Thank You!

In many ways, last week was an experiment for us. Like most sites, we collect user feedback about our pages, the designs, the content and more. And we have always incorporated user testing into our design process. It’s really an integral part of the process. However, last week was the first time we officially collected feedback via social media.

Traditionally, we have collected feedback on our site, using three methods:

  • User Satisfaction Surveys – Using ForeSee Results, which you may have noticed on any number of sites, we gather feedback about how satisfied you are and benchmark it against other sites, such as Google and Amazon, using the same basic survey. The survey also has questions specific to NASA.gov. We review the results monthly and pay especially close attention to individual comments.

Foresee Customer satisfaction Survey

  • Analytics – NASA analyzes web statistics — metrics such as page views, time on site and referrals — to show us what is popular across our site. We use these stats to see what people are most interested in and how they’re finding it, and this helps us make editorial decisions about where and how to highlight content on the site. This also includes items like the ratings for popular content or the number of likes/tweets stories have received, which can help users make informed decisions about their next clicks.

  • User Testing – NASA.gov conducts usability testing on most major changes to the website. This allows NASA.gov’s team to watch how users accomplish certain tasks and use the site in general. Which buttons and links do folks click on to get to this or that? Do they scroll the page missing the item we’d like for them to locate? Analyzing user behavior during these sessions helps us to make our designs smarter and more in-line with user expectations.

User Testing for NASA.gov User Testing for NASA.gov

But last week, our blog post was an experiment at a fourth way: using Twitter and Facebook to drive visitors to the blog post and soliciting their feedback. Thanks to all of you who responded. We’ve had a wide range of comments that will help us refine our designs, and we plan to implement these navigation menus within the coming months. We’ll blog about it again once the changes are live.

Seeking Feedback on a New Approach to NASA.gov Navigation

We’re working on a new approach to our navigation menus and we want to hear what you think of them. The primary goal of the new menu design is to surface popular and hard-to-find contents so they are easier for you to get to.

We’ve been listening to our users through a variety of channels including satisfaction surveys, e-mail and social media to learn what information you’re seeking on NASA.gov. Our new menus highlight this information, making it easier for you to get to, along with the standard sub-categories and links to featured and most popular content.

The new menus can be found below. We really want to perfect these before launching them on our site so take a look at them and let us know what you think. And if you know of other Web sites that do navigation even better feel free to share them with us. Thanks in advance for your valuable input!

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News Menu

Missions Menu

Multimedia Menu

Connect Menu

About NASA Menu

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