March 6, 2024 - Updates, priorities of the week

Updates

DTO

• Just a note on how DTO runs these meetings. Peter Smith refers to the agenda, which he keeps evergreen so you can check out what is coming for upcoming meetings
• Try to spotlight work from various government departments to highlight work and or questions
• You can find the agenda linked from the GCPedia page: GC Web Priorities Meetings - Réunions des Priorités Web du GC - wiki (gccollab.ca)

Roundtable

Finance

• April 16 - Communications pause for the budget on AEM from 3:30-4:30pm EST, this is for newsroom items only, normal pages are not affected
• To create space for Finance to rollout out their information

ECCC

• Currently cleaning up our top tasks according to results of Top Tasks Survey

Agriculture Canada

• We’re organizing a touch-base Friday morning with anyone interested in discussing PowerBI

WAGE

• New content for our youth campaign against gender-based violence is live:
  • https://www.canada.ca/en/women-gender-equality/campaigns/gender-based-violence-its-not-just/searching-for-end-gender-based-violence.html
• Also, celebrating international Women's Day on Friday
  • https://women-gender-equality.canada.ca/en/commemorations-celebrations/international-womens-day/2024-theme.html

Heritage Canada - Principal Publisher

• Launched a electronic book of condolences in the memory of the Right Honourable Brian Mulroney who recently passed away
• ENG link: http://canada.ca/tribute-brian-mulroney
• French link: http://canada.ca/hommage-brian-mulroney

DTO - Presentation

Research tools update

• Why improve the Feedback Viewer, and why now?
• Originally launched in 2021
• We wanted to make improvements, but not enough resources, but now DTO has joined CDS which means we have more HR resources
• We ran a UX review, which assesses usability standards, we found that:
  • Many users want to access many pages at once, not allowed currently
  • Users want summaries to make sense of data
  • Alerts sent to users could be helpful
  • Problems with setting date range

Design recommendations

• Simplify and improve filters
• Better date range picker
• Users can now pick from more than one department
• Simplified results to make it easier for user to read/analyze
• Exploring including footer with guidance
• Version 2 which implements these improvements is almost finished

Next steps

• We plan to go live by March 31, 2024 with V2, some of the improvements might be implemented even sooner
• We hope that these UX improvements help your work
• We are thinking about the best way to summarize the data using the tool, so you don’t have to use tools other than Feedback Viewer to analyze the data

Questions:

How many of you in the web community share this information with senior management? Please share your feedback in the chat.

DTO: We found that people really like the graphics so that they can share them in presentations with management.

PCO: Is there a way to share the information more widely with a lower barrier to entry, similar to Adobe Analytics link? So that you don’t have to actually go into the program.

DTO: Maybe we could have user profiles to save common settings.

Chat comments:

• If it goes public, Canada.ca Content Style Guide should be applied to the content.
• The feedback tool has become our preferred feedback collection method (over TSS) because we can see exactly which page the comments are related to
• As a first step, could we simply save as PDF and share the PDF to senior management?

Why is findability of you content important

External search

• Performing well on average

Internal search

• Significant room for improvement

Barriers for web advisors and web managers - our thoughts

• No easy way to measure findability
• Lack/incomplete guidance and tools for improving findability
• Lack of capacity for continuous improvement

Poll - Help us understand your search performance needs

We see the Feedback Viewer tool as part of a bigger system:

• Learn findability
• Research search terms
• Measure search performance
• Apply SEO to content
• Improve internal search/boosting

We also realized that we have to improve our guidance for the whole process. There is good guidance, but it’s scattered through many channels.

Our team is already working to improve things, for instance they are working on improving Metadata guidance.

CRA - Search Assessment Tool

• We are examining how to scale this tool to other departments
• Right now we’re working on our own versions of the tool
• We have analyzed it and made some improvements
• Now has the “improvement task list” which lets users know what changes to make to their pages

Next steps for Search Assessment Tool

• There’s a lot of things we can improve right now
• Review with IRCC

Connect with us on Slack, or contact lana.stewart@cds-snc.ca

Questions:

How do we find search terms?

A: Google search console, look at the top 3 searches

Question: It would be nice to show other pages that have similar titles.

A: Yes that can be currently done in Adobe Analytics

Question: What’s the criteria to improve searches?

A: We monitor the performance of the top 100 searches.

What search tools are currently being developed?

Principal Publisher is working on a tool, which will take about a year, we don’t know details yet.

Q: Is there a way to boost internal searches?

A: Yes, but try improving content first. If you are interested in chatting, email Lana Stewart or connect on Slack.

Problems with improving findability - Chat comments

• A workshop/webinar on how to improve our departmental search performance would be great
• Constantly changing algorithms / approaches used by Google
• So many overlapping page names and pages that need optimization... outside of my area of responsibility