Redesign 1 webpage, save £54,000
Our task-focused staff homepage has saved the University a ton of time and money.
A year ago, we redesigned the 3rd most visited page in the University of Glasgow website — the MyGlasgow Staff homepage — around its users’ top tasks.
With 8,500 staff clocking up 1.5 million views a year on a page that was largely unchanged since its launch in 2015, this was the perfect target for a user-centred redesign. I wrote at the time about how we approached it. Now it’s time to quantify the impact of our work.
Disclaimer: The following is based on crude maths and potentially unreliable Google Analytics data, so I’ve rounded down a lot both for simplicity and to avoid exaggeration. Full workings at the end.
Surprising impact
We looked at Google Analytics for the MyGlasgow Staff homepage, comparing the year since we launched the task-focused layout to the previous year.
Pageviews are up 7%
Nice to know, but doesn’t tell us much on its own. Could be explained by staff numbers going up a similar amount too.
Entrances are up 22%
This is very pleasing, as it suggests more people are coming directly to the page rather than navigating to it from elsewhere on the site. Perhaps more staff have made it their browser homepage, or bookmarked it, or just know to search for it. We’ll look out for this in the next round of user testing.
Average time on page is down by 4 seconds
This is great: 4 seconds is a long time on the internet, especially when you’ve got a specific task in mind and just need to find the right link. Multiply that by several visits a week, which is what most staff are doing, and we’ve removed a considerable amount of annoyance.
It gets REALLY interesting, though, when we multiply 4 seconds by 1.5 million views and find that we’ve saved 100,000 minutes over the year 🎉JACKPOT!🎉
The average full-time member of staff works 92,400 minutes a year and costs the University £50,000. So saving 100,000 minutes is like giving the University 1.08 more staff, worth £54,000!
I’m going to say that again, only bigger:
By tailoring 1 key webpage to its users’ needs, based on evidence from those users, we saved the University 100,000 minutes of staff time = 1.08 full-timers = £54,000
Now if I can figure out how to get those 1.08 staff assigned to the UX team, imagine how much more we could do…
What next?
So far we’ve saved 100,000 minutes by redesigning 1 page. Now I’m wondering how far we can take it. Where’s the next place we can save a lot of people a little time? Or a few key groups a lot of time? Could we save a million minutes?
As we know, saving staff time saves money: a million minutes = 10.8 full-timers = more than half a million pounds!
But saving student time (or at least not conspicuously wasting it) can improve reputation: the magic elixir all universities crave. As yet I’ve only vague ideas on how to quantify that, but it’s got be worth working towards.
UofG staff: if you’d like to get involved in saving our University a million minutes, get in touch via the UX Yammer group. Let’s see if we can make this a thing.
The maths
Staff time in minutes and ££
- 1 working day = 7 hours = 420 minutes
- 1 working year = 92,400 minutes
(365 days - 105 weekend days - 9 public holidays - 31 annual leave days = 220 working days x 420 minutes) - Average cost to the University of 1 full-time post = £50,268
(including employer’s pension contribution, based on HR’s advice that the average staff member is on Grade 7, spine point 35) - 1 million minutes = 10.8 full-time posts = £542,894
(1,000,000 minutes / 92,400 = 10.8 x £50,268)
Google Analytics for the year since 3 April 2018
- Pageviews = 1,511,889
- Average time saved per pageview = 4 seconds
(compared to previous year) - Total time saved = 1.09 working years
(based on 1,511,899 pageviews x 4 seconds saved = 6,047,596 seconds = 100,793 minutes / 92,400) - Total cost saved = £54,792
(based on £50,268 x 1.09)
