What do you do with 1400 responses in a week?

Now that you know why it’s necessary to understand user intent, and how Task Analytics works to deliver that understanding, comes the inevitable: How do you manage the flood of responses?

For the past year, we have been in a pilot with a global leader in networking, cybersecurity, and IoT, working with their internal security team to meet the gold standard in enterprise security SaaS readiness (see Dave’s blog for more about that experience). Previously, their team used Gerry McGovern’s Task Management methodology (and had done so for many years, because they understand the importance of identifying which tasks on their site are giving their users trouble). Over the last eight months, the digital marketing team overseeing their website deployed our intent-based survey — at first to just their product pages, where only 10% to 15% of page traffic was prompted with the survey, as we worked to receive security certification.

Well, this past week, with our Security Certification in place, the company removed the governor. Overnight, every single visitor to the company’s product pages was asked, Will you let us know why you came to this website? And sure enough, a lot of users wanted to share their thoughts. In six days, 1400 users revealed their intentions, if they were successful, and if not, what did they did instead. And, since the company believes in continuous data collection, responses keep flowing in.

Now what? If these were heatmap videos you’d brew a big pot of coffee and settle in for a long day of heat map video speculation. If these were your click path reports, you’d get out the Ouija board to help you gander as to why users clicked what they clicked. By simply asking, Hey, what are you trying to do?, the company got the whole picture, right up-front. (Pour yourself an espresso instead.)

What does the team see when they open the Task Analytics dashboard? First, the Overall Completion Rate across the entire site, encompassing all of their Top Tasks. The team can sort tasks by Overall Demand or Completion Rate; highest to lowest, or vice versa. By Demand allows you to see which task is most in-demand; By Completion Rate allows the team to sort by the tasks users struggle with the most, or which ones they complete with greater success.

No matter how many responses the team is flooded with, they can quickly identify the task they want to explore, either by demand or pain point, and click into it. For a specific task, they see the number of responses for the task, and the demand for the task over time, as well as how the task’s Completion Rate over time. Did a recent update improve the user’s success rate with this task? Or did it have an adverse effect?

Now the espresso is kicking in. You can also:

• Filter by time period, visited pages, traffic source

• Identify trends and Top Tasks during specific periods

• Compare Completion Rate over time

• Deep-dive to find the root cause

• Segment response to identifying the hurdles per segment or visitor type

• Gain context into user’s intent by analyzing customer’s free text responses

With the ability to visually see the intent of their users, you can spot concrete and actionable insights. After one week and 1400 responses, our client’s team will be able to head into their Monday meetings aligned around what the issues are, and how to fix them.

That’s the power of intent.