Webinar on Review of EERE Web Site and Consumer Site (Text Version)
Below is the text version of the EERE Web Site Analysis webinar, presented by Brian Lamb of the Gerry McGovern group.
Sarah Kirchen: ...really time to take a good look at our Web site from the perspective of a user or an outside viewer. That is why we asked Leslie Gardner, who is our template coordinator and our content manager out at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, to engage in a content analysis of our Web site and bring some resources to bear on our Web site that would help us get a better handle on our content.
I just want to share with you the title of a book. This is a really, really good book on Web site usability by Steve Krug and the title is Don't Make Me Think and all too often that is what we do with our Web sites and I think in this demonstration by Brian Lamb you will see what are the inadvertent ways in which we make people think about our Web site. We hope this presentation will be useful to you, not just in terms of better understanding how an outside user uses the EERE Web site but also thinking about your own specific Web site content areas. Some of the questions that are being asked in this exercise and in this analysis you might say, "Well nobody asks those kinds of questions when they come to our Web site," but there are basic questions that your users ask when they do come to your Web site and I think if you'll listen to Brian's methodology and his analysis, how he went about analyzing our Web site, it will give you some food for thought about how to think about developing and managing content and navigation on your site.
So, having said that, I'd like to turn the meeting over to Leslie for some opening comments and then she'll turn it over to Brian Lamb of the Gerry McGovern group, which is one of the world known, world acclaimed content and Web site design analysis organizations specifically dealing with large, complex Web sites. So Leslie?
Leslie Gardner: Thank you Sarah and welcome everyone. Sarah, can I ask who's in the room with you?
Sarah Kirchen: I have about 13 people and I'm not going to—
Leslie Gardner: No, that's fine. That's fine. That's great. Well, hi everybody. As Sarah said, we started last year doing multiple types of content analysis on the EERE Web site and this is one of several activities that we're working on. Brian gave us some great feedback. What are the top tasks of what people want to do on the EERE Web site and this is also a huge focus in the Federal Web Managers arena and if you guys use webcontent.gov as a resource, they have a whole page on focusing your site on critical tasks and they developed a roadmap to implement a task-focused Web site. So we wanted to align with our federal manager colleagues and go through this meaningful exercise.
So the most challenging thing was to decide which tasks were the most important and we looked at our stats data and our search data and from that, we know that the consumer, the EERE consumer Web site is the number one site in all of EERE. The consumer site gets over 2 million visitors each year so that was a great place to start. And then thanks to our good partners at Washington State University, we met with Lee Link and Jennifer Carter and they gave us, actually, the specific words of questions that they get at the information center to help formulate these tasks that Brian is going to share with us today.
So I think that's it. So Brian, we will turn it over to you. I guess one point of order is that this presentation is an hour long and I would like to recommend that we hold questions until the end just to keep our time as efficient as possible.
I also have this presentation recording and if the recording works out well, I will be happy to share it with anybody who wants it afterwards.
Okay. Brian, I'll turn it over to you now.
Brian Lamb: Thank you, Leslie and thank you everybody in EERE for attending today and particularly to Leslie for working hard on getting ready for today.
So let's get started. Here's a picture of me. In my youth, I was a free spirit and it was that same spirit that attracted me to working on the World Wide Web. It was a great place for a young man to come and experiment, and try things out, and try new things and the whole atmosphere was one of, "Hey, anything can happen here," and anything generally did. I really enjoyed those times but after a while as I got more in my career and started managing things instead of making things, I became frustrated particularly with web projects because they seemed to start off with a great burst and then kind of run out of steam and lots of things just didn't end up getting used and it all began to lose a little bit of it's charm. Then I met this man, this is Gerry McGovern, and Gerry recognized something pretty fundamental about the Web a few years ago. He said, "Hey, there are some things we know about this thing called the Web. We do know some rules. There is some best practice. There are some ways of doing things. The age of experimentation may just be coming to an end in some way. There probably is something to be learned from other disciplines that we can put into this web publishing idea." So I started—I met Gerry and was lucky enough to do some work. I was based in Belfast and then I continued to work with him right up until now. I find that the rules that he provided are a really solid guide to being successful on the Web and he used a methodology that I use to have a look at the EERE sites that Leslie and Sarah asked me to look at.
I am just a piano player. Please do not shoot me. I will be—There's very little point in my reviewing your site and telling you, "Well, everything is hunky dory. You're doing all these things and they're great. It all works technically. Blah-de-blah." So the presentation is a critique. I am offering you what I hope is constructive feedback on your site from a particular perspective and one which I hope will fuel what should be for EERE a really active debate about the future of it's web presence. So don't shoot the piano player.
Now, let's get into this thing. Web customers sometimes look a little like this. They are anonymous. They are on the other end of the screen. You never see them. In order to make them real, in this review of your site, I've chosen to use a technique called personas and some of you may be aware of that technique. It's just a fancy way of saying that I made some people up. Here's my persona. He's called Jim. He's just a regular guy. He's doing his computing at home and he's married and he has one small child, she just started school and he works a regular—he does a bit of a commute everyday. It's a bit of a feature of his life. He has to get up early and commute and when he goes on to the Web, he has a task that he wants to achieve.
Now, just think for a moment about the last time you were on the World Wide Web and the last site that you were on. Has everybody got an idea of a site in their mind? There's no need for everybody to answer. I realize I can't hear everybody, but I'm hoping that you all have pictures of various sites. Now, when you went on that site, you had a task, something you were gonna do in mind. I bet you did because I tell you what. You can count on the fingers of probably both hands the number of people who say, "Oh, I've got a spare 15 minutes, I'll just go and have a look around the EERE Web site." There is nobody doing that. Everybody who comes to your site has got something that they're trying to achieve and it's not something vague like get information. It's a real and tangible thing that they want to do. That's not rocket science but I tell you if you could manage to hold that thought in everything you do about your Web site then you can improve it dramatically.
To help us do that, Leslie has worked hard on producing some tasks that Jim and Jim's wife, Steph, are gonna carry out. So you're seeing Steph and Jim together working through something on the computer. The purpose of personas is to give us some empathy with the Web customer so they don't appear like that first slide I've shown: the anonymous cardboard cutout where you just don't know who they are. They don't have a real presence and so we generate some empathy and we get some focus so we can actually apply some focus. Often on the Web, we don't have a great deal of focus. Personas can help us focus by saying, "These are the tasks of our persona and let's concentrate on those." A big consensus, a lot of discussions around the Web and everybody's got a point of view about what their favorite content is. If you can have a convincing persona with a real set of tasks, then everybody can coalesce around those and hopefully there is an emergent consensus on what you should publish and what you should do.
So, back to personas. I think they are excellent tools and they're not—there's a whole industry on making them but I tell you what, you can just develop them on your own pretty quickly and they function pretty good just like that. There's lots of good books on the making of them and you can get quite sophisticated if you want with them. But I'm saying that my first key recommendation to EERE is to build some simple personas for your site. You need to do it. The process of doing it is nearly as valuable as anything else and they will help you enormously in focusing your energies on the right content. That's my first recommendation to you.
As Sarah and Leslie mentioned, we're gonna look at some tasks that Jim and Steph together want to carry out on the EERE Web site. We're gonna visit a number of EERE Web sites and the focus is very much on the broad, the popular tasks and I think that's good because, for me and for the—the Web is a mass medium, and if you're gonna do a Web site right, if you're gonna really help people and you're gonna consistently publish material that helps them complete tasks, you need to have a firm business case for doing that because it costs money to publish. There's no such thing as free publishing and if anybody tells you that there is and that you can just put stuff up on the Web and there's consequence is wrong. If you're gonna make a set of tasks work for your customers and your Web sites, there's a cost and therefore these tasks better be pretty popular to justify the cost of it. So they're popular tasks and we're gonna take Jim and Steph through some of them.
This is the first one. How can I get solar power for my home? The very important thing about this task is these words: Solar Power. That's a care word for your customers right there. Solar Power, that phrase. Words are really, really important on the Web and these two words, solar power, are kind of important for EERE. Why is that?
Words are the fundamental thing that's going on on the Web. You can talk about graphics or video or all sorts of technologies behind them but basically what we do when we get on a Web site is we read. The things that we read are words. The things that we enter in search engines are words. The things that we enter in Web forums are words. Words are at the center of everything we do and the choice of words we use on our Web sites have a large impact on the success or otherwise that it has with your customers.
Let me try and make that real for you. Here is some search data on two terms: low fare. Low fare is what the airline industry calls cheap flights. Here is some search data for them. It's actually from 2004 but if I updated this slide, it would say largely the same story. The volume would be a little bit higher here because the general volume of the Web has gone up but there's 6,375 people in February of 2004 searched for the term low fare. Okay? That's the total for cheap flights. If you run a site selling low fares, what's the phrase that you're gonna put in your site if you want to be found? I don't need to ask you to answer that because the answer is cheap flights. It's going to be a disaster if you insist on calling everything low fares. Despite the fact that if you're in the airline industry and you're talking to other airline guys, you're gonna use low fare. When you go to lunch and you go to the cantina and you're in the airline industry, you talk about low fares. On the Web, you've got to talk about cheap flights because that's what your customers are talking about. On the Web, you use your customer's language, the language they use to describe tasks, and that brings me back to Jim and solar power.
Here he is looking for solar power on the consumer's site and he's at your home section and he's looking hard and thinking about getting solar power. "Where is solar power? Where is solar power? Where is solar power?" The terms that you used, the first link that he might encounter if he reads the opening paragraph is renewable energy. Well, I had a look for Jim and just how many Jim's are looking for renewable energy? 6,001. That's from Keyword Discovery, a slightly different engine, but nevertheless, very reliable and I'm looking 2 months behind so that's looking at October of this year's search data. Let's have a look at solar power. Now, it's not as big of a difference as cheap flights and low fare but it's a significant difference for you. Those words, solar power, are what Jim's looking for when he's doing that thing and there aren't many people looking for renewable energy because it's my guess, it's my hunch that renewable energy is a kind of insider term not the one that everybody thinks about. It's one you might use if you've either done a bit of studying on energy or if you're working in an energy industry. It's vital that we find the words that are close to the top and close to our customers and that we use our language, particularly in large organizations. It's essential for large organizations to develop their own language. They have to otherwise their conversations would be interminable. We all need this internal language. It's vital for us to get, and I do it in my industry all the time. I shout out things like care words and Web browsers and all sorts of things and people look at me quizzically because it's inside language. It's language that is inside my industry and it's essential that I know it so that I can have conversations with my peers but when you're on the Web and you're talking to Jim, you've got to use his terms. Renewable energy is just—it's not entirely clear to him what's going on there.
And again, when he goes back to the home page there and he can't find solar power and he doesn't really know what renewable energy is, he goes back to the homepage. He thinks he'll try this quick links box and then he sees this: Passive solar, solar water heating, solar electric systems. "I want solar power. Is that what this is all about? What's passive solar?" It all leaves him feeling a little bit puzzled.
So really what I'm saying there is look out or those words and the same thing here with this phrase, carbon footprint. I don't really know what carbon footprint is but I do know that this task, this phrase and task, carbon footprint, has become a buzz phrase and also to people it's bouncing about in the media and so on. It's one that's larger than my head and larger than Jim's head when he comes to the site and thinks about, "What can I do about the environment and stuff? My little girl has just started school and she's bringing me home all this stuff about global warming and carbon footprints. I know. I'll go and I'll find out about that." And here is, again, just to back that up, back up that little story about carbon footprints and why it's an important set of words for you is this trend history here. This is from Google Trends and it's showing the search volume, the search volume of carbon footprints versus energy audit, a term which you do use on the site. You can see on the right of that slide, you can see some of the news references that have triggered the volume of searches for carbon footprints. You can see carbon footprint has become sort of a media buzz phrase and the searches are spiking around those media things. And again, what I've got to say to you is your language is important in your industry, but on the Web it's the consumer's language that drives traffic to you. If you're not using those terms, it's difficult for people to achieve their tasks because they associate those words with their tasks.
Here is the search results from the site for carbon footprints and I can assure you that none of these links lead to the content that Jim wants to try and find carbon footprints estimated so he left kind of stymied with that task and that was far as I could really get realistically with Jim because people on the Web are impatient. Jim will not hang around. He's done a few things, but he has a two hour commute, he has limited time to be on the Web, and he wants to get things done. He's gonna go somewhere else to find that carbon footprint calculator.
So a key recommendation here is to find the language that your customers use by observing them and asking them. So this is not always easy and there's a lot of different techniques for doing it but if you're publishing stuff on the Web, then you've got to be somehow observing your customers and finding out what is the language that they use. This applies not just to Jim and his consumer task, it applies to any major customer group and they're gonna be using their language not yours. It's really easy to fall into the trap of not doing that. So my recommendation is to find a way to identify the language that your customers use. At its simplest, that is sitting down somebody in front of your Web site and observing them using it and asking them to think out loud. "Sit down in front of my Web site and tell me what you think. What's happening now? Why did that happen? What did you do there?" These are the good questions to ask and let's hear what they say and let's listen to the language that they use and you will find out what language they use with their task.
Okay. Jim's back. He's fortified with a donut and coffee and he's determined to find out about solar power. Off he goes back to your home. "Electricity, yes. I can buy electricity. Now, this page is a little bit puzzling. I buy clean electricity. What? Is that solar electricity? Green car? Make your own electricity? I don't know. I don't know what it is. I'm gonna have something else to eat but I'm determined to get it done." And eventually he clicks on clean electricity and he gets there.
There's good content here, actually. The solar systems content I thought was good and comprehensive and Jim has everything he could possibly need there. It was just a little hard for him to get it. He had to keep on clicking and in the end he was really tired of it after his long trek through the EERE Web site. It should be easier for him to achieve that task. Solar Power is a popular term and, okay, it might not be the only offering EERE has in this area and there may be other ones they wish to promote but if it's a popular term, I tell you that on the Web, you have no option but to follow that because people aren't really like Jim. They will not persist. They'll go somewhere else. They will find the content somewhere else or they will just abandon it.
Okay. So that leads me on to simplicity. Keep it simple. It's really easy. It's motherhood and apple pies. "Of course, we're going to make our Web site simple!" But it's so easy to overcomplicate it because there are so many compelling things to publish. There's so many projects across EERE that's such an urgent issue. Everybody's working hard. Everybody's got a project. Everybody's got something to publish. But you know what? The more you publish the more stuff you put online, the more complex your site becomes and the harder it is for people to achieve the big tasks, the major tasks, the tasks that might result in a real change. You can't publish everything and you can't have a simple site, an easy to use site, if you publish everything.
Here are the masters of simplicity: Google. It's wonderful isn't it? Look at it. There's no doubting what you're gonna do here. You're gonna search. That's it. It's brilliantly simple. Of course, EERE are not Google. You've got a more complex job to do, but you cannot push that complexity on to the Web without making life complex for your customers. Here's an alternative version of Google. This is Google redesigned so that it could be found. Imagine it was just a search engine that nobody knew and it was trying desperately to get search traffic. This is what it would look like. It would have all this additional gunk all around it.
Which one do we prefer? We prefer the other Google, the simple Google, that's the one that is compelling. That's the one that we're familiar with and we love, and we love it because it let's us do what we want. We want to search. Google has got lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of content. This is just a snapshot of the tools that Google have beyond that first page. There they all are. Look at them. That's not even half of them. Now, I know. Let's suggest to Google, the person that runs that Google front page, and there is such a person, let's suggest to him, "Hey, let's put all those links on the front page of Google." What do you think his answer would be? It would be a resounding no, and that's because Google knows success for them is built on meeting the customer's needs. The customer wants to search. You can't have all the tasks on the front page. You can't. It just won't be clear. It would make your life simpler because, "Oh, you can do all of that online. You can get all of that online. Oh, that's all online," but it doesn't make your customer's life simple. It makes it more complex. So that's really one of the problems of that task that Jim was trying to achieve there. It was just a bit too complex. It was too hard. There were a few too many links. It's too broken down and there's all those quick links and all those different terms for solar power. It was just a little bit too complex. So another key recommendation for you: Keep it simple and short. Restrict the number of different links. Don't make me think, which I've stolen from Steve Krug.
One thing describes the customer on the Web and that's "impatient." They just—It's too easy to hit the back button. "Oh, let's search again. Oh, I'm just gonna ring them up. Oh, I don't care. I'm giving up." It's just too easy. You've got to try and simplify.
Okay. Second task: How do I get an energy audit for my home? Jim and Steph are gonna try this one together and they're not really sure what an energy audit is. They're pretty keen on finding out though, so they search and hey look. You're right there with energy audits. Look you're in the top four, you're number two in Google beneath those sponsored links at the top and that's great. My only thought is that there's not a lot of people looking for energy audit as a term right there. There's a lot of people looking for save energy, the energy below for energy audit. But you're scoring highly. If people want to do it, they can find you and you're right there in the Google results.
Now, this is a general point about organization. You can see my picture here is of large silos and I often see these large organizations as being made up of these large silos. Conventionally, what happens with content is communication is pushed down the organization silos. What I'm seeing and what I'm advising you to do at EERE is move to a reader and task focused communication which cuts across silos. I think we saw—I saw that clearly in the energy audit task. It could involve lots of different pieces of the organization and it probably involves a little bit about the guys that are in charge of the energy audit as an initiative and I know there's a big chunk of federal funding out there for energy audit and for help with drafts and helping with weatherization and I think there's some real joining up to be done about the content around it. I'm thinking about the term energy audit and whether it's actually a bit too organizational, a bit too policy focused rather than focused on the customer and what they want to do.
Okay, a little bit more about silo communication. This is the front page of the main EERE site. On the left hand side, you lead with your program and there they are all laid out alphabetically and on the right hand corner are a set of quick links. I want you to consider the ways those are organized in the light of what I'm saying about best practice and trying to focus on the task at hand and focusing not from an organizational perspective.
Let's imagine that this is Microsoft. This is their site. This is their public site. Let's imagine if Microsoft decided, "Okay, we're gonna lead with our front page. What we're gonna have is our products division as the main link on our front page. The platform products and sub division and the business division and the entertainment and the devices division. We're all gonna have big links there and that's how you're gonna find out about your Xbox 360. You're gonna go on the platform products services division. Oh, no. You're gonna go in the entertainment and devices division and you're gonna find the Xbox 360." I don't think they're ever gonna do this because, of course, Microsoft has spent a lifetime learning about the Web, and not always painlessly, but they have. It's a kind of goofy way to pointing out to you that I'm not sure that leading with your divisions on that left hand side of the site is actually helping anyone. It's just a reflection of your organization. You may want to challenge me on that. I don't know but that's what I think. You can give me those challenges at the end.
What I think is I think this should happen and I think that's a pretty good improvement right there because not pointed at the citizen.
Okay, another reason for that area of that screen being important, the top, left hand corner, is what's called the golden triangle. The picture you're seeing now is done by attaching sensors to the external muscles around the eyeball and measuring where people look when they see Web pages. The hot spots are where they target and linger. The cooler spots on the diagram show where they have not looked very much at all and this golden triangle, we can suggest that it's moving slightly to the right, but basically that's where most people read things. Add your most important in the golden triangle. At the moment, that's the EERE home page looks like the most important thing is "Our Programs". It's good that you've got programs but it's not good and I'm not sure that's really task focused. I'm pretty sure it's not citizen centric and it's—you may want to think about that, and certainly you need to pay attention to the golden triangle in any Web content that you're putting up.
So, two more key recommendations are that you need to challenge, in a healthy and grown up way, the internal thinking. This idea, the project kicks off in EERE and logically, at some point, some of us will publish results or reports or anything, and it will be published on the Web. This is something that needs to be challenged. Everything coming down those organizational silos and every organization needs those silos. You need to have an internal organization. It's essential. Everything coming down those silos does not need to be published. It does not need to be published on the Web.
The state of Arizona won for three years in a row, won the public Web site of the year in the US. I'm not quite sure who awarded this but they did and one of the comments that I remember about the site was that, "You have a great link on your front page. If you can't find it on our Web site, call this number." And they didn't man it 24 hours but people could leave a message and they responded to the calls eventually and things got done. What they focused on their site was the big tasks that were obvious to the citizens that they really needed to do and in that way, they were able to manage the site much better. So you don't need to publish everything and you've got to challenge that internal thinking.
Okay. Does the Department of Energy provide any financial support of energy efficient or renewable energy technology? Let's see how Jim get on with this one. Jim and Steph are gonna have a go at this one again. Off they go and they decide to do a search there. Jim and Steph here, they're really thinking, "Okay, can I get a grant for that solar power I'm thinking about?" They enter their search term. I think you can see my little red dot highlighting the search term they're putting in up there: Solar Power Grants. What comes back? Well, actually none of the links really do it.
24 astronauts have been on or near the moon. How many people have been to the second page of EERE search results? There may be more than 24, I don't know, but not very many people go to the 2nd page of search results. If Jim and Steph are gonna be successful here, they're gonna have to go to the 3rd page of search results before they can get to any content that meets their task.
Now, what we do know about the customer on the Web is that there are two type of navigation that they really like. They like either to click on links or they like to search. And as the reliability of search engines like Google grows, more and more people want to do a thing called navigational searching. Navigational searching is just try and use search—not to find a specific page but to get them on the trail or on the scent of something and that's the way you've got to manage search. You've got to manage search like a task. Unless someone is looking for financial support or grants or something you've got to identify that, identify your top 100 searches. Leslie has already done some work on that so she could probably share something with you. For each of those searches, you've got to identify the best link or page, the page that people are most likely to want to go to, and usually it's not that hard to do that, and then you can test the results of that search by putting it in the search engine and seeing where the best link lands. Does the correct link appear in the first page of search results? If it does, you can give yourself a tick in the box and say, "Yes, okay. We're heading up." If it doesn't, then you need to take action and promote that page to the top of the search. I think Verity will probably allow you to do that. I don't know. That's your search engine. If it doesn't, either there are workarounds that you can get into with this. In any case, you've got to approach search as a major task on your site. Whatever we think about the task that Jim and Steph have been through in this review, search is definitely a task. Everybody wants to do it and with a big site like yours, you're gonna need to manage it really, really properly. So my recommendation is to identify the top 100 searches, identify the best link for each of the searches, test those searches, see where that link appears, and then take action.
Okay. Fourth task: Can I calculate cost, savings, and reliability for a potential equipment purchase? Okay. And Steph is off again and thinking about getting a new appliance and estimating the—Here they go. They're gonna estimate the home and electricity energy use and they get to this page. This is a fine formula for estimating energy consumption. I did a little thing called a SMOG analysis of the writing on this page and I got a reading of 18.68 with the SMOG index reading for this.
I need to explain SMOG index. I'm conscious of that. It's an algorithm used by language professionals used to estimate the reading age, the reading skill, of any piece of text and there are a number of these calculators on the Web. I use this one by Harry McLaughlin who is the inventor of SMOG and he has a little tool on there. You copy the text and you put it in to the little tool and it calculates a SMOG index. The SMOG index for this piece of writing is 18.68. Now, 18.68 means you've got to have a—a score of 17 to 18 give you a SMOG rate of post graduate studies. It's the equivalent of the Harvard Business Review we've got there. It's too complex. You've got to simplify this. It's hard to read on the Web. It's about 40% harder to read on the Web. If you're dealing with Jim and Steph, they've just done a day's work, they've got a little bit of time before they eat, they want to work out how much they're—if they spend the extra on the environmentally refrigerator, will it pay them back or not? That's what they want to know and they don't really want to have to—They're used to mortgage calculators on My Money or MSN Money or Yahoo and these things take you through step by step and are really easy. They're not going to puzzle their way through content like that.
It leaves them feeling pretty glum, really. They're pretty exhausted by that. That probably won't persist with that. Although, the formula itself is all there. All the thinking is there. What's difficult with that piece of content, the difficult thing is to make it simple. It's not easy to take what is something that people have put in an enormous amount of thought and effort in to developing that formula. It's not easy to make that easy. It's complex for you. Often, publishing on the Web, publishing something simple that helps people really achieve those tasks online, is complex for you and simple for the customer. If you make it simple for the customer, it's often complex and more work for you. I'm advising you to do more work and the other thing to say about that is because it's more work, if you're going to have these calculators on the site, then you need to commit the resources to making them work. You're not going to be able to publish everything. Is some sense of prioritization around all the calculators and all the different things on the site will be necessary? If you're going to make them really, really work so that people can really use them easier. There are further examples as we get through and some more tasks.
Here is my recommendation around web writing. Keep the content short and simple. Headings, eight words or less. Sentences, 16 to 20 words. Paragraphs, 40 to 70 words. Documents, 250 words or less. You should never publish anything on the Web on a page, on an HTML page, you should never have more than 250 words. You should never have more than 200 words, really. Less if you can do it.
Okay. Well, here's Jim. He's off again. He's gonna change the car. He has a big commute and he's pretty keen on saving money on fuel and he likes the idea of maybe going down to biodiesel. He's on the Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles data center. He's sees biodiesel and thinks, "Yeah, let's have a look at that. That's nice. I'm interested." And then he sees a great word for the Web: Prices. "Prices" is one of those buzzwords on the Web. It's featured in so many tasks and it's so important to so many different things. It's a great word and when people click on it, do you know what they expect to find? Prices. They expect to find prices. When Jim clicks on the link, he gets this alternative fuel price report. "What's this?" he's thinking. And then when he clicks on it he gets this PDF report and it starts—the PDF report starts with methodology. Jim isn't really interested in methodology. You have to actually go to page 13, I think it comes up there, to find that item. This is a PDF. PDF stands for portable document format. It is designed, its inventor said, for if you want to publish something on the Web that people can print and read later. So PDF is always print and read later and that's the only reason to publish it is if people really need to take this information away from the computer, I can't shorten it, it needs to be lengthy, I need to make it a report and I have to publish it because it's essential to the customer completing a task. Then maybe you can publish a PDF.
What your PDF is saying is that if it's getting in the way for Jim, it's saying, "We don't care about your time. We took this print stuff and we put it up on our site because it saves time for us." For Jim, Jim and Steph, that's really "Ahh!" It's a real heart sink moment and we've all been there. I bet we've all been there. I bet we've all clicked on that link and the little download egg timer starts and you think, "Oh, no!" And the massive PDF opens, pages and pages and pages and pages of it and it's all the more disappointing because you know what Jim clicked on there? He clicked on prices! And it took page 13 of that report he has to go through to get the prices. He can't believe it. He's given up.
When you navigate, when you invite people to click on that link this way, you're making a promise to them. You're saying, "I'm gonna show you the prices." This is true of every single piece of navigation, every single link on the site. If you say something then you got to deliver it. So when you say a sign post saying prices, when you see a sign post saying Washington on the highway and you take the exit, you do not expect to end up in L.A. You don't expect when you see the sign post prices to be taken to a report. You expect prices.
So, navigation and print content. Print content should only be published for the task requires something to be printed off. Remove any content that is not written specifically for the Web. That would be a great thing, I think, for EERE. It would rid you of a lot of content that is not really helping at the moment and would clear the way for the content that's really important for tasks if you took away the content that's not specifically written for the Web. You can challenge me on these things after.
Okay, so I made the point about navigation again. Here's another little thing about navigation. Additional resources, financial opportunities, databases for renewable energy. Jim says, "Okay, let have a look at that. Look, oh no. We're on a completely new site. Where? How did we come out here? Where is it? What happened?" Even if they work out how to use that one, and they're pretty surprised, they get this page. This page, The North Dakota Incentives for Renewable and Efficiency has a SMOG grade of 25.4, which I think is probably Harvard professor; I can't remember what it said in that table. Two things have happened here. The first thing is that the content is too complex, but the other thing that's happened is that you've taken them out of that nice, consistent navigation that you had going on within the EERE sites. There's a real task there for Jim in finding out if there's any federal money available, but he's not sure. "Is this is EERE site? Is this still the government site or where have I gone?" That's a genuine concern for people normally on the Web. Consistent navigation is about reassurance and confidence and consistent design. It's about making people always feel comfortable in where they are so if you're linking out to somewhere that just won't conform to your design standards, you've got to tell the customer that that's going to happen. You've got to say in big and bold, in somewhere significant, that you're going to be taken away from the site and we're not responsible for the content because it's got a SMOG grade of 25.4.
So this is the navigation point and we're just about at the end of my—the formal input part of my presentation today and hopefully I—I'm sure I've stimulated some questions somewhere along the line. So I'll make these two final points and then we can move on to questions. So navigation has to absolutely consistent through the site and the design has to be consistent through the site. You have to sign post clearly when you link to outside sights. You have to, and I'm gonna add one here which I have no idea why I left off, but when you put a link up, you must check that the link goes directly to the same thing that you sign posted to, because otherwise it's really—there's a sense of disappointment for the customer.
Okay. So that was a critique of your sites. There was lots of good stuff there, I need to say, but there wouldn't have been much point in me leading you through that so I focused on the possible pitfalls for those tasks. I think they're pretty real and I welcome your feedback and questions.
Leslie Gardner: This is Leslie. Thank you, Brian. Are there any questions from the folks back in Forrestal?
Brian Lamb: They're all stunned.
Leslie Gardner: Well, I'll ask you one, Brian. A lot of our information as you noted when we talked with Sarah a week ago is on the more technical side of content and some of our customers are researchers or folks in the industry who can handle a high SMOG level because they truly are at that high technical level. Can different type of pages maybe be written for different SMOG levels depending on who it is and who it's for and what the content is?
Brian Lamb: Yes, of course. That's quite true and I guess working out your personal tax credit is not something that we expect people to have.
Leslie Gardner: Agreed. Agreed. I just want to sort of acknowledge that there are some areas that have technical audiences that—
Brian Lamb: Yes, absolutely.
Leslie Gardner: So it sounds to me that we need to be mindful of, for every page, who the audience is and I just want to put in applause for the new EERE web content standards that were developed by Allison Casey here at NREL. They were published in August and one of the questions is for these new standards is when people create a new page, who is the audience of this particular page and what is their purpose of going to this page. So hopefully all this great input and feedback that you're giving us will stir people's imagination and then they can use the new standards to help them formulate better Web pages.
Brian Lamb: Indeed and they weren't all like this.
Leslie Gardner: Right, right. Now, I thought it was all very good.
Sarah Kirchen: Brian, I've got a question and then someone else in our audience has a question. Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean by clear sign posts when you're taking someone to an outside site? To a site that is not in your look and feel and navigation? What would that sign post be?
Brian Lamb: Generally, there is a subheading saying external links and quite often there is a writer, you know, EERE is not responsible for the content of these sites.
Sarah Kirchen: Right, okay. And Margo, did you have a question? Did you want to come up to the microphone?
Female: Hi, I'm Margo Rushing.
Brian Lamb: Hello, Margo.
Female: Hi. With regard to your search boxes on Web sites and my question is do most customers spend a lot of time—Since you're saying the majority, I guess within that triangle on the top left—would they spend more time looking on a Web site for content or phrases or words that they want information on, or would they catch a search box at the top, would that be something that they might gravitate to first or is there any data out there to show that?
Brian Lamb: That's funny. I was just reading today, actually, that as Google and other search engines have become more efficient and what's happening is that people are more and more relying on search because they assume your search engine is gonna function as effectively as Google. It's a trend that people are using search more.
Female: More and more. So they key there then is to load up your engine with a lot of words, phrases, catches and that type of thing so then people are can navigate to where the information they're looking for.
Brian Lamb: Yeah. I'm really not a fan of keyword stuffing. It doesn't work for Google, for instance. Google is no words, key words, stuffing. It's just the algorithm that they use is just much more sophisticated. I'm a fan, well, I guess it's organic search. That's an inside industry term. I'll explain what I mean. I'm a fan of finding out the words that your customers use and then using those words. That doesn't mean that you're any less stuck for writing and it's not a mechanical process. It's just dragging the words out of the search engine, which is kind of a crude way. I've done it today for you in looking across the volume searches for solar power and carbon footprint and it's a more measuremed—it's about observing your customers and listening to what they say when they're on your site. There are various techniques for doing this, but at the simplest, it's about listening to what your customers say and observing them use it and then putting those words, using those words. If you use those words then you will be fine.
Female: Okay. I had a question about Google. I guess I don't really understand how they operate. You kind of touched on that a second ago. As far as Google and the words or the links or that type of thing, when you plug in a couple of words or you put a comma or a plus and put something else as far as their searching, is that just the one that ends up at the top? Is that the one that has the—how does a person end up at the very top of that list when you Google because I am very impatient. I never go to the second screen. So the 1st screen to me—
Brian Lamb: Nobody ever goes to the second screen. It's like I said, it's in the 90 percent that just stay on the 1st page of search results. Google would say that they change fairly frequently how they rank pages but certainly the secret of their success is that they rank pages most highly with the most links to them. So if you're talking about energy audit where you come top, then there's lots of other sites linking to you for energy audit. That's why you come in those top three or four of Google's results. Google goes and looks at all the pages and says, "How many pages are pointed to this page and of those pages that are pointing to this page, how many pages…" It's quite complex. For instance, when was the page last updated, how frequently is it updated and it looks at the page that are linking to you and how frequently are the updated and are they real because they can be spoof sites or something to just drive up linkages and so on. So they are very sophisticated by at the center of it is how many pages are linking to that page?
Female: So the goal is to be number one on a lot of energy key words?
Brian Lamb: Well, I think that will just confuse you. I really think that's not a strategy. That's a technique and that technique is only useful if you have a strategy and I think that what you need to do in EERE, I think this is what anybody that has a Web site wants to do and I would say this, wouldn't I, but I think that what you've got to do is identify who you're customers are, identify what their top tasks are, identify what the words that sticking to those tasks are and write your content around those tasks, write the content using those words, relentlessly focus on those tasks. And I mean a small group. I mean three, four tasks. Relentlessly focus on them, do nothing else until those three of four tasks work perfectly every time because word publishing is not a project based environment. It is an environment of continually improvement. The EERE Web site, as Sarah pointed out in our introduction, has been around since 199—what did you say, Sarah?
Sarah Kirchen: 1994.
Brian Lamb: 1994. It's not going anywhere. It's always going to be here and the thing that I expect happens on the EERE Web site that I see a lot in government sites is that there is a project or an initiative and there is a huge amount of energy that goes in to the initiative and that does come up with content, it gets published, the initiative is over, everybody goes home, and three months later Allison or somebody is sitting and looking at this part saying, "It's out of date now. Who's gonna maintain it?" The end of that kind of approach means saying, "Okay. Initiatives may come and go, things may change, but these five tasks my customers want to do are probably gonna remain the same" I think those are just emerging for EERE, and you're just beginning to sort of gather the data from the Washington State University work, the work at looking at your search terms, the work of observing and talking to your customers, that's just starting to happen and that's what's gonna be necessary for you to be really successful with your Web site is to say, "We can't do everything. We're gonna do these four or five tasks for our top customers."
Female: Okay. Thank you so much.
Sarah Kirchen: Brian, this is Sarah again and I have one follow up question for that. In a Web site like ours which is in a sense, a collection of technology-based Web sites that are all tied together by uniform navigation and information architecture and graphics and placement of things like the search box and things like that, is it conceivable that at the, what we call the top site, which is the EERE homepage, you can have a set of tasks and then at another directory level in the site you can have another set of tasks that are focused on that particular audience? Does that make sense as a strategy?
Hello? Brian? Brian? Leslie and I are here. Okay. Well, I guess that's it folks. Leslie, do you have any final words?
Leslie Gardner: I do not but I will send out a link. Again, if this recording went as well as I hope it did, I'll send out a link of where it will be posted and if you have any follow up questions just let Sarah or me know and we'll be happy to address those.
Brian Lamb: Hello?
Leslie Gardner: Oh, now Brian's back.
Sarah Kirchen: Brian?
Brian Lamb: I dropped the call for some reason there.
Sarah Kirchen: Well, I'm so glad you came back because I had this question that I wanted to pose for you and that is in the EERE Web site, which is a collection of numerous technology-based Web sites that are all held together by common navigation and information, architecture and graphics, is it conceivable that you have top tasks on the EERE homepage and consumer site and then other top tasks on the other directories? In other words, for example, we have a large number of web teams that manage their own directories of information and would it be, would it make sense for me to encourage them to identity what the top tasks are, say, in the biomass area, the top tasks of the solar area and the top tasks of the vehicles area while I, as the consumer and top level media area, focus on other top tasks. Or is it your recommendation that EERE commit itself to five top tasks throughout the enterprise? Did you come back?
Leslie Gardner: Oh, it sounds like we lost him again.
Sarah Kirchen: Okay. All right. We'll follow up with that question by email and see if we can get some feedback from him.
Male: You know, we have two different really avenues here. We have the research side and we have the deployment side and the question is do we want to separate those to where you have the research side of it and the deployment side and what people are looking for on the deployment side is different from what they would be looking for on the research side. Would that be a way to kind of integrate—
Brian Lamb: Hello. I'm back.
Sarah Kirchen: Brian, we're gonna send you an email question, okay? You need to be going home to your family.
Male: Gone again.
Sarah Kirchen: Gone again.
Male: He's going behind the—
Sarah Kirchen: All right, thank you very much. That's a very good question.
Leslie Gardner: Sarah?
Sarah Kirchen: Leslie?
Leslie Gardner: Yeah, I need to go to a lunch meeting. Do you want me to call you real fast?
Sarah Kirchen: Why don't you go to your lunch meeting and call me after that? Can you do that?
Leslie Gardner: All right. Thank you.
Brian Lamb: I'm back if you want to try and finish that question or any of it. You don't need to linger on if that's all.
Leslie Gardner: Brian, this is Leslie. We're going to email you the question.
Brian Lamb: All right.
Leslie Gardner: And thank you very, very, very much. I'd like to chat with you later but I have to run off to a different meeting but I thought it was wonderful, wonderful perspective and I can't thank you enough.
Brian Lamb: All right.
Leslie Gardner: Okay?
Brian Lamb: All right. Well, talk to you later, Leslie.
Leslie Gardner: All right. Thanks, bye bye.
Brian Lamb: Thank you. Bye bye now.
[End of Audio]
