4Q: Open-Ended Insights on Website Satisfaction and Task Completion

Although all 4Q results are deeply meaningful, we believe that the real golden nuggets of insight emerge within the open-ended commentary. It is here that visitors are allowed to praise the site and vent their frustrations unimpeded. It is here that visitors are able to denounce, in no uncertain terms, the barriers to task completion.

We have run two months’ worth of 4Q open-ended data through our sophisticated natural language algorithms and outputted the results in the charts below:

This is the first in a series of reports, which will help shed light on the state of website satisfaction and web-wide task completion.

The goal of this exercise is twofold:

1) to draw out the top reasons why respondents are not able to complete their primary tasks
2) to highlight the top themes that emerge in positive open-ended commentary

The Web is an inherently noisy medium. As such, any attempt to analyze open-ended commentary in an unstructured way is bound to lead to failure. Painstaking ad-hoc coding efforts can often be exercises in futility. This report builds on iPerceptions’ patented, best-of-breed algorithmic approach to open-text analysis.

Some noteworthy findings from the first two months of data were:

1) The advent of the summer holiday season pushed the twin concepts of “reservation” and “book” into the online customer vocabulary. The 4Q family contains sites for which online hotel reservations, rental car reservations, and resort reservations are critical revenue streams. The overall thrust of the commentary right now is neutral.

2) Website owners should not neglect the importance of effective site usability and navigation. Page loading latency, inefficient internal search results, and buried calls-to-action can all get in the way here. Ferrying visitors to exactly what they are looking for goes a long way towards ensuring they complete their tasks and surf away satisfied. Judging from the fact that “look for” trended as the second most popular negative concept, it looks as though site owners might be dropping the ball on this one.

3) The nasty downturns in the economy and the ever-rising costs of fuel and other commodities are contributing to declining satisfaction with price points across the 4Q family of sites. Significantly, the presence of the concept “price” in the positive open-ended stream fell by close to 50% from May to June. This will be a key indicator to watch during the summer, as it ties in closely with the concepts of booking and reservation.

We’ll be running and disseminating these reports on a regular basis going forward. As I mentioned in my last post, trending is key to good analysis, and the modulation of positive and negative respondent opinion will yield us a lot of insight into where the web is headed.