The central Government of the Netherlands distributes a massive amount of information on a daily basis. And their website, rijksoverheid.nl, is one of their biggest channels for doing so. This is why it’s important for it to be as clear and user-friendly as possible. To achieve this, rijksoverheid.nl makes sure to listen to their audience effectively and strategically with the help of Mopinion’s feedback software.
Martijn Warmoeskerken is the Team Lead for UX Research & Analytics at Dienst Publiek en Communicatie (DPC). This is the Dutch government’s central public information office. One of their tasks is to manage several governmental websites – with rijksoverheid.nl being the most important one.
“This website is of great importance as it informs the public about all the rules and regulations in the Netherlands. It’s where you go to find everything from information on school holidays to retirement and everything in between.”
Understanding how the users perceive the content
Because this website is such a vast bank of important information for all of the Netherlands’ citizens, it is naturally a big priority to make the content on the website both easy to find and easy to understand.
Martijn explains that a lot of the website’s visitors come from search engines, like Google. He estimates that it makes up almost 75% of the traffic they receive. And the visitors come with a task at hand – they want an answer to a question. Like how to renew their driver’s license, how to get a marriage certificate or how to file for a divorce. These are big moments in a person’s life and they often require specific actions.
That’s why it’s consequential for Martijn’s team to be able to estimate if the information that the Rijksoverheid provides is helpful to their visitors.
“We organise the information on our website by subject matter, but also by life events, like these. They require contact with several governmental organisations, which is why we try to give an overview of what you have to do, how you do it and who you need to contact.”
The importance of privacy compliance
To measure the success of rijksoverheid.nl’s content, the team needed a solution to help them gather feedback. This is where Mopinion came into play. Martijn explains:
“We are doing a lot of different kinds of analytics. We monitor dashboards that give insight into clickstreams,traffic sources and on which pages users are aborting their visits. But this only shows us numbers. To be people-centric we need to know why visitors act the way they do and that’s why we implemented user feedback.”
Privacy compliance played a big part in why Martijn and his team chose Mopinion as their user feedback solution. Information security has always been integral for governmental organisations and since the introduction of GDPR in 2018, there has been a high demand across all of Europe.
“The software we chose had to comply with all our information security policies and the GDPR. And there aren’t many feedback software companies that actually do this. But Mopinion did.”
Martijn explains that working within the public sector, users often type in all sorts of data. It can slip through even when they are asked not to give out personal or sensitive information. A phone number or name might accidentally be added by the user. That’s exactly why Rijksoverheid has such strict privacy compliance requirements for the feedback software they yse.
“We also really appreciated that Mopinion went the extra mile and even made additional efforts that aligned with all our needs for information security.”
Creating an ever improving website
So how does Rijksoverheid collect feedback in order to achieve the right insights? Martijn explains that they use a few different kinds of forms, depending on what the goal is. They mainly use customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys but also customer effort score (CES) surveys to see how hard (or easy) it is for the visitors to find what they are looking for.
“We use embedded surveys at the end of the page. The most important questions we ask are ‘Did you find what you were looking for’ and ‘Do you have any suggestions for improving the website?’”
Translation: Did this information answer your question? Open question: What question did this article answer?
To achieve the quick wins that will create an ever-improving user experience, Martijn’s team continuously monitors the feedback that comes in. If they notice that something is wrong or missing in the website’s information, they contact their editorial team who can immediately remedy the content.
How feedback facilitates a heigthened user experience
Every quarter, a research team also deep dives into the feedback data to identify trends in user feedback and satisfaction. This helps Rijksoverheid understand the user experience and how they can improve it even further.
“We try to continually improve the website based on insights that are provided in the quarterly reviews. We break off into small work groups and brainstorm new solutions or experiments.
An example of an experiment we did was the call to action buttons. One of the purposes of Rijksoverheid’s website is to guide people to other websites. For example, if you need to apply for a new drivers’ license, you can’t actually do that on rijksoverheid.nl, but we have information about where you need to go to do it. Naturally, this means that sometimes people don’t want to read an entire article to find the link they need.
We identified the pages where we saw a lot of click-through traffic and reviewed them. By placing a call to action button with a link higher up on the page, we improved the click through rates.”
This is a great example of how a continuous loop of collecting user feedback, analysing the data and implementing changes will give you an ever improving product and user experience. Both on a smaller and bigger scale. This leads to happier, more satisfied users. And don’t we all want that?
What’s next for Rijksoverheid?
Of course, Martijn’s team doesn’t stop there. Innovation in data collection and analytics is important and the team is currently thinking about creating a larger feedback campaign across all the governmental departments that they work with.
“I’d like to set up a yearly standardised survey between all the domains we run. The Dutch government has many websites with high traffic and users who give a lot of feedback and improvement suggestions. By running a survey like this across all our websites, we can benchmark them, which would make it possible to create a broad implementation of user experience optimisations.”
Martijn explains that this could help them identify issues that they otherwise would not discover or be able to act on. It’s an interesting idea, indeed, and we’re very excited to see what Martijn and his team have in store for the governmental websites and rijksoverheid.nl next.
Special thanks to Martijn Warmoeskerken and the team at DPC for these fantastic insights!
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