Round about this time last year I wrote an article, prompted by the eternal Twixtmas question of when the Christmas and New Year bin days are, suggesting when we know demand for certain things is going to be especially high we should pre-empt those queries, and also suggesting that ideally our CMS tools would also be able to automate this task for us to a degree.
For the lolz, I'm going to focus on user behaviour on the www.birmingham.gov.uk site for the period 22-28 December to see what people have actually been doing in terms of specifically coping with the changed bin days.
First of all, we can see that of the 238,411 user sessions started in the seven day period, we can deduce that 41,599 of them were as a result of a search query taking the user straight to the Check your collection date page:
What we can also see that of those 41,599 landings on that page, 25,310 of them appear to have been satisfied with what they saw at the top of the page, namely, the changed dates for Christmas and New Year:
That to me seems like a reasonably successful journey; we see that 5,581 of those users then wanted to actually check their actual date, 2,055 of them actually wanted the tip, 1,138 of them wanted something else to do with the bins, and the rest wanted something else.
Interestingly, of the 24,639 sessions starting with the user entering (again, presumably via a search query) on the Book a household recycling centre visit page, 2,373 of them actually wanted to check their collection dates:
This time of year is one of the very few times of the year when the most accessed page is not either the site home page or the online account page - last week, the bin day page was the most accessed page of the site, so that absolutely tells us that bin day and going to the tip really is the important thing on people's minds when they think of the council during Christmas week:
And as the last user journey image I'll show here, we can see that from the 16,750 sessions which started with the home page, 2,548 of them went to the bin day page:
So in total, the data shows us that of the people who came to find out all about the bin day last week, 25,310 of them were successful straight from their entry to the site, and 4,921 of them had to poke around the site from their entry point to get the information we know they were looking for - or to put it proportionally, 83% of those journeys were immediately successful, and 17% of them made the user do extra work.
I think whilst 83% of journeys being immediately successful is not a result to be ashamed of, 17% of them resulting in extra work for people when they should be focussing on their families and their jamóns and their mushroom Wellingtons would justify a little bit of work on our part to actually provide the information directly on key pages saving a lot of work on our users' part, especially if indeed that could be automated.
Whilst the data here was taken from the Birmingham council website, it's reasonable to assume that for most councils which offer bin collection services they will get similar results, since most councils deal with the changes which happen for Christmas and New Year pretty much in the same way.
