Setting up Dashboards in HBX

Ok, I'm not going to moan that I didn't get told that HBX could do this as soon as they pushed it into their live system. No really. I'm not even going to moan that I had to work it by myself and this was something that we'd wanted for a while now. This however is going to be picture friendly, link free zone. Well ok, I might give you a link to a nice website that knew about this before I did (why the hell didn't he tell me, etc, etc).

Right - HBX has some nice new features that incorporate Dashboards and homepages. We'll deal with home pages first because it's easier and quicker. Most of your HBX pages now have a little icon in the top right hand corner that looks like a house.


What can you do with this little home button is very clever (ok a little bit cleverer than not having it) - you click on it and it gives you two options. You can either go back to your homepage (standardised as the one that shows you the visits throughout your time period) or you can set your current report as your home page. This means that you can choose any one of the reports to have as the first page that you log into. Especially useful if you always look at one of the other pages first or if you have set up your dashboards to be useful.

The old dashboards in HBX tended to be rubbish. Well they did in my opinion - you might have been able to find useful ways of using them. One of the nice new updates that we have in HBX 4.1 is that you can now use search facilities in HBX dashboard creation. So in the past when you wanted to see a list of the most popular pages, you discovered that the home page, search page, other various navigation pages were always at the top (and not the articles - hey, I work for a media website). Now you can filter them to get rid of these pages. And if you've been sensible like we have and named the pages with a good content hierarchy, then you can search just for your little section.


Don't forget that Dashboard 1 already has a load of stuff in it already. Choose one of the other 9 if I were you. Don't forget that if you choose to add a whole dashboard in then you'll only be allowed a maximum of the top 10. However it'll then have a nice link into your whole report with that filter still applied. Wow - that means that instead of creating bookmarks to all of your top reports, you can put them in a dashboard and suddenly you can right click and put them in a new tab of your browser, really easily.

Don't forget that there are those other dashboard types you can add, eg for individual entries in some of those reports like below if you want to get a certain amount of traffic from a domain:

I think journalists/editors might want to use these if they are trying to hit their targets for visits to their stories (using the custom metrics we've set up). We can also use the gauges for conversion points (for those of you setting up campaigns):



Ok - now you can see up at the top there next to where it says Dashboard 2, there is a little picture of a piece of paper and a pen (or is that just my imagination). Click on this and suddenly you have a whole new set up of options of things to do.

First thing to do is to change the name of your dashboard to something relevant. This is important if you are going to share your dashboard with someone else (or with other people generally). Now what you need to do is to move your bits of dashboard around so that they are in the right positions. This is much easier than with the old version where you had to cancel them and start again making sure they were in the right order. Now you can drag and drop - like the widgets in the home page of your Google.

Next thing you can do is to share them with other people. This is the clever (and a bit more time consuming) bit - click on 'share' in the drop down next to the Dashboard name. You are then given the option to share this with any number of users for any number of sites (that you are subscribed to).

Next thing you have to do is get your users to subscribe to them. This is really simple too - get your users to log in to HBX, click on the Dashboards link on the right hand side and then on "Subscribe to Dashboards". You'll then see all dashboards that you can subscribe to. You can either view it to check it's ok - clicking on the magnifying glass on the left - or you can subscribe to it by selecting the report and clicking on subscribe.

Now all your subscribed dashboards will appear in your 'subscribed dashboards' sub menu of dashboards. Which you can also make as your Homepage if you want.

The rules of engagement

Ok, I've talked about Engagement before on this blog (twice actually), so I am not going to repeat myself. There are a number of measures of engagement that you can use and these are detailed all over the place. My favourites are always:

• Percentage of visits lasting more than one page
• Percentage of visits lasting more than one minute
• Percentage of visitors visiting more than once
  

Obviously you can segment the first one by looking at groups of pages - this is easy in the Page Analysis summary of HBX, because it gives you your entries and single access for all your pages. It's then easy to search for your content group.

Well we're looking at the measures of success of our redesign of ComputerWeekly and although we can measure all those things that we've talked about earlier, what we really want to do is look into what we can measure in terms of the design and in terms of changes we've made. Then we're going to look at what we can do to continue the improvement.

I always think the best places to start on these things is to look at the old versions of the page and then you can work out the changes you've made. So here is the old Computerweekly:


Well as you can see in the old style left hand nav, we've got a series of options that basically have just grown over time and then eventually most of the navigation is hidden away under IT Management and Technology. That's ok, because if your users have been on the site since inception, then they'll have seen the gradual change and know where everything is. The problem arrives when you spend lots of time and effort getting your users deep into the content and they may not have seen this navigation before. So here is the new one (and we don't forget how we came up with it):



Well the difference here is the top navigation, but one of the interesting things we've discovered about these pages is where people have clicked on the page. This is where you need to get your active viewer out and have a proper look. The thing that surprised us is that the users liked clicking across the top of the page, using the nav links, but also on this page are the clearly defined sign ups in the left hand nav. I thought that the online audience wouldn't be at all interested (they never seemed so in the old navigation where we included links to personalisation and offline products). What we need to look at is whether one of these is or isn't getting the clicks we think it deserves, based upon our persona research. Then we can try renaming, replacing or moving to see if it has the impact we desire.

The next thing that we need to look at is the articles themselves and what our users click on here. I've split the page up into a couple of sections, like you might do in a wireframe and of course I had to choose an article about e-business:

• Top Navigation - this is here for consistency, but we need to work out if articles are classified in the right sections, so are the users clicking out of these sections into others, can we use that to help related content
  
• Left Hand Nav - this supplements the main navigation and can help to show which sections users like in terms of preference to give an order
• Right hand related CW content - these are articles that we've deemed to be related - if users aren't clicking on this, we need to work out whether it's because of our classification rules or because it's not prominent enough
• Right hand related web content - this is really dangerous (and political). You're linking to other content so users may leave and not come back, however they'll remember your site and come back. If this is clicked on too often it may be that we're not creating enough related content
• Contextual links - all research points to these links being the most clicked on. However they have to point to relevant links (relevant to the user, so work out where you think they are going to come from to get to the article before putting them in), with relevant anchor text.

This all needs to be looked at in context though. Prioritise which areas look like they need the most work first, work out ways to change them and use your agile programming to make lots of small incremental changes. Then measure them to see if they've worked.