Revamped and Revitalized: Continuously Improving the Office of Process Improvement Webpages
By Vivian Engen and Niles Koenigsberg, Process Improvement Interns
January 14th, 2019
The Office of Process Improvement (OPI) is the driver of continuous improvement at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT). We encourage CDOT employees to contribute new ideas to improve work at CDOT with innovative solutions that make work activities better, faster, and safer for all employees.
Throughout 2018, OPI applied that same approach to make our pages on CDOT’s website more user friendly. The result? A website that uses analytics and customer feedback to inform decisions about how to provide the best experience for our customers, people like you. Recent improvements to the site enhance the overall customer experience through website redesign, back-end development, and content prioritization.
What Helped Us Improve?
In 2018, we used a variety of tools and programs to inform our decisions and develop a better customer experience. This includes the usage of Google Analytics to track website traffic, user locations, and target audiences; implementing an Awesome Table to present our data in a more user-friendly manner; and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve the online visibility of the OPI pages in standard internet searches.
By optimizing how our pages appear in online searches, we’ve increased traffic to our site, specifically through a targeted keyword strategy for more page views and improved click-through rates. To better understand how our content is shared on other media platforms, we’ve begun to use Sharethis, an open software used to create open social media buttons. This tool tracks how many people are sharing OPI page content, on what platform, and which articles are shared the most.
By using these tools, we now know a great deal about our web pages and our visitors. In 2018:
The OPI pages had over 43,000 sessions—groups of user interactions within a given time frame on our website.
Over 65% of the sessions came directly from organic searches, with 77% of those sessions being new visitors.
Over 33,000 sessions were accessed via desktop, but just over 8,000 came from mobile devices.
Additionally, between October 2017 and April 2018 the OPI pages on CDOT’s website had just over 40,000 page views, but in the six months following the improved page design (April to October 2018), the website experienced over 52,000 page views—that’s a difference of 12,000 views. And the analytics continue to support these design changes.
Data-Driven Improvements
Google Analytics has helped determine which OPI pages were most trafficked. Based on the results, additional improvements were made to enhance the customer experience. For example, the most trafficked page of 2018 was our summary of Change Management: The People Side of Change, with over 5,800 views. This information drove a reorganization of content to simplify access for interested users. Now, the Change Management book summary, along with additional popular book summaries like our ADKAR summary (with over 4,000 views), are moved up higher on the page for easier accessibility.
Our “Idea Cards,” one-pagers highlighting employee innovations and the benefits they bring to CDOT, are another group of features that receive heavy engagement. Based on the high trafficked use and views of these cards, OPI increased the number of idea cards visible on CDOT’s website, and has continued to publicize their existence. In 2018, the OPI team published over 100 idea cards, and that number will only continue to go up.
Keeping People Engaged
The improved OPI pages on CDOT’s website keeps visitors engaged with recommended content sections. At the bottom of each article page, additional OPI content is recommended for additional browsing. This feature is now active on all OPI pages, which provides greater value by recommending content that builds upon the reader’s interest.
Improving Site Navigation
In response to user feedback, OPI pages were reorganized for improved navigation. The sidebar navigation tool was developed to simplify site exploration, with an improved site map to better direct users. Based on this content, existing and new OPI articles were condensed into more distinct categories. The change not only simplified the search capabilities for articles on specific topics, but also directed users to areas they were already interested in. As a result, more site visitor time is now spent exploring content and learning about process improvement, change management, and other OPI news.
Getting Users' Feedback
To incrementally improve our services and the functionality of the website, we implemented a feedback button to the bottom-right of each root page of the OPI webpages. This feature will help us further understand the voice of our customer, what kind of content they want to see, and how we can change our site for the better.
Before and After Improvements
Check out the before and after screen grabs below:
Lean Everyday Ideas Before
Lean Everyday Ideas After
One of our more notable improvements has been the reformatting of our idea cards. Before our redesign, employee innovations were documented and spread in the form of articles via a simple text list. Around the time of the redesign, OPI began to produce idea cards (mentioned earlier), to better spread ideas, so on the OPI site we implemented an Awesome Table to visually display these cards in an appealing format.
Idea Cards Before
Idea Cards After
What’s Next?
The name of the game is improvement through data, and we’re pursuing that. Moving forward, we will use more analytics tools, like Google Search Console to track keywords that users search to find our site, Google Trends to see worldwide popular keywords, and Google Analytics to continue to track user behaviors. We will keep tracking the number of new and returning users to see how customers engage with our pages and how we can better retain new visitors. In addition, our office is using an internal feedback survey to receive the voice of our primary customers to understand how we can not only improve the website, but our services as well. And we will continue to implement new features on the website regularly to better serve our target audiences.
With fresh minds and gold mines of data, we can further develop a better online marketing strategy to pursue the needs of our customers.