical role as Bixal adapted the survey to assess small business owners’ pursuit of stimulus applications and information. As various SBA personnel looked for answers, survey responses helped connect the dots and reveal new user behaviors.

This included segmenting user satisfaction ratings by the loans people pursued: Paycheck Protection Program, Emergency Injury Disaster Loans, or more traditional SBA loans. The Bixal team could also identify users who were uncertain of the type of loan they wanted, and then analyze trends within that segment. Bixal can also take feedback captured on COVID-related content and compare it to other pages on the site, while still factoring whether the COVID-agnostic pages were seeing a significant trend in satisfaction rating pre- and post-pandemic. We were ready to measure and respond.

Survey expansion for a multi-lingual audience

Bixal’s team of Spanish-language content specialists created a Spanish version of the survey, ensuring the use of terms understood by the diverse Spanish-speaking community in the U.S., as we have done for SBA.gov en español.

Per the CARES Act guidance, the SBA now offers web content in 18 languages. After updating the SBA language library, Bixal collaborated with SBA translators to create 16 new iterations that — in addition to existing surveys in English and Spanish — have been deployed in the following languages:

• Arabic
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• French
• German
• Gujarati
• Haitian Creole
• Hindi
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Tagalog
• Vietnamese

As the pandemic carried on, it became clear there was a challenge in knowing what relief users wanted versus how well they understood the type of financial support they actually needed — and how well the SBA’s website currently guides that nuanced experience.

Throughout this process, Bixal’s content strategy and UX teams remain flexible in answering elusive questions around the gamut of user journeys. Polling did not exist on SBA.gov entering 2019.

Bixal’s content strategy and UX teams can leverage nearly two years of surveys and open-ended feedback to deliver insights for our client on small business owners’ path to relief.