Plan-B for Software Documentation

I did start working the user experience of Plan-B for Openoffice.org because I thought that 70% of a bounce rate is rather high. While I succeeded with some first steps to encourage visitors to explore the site, some other steps did not do as much as I had hoped. However I was wondering what my target should be? What would be a good bounce rate, specifically a good bounce rate for my type of site? I wondered if there is a benchmark that I could measure myself against?

Today I read the Google Help article about high bounce rate. Most informative is the video from Avinash Kaushik @ MarketingProfs.com. He states:
* Marketing metrics are different for every website
* Typical bounce rates are between 40 and 60%
* There are two reasons for a visitor bouncing:
* The visitor found what she was looking for (satisfied customer?)
* The visitor did not think she found what she was looking for (window shopping, in the wrong place, different expectations)
* It is hard (impossible) to know which is the reason for a bounce
* However changes in bounce rate are significant. The trend is your friend!
* Bounce rate is a great qualifier metric!

So here it is some number I can compare with. However, the nugget I learned is to read the bounce rate in conjunction with other metrics:
* How does the bounce rate for different traffic sources (Google vs. Bing, Search vs. Direct Link vs. Mail campaign, AdWords vs Organic search)
* How does the bounce rate differ per keyword on the same landing page?
* How does the bounce rate differ on the top 20 landing pages?

I recently decided to replace the lucene based search engine on Plan-B for OpenOffice.org with a Google Custom Search engine. At first glance this seems to be an easy task. Remove the old code and replace it with some Google Java scripts. However this is not how it turned out to be.
I targeted a layout, where the search box is part of the general navigation menu bar and results appear on their own page. However the HTML/CSS code generated by Google is rather inflexible. The two page template came the closest as it generates two separate code snippets, one for the search box and button and one for the search results.
So I had to add some CSS to make the divs and its generated child elements inline elements

div#cse-search-form {
display: inline-block;
zoom: 1;
...
}
div#cse-search-form * {
display: inline;
...
}

Another inconvenience is that the JavaScript includes an absolute URL for the results page. But it also works when I omit the protocol and hostname part

options.enableSearchboxOnly("/search/index");


I have replaced the Plan-B for OpenOffice / LibreOffice search engine with Google Custom Search.

The local search engine based on lucene was heavy on resource consumption and did require a lot of effort to keep up the indices with new or changing content. So I decided to switch to a Google Custom Search Engine.

I hope this change makes the site an even better resource or OpenOffice and LibreOffice users. Please let me know if you have any suggestions on how to improve search on the site.

In my quest to improve the user experience at Plan-B for OpenOffice/LibreOffice, I did change the over 1,000 video pages, such as “Export a presentation in PDF format” or “How to create an Agenda Template with Writer.”

All video pages were constructed the same. Front and center was a massive frame for the 800×600 video player. Every video started instantly when the page loaded. I replaced the frame it with a simple “play video” button that brings up an overlay to play the video. This button is much smaller and allows you to start the video multiple times.

I have read that starting video instantly is not appreciated by most users and I sympathize. Although our videos are silent, and do not draw attention immediately from everybody around, it feels better to be in control.

This change brings the textual content of the pages above the fold and I hope this will stimulate users to explore the site more fully. if I’m right this should influence lower the bounce rate and increase the average time spend on the site.

Three days ago I asked the question “How often do you view OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents on your Android device?” on Plan-B for OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice The 100 free answers came in fast. The survey was closed in less than two days.

Thank you to all that participated, here are the results

Clearly ODF documents are not very popular on Android devices. 54% that did take the time to answer the question said, they never needed to do so. 27% replied they don’t have an Android device. I assume the real number of users w/o an Android device is even higher, as it was self selecting to answer the question in the first place.

However 13% did view an ODF document at least once and 4% do it more often than once a week. I think we can assume that nearly 100% of Android devices are phones. The answers might be different when we ask the question for iOS, the Apple mobile operating system.

Your thoughts?

Today I added a survey to all video pages on Plan-B for Open Office / LibreOffice.

The survey asks “How often do you view OpenOffice/LibreOffice documents on your Android device?”

• Never, I don’t have an Android device
• Never, did not need to
• Tried once, did not work
• Tried once, successful
• Several times
• Once a month
• Once a week
• More Often

I used SurveyMonkey with a free account.

After a longer time of minimal maintenance at Plan-B for OpenOffice.org, I find more time to edit and improve the site.

I did clean up some broken links, updated the statistics to reflect that we now have over 1,000 videos and worked on some spelling errors.

I have decided I have to move this web site project of mine from an altruistic endeavor to something that sustains itself. I’ll experiment how to change things to make this resource more attractive to its users and also how to generate some income from it. I can’t continue to foot the bill for hosting and if I can get revenue from the site I can invest it back into adding content and improving the service to its users.

The first step will be to re-vamp its analytics, as to measure what works and what does not. Next I’ll experiment with changes to the site so that traffic increases but also to engage users in different ways and more deeply. The web has been a different place when I designed the site in 2004 and much has changed. Search engine optimization has changed a lot and still remains the same. And social network websites such as Twitter, Facebook or Google+ have become a medium for users to gather and share ideas. In addition users consume their content on cell phone and small screen tabled computers. I will have to adapt the site’s content and marketing accordingly.

But also OpenOffice has developed a good deal. There is an evolved look and feel and new features and especially the fork of LibreOffice has added a whole lot of new functionality to cover in tutorials and videos.

If you care bout these topics, please drop me a line or comment.

The recent GNOME 3 hackfest in the UK got me thinking of my ideal desktop design – task oriented and controlling interrrupts

Here would be my vision of this:

• Have separate desktops for each task (open documents, web pages, chat sessions, e-mails, contacts, bookmarks, browser/search history, …) and that persists across login sessions (under a name) and ideally across machines (web sync like Mozilla Weave)
• When I start a task I might want to start with the desktop of another task (snapshot) or a blank slate
• Have a system to do fast task switching (like the multi screen desktops, but not limited to the number of those) and also a system that notifies me of activities that belong to other tasks (like chat responses, mail replies, etc.) Ideally filtered by a priority/importance level of the task intruding (or filter by the planned work – stuff relevant to tasks that I have planned to work on today or tomorrow –> scheduling)
• Make task contexts such as personal/work/hobby/moonlighting (or even sub contexts like projects) and allow me to switch between those and filter notifications with different filters for disruptions in those. For example notify me of the important private reply at work, but not of the important reply on hobby. But while in hobby notify me of anything that is important.
• Allow to set availability levels for IM with switching contexts (tasks with different priorities and task contexts) automatically. Sometimes even separate profiles.
• Allow the kind of scheduling that is indicated with the Task popper and within the time buckets a simple order/ranking to make a plan
• Give me desktop search with clear priority for task local results over global results.
• All tasks are archived, the waste basked is only task specific. May be have a Shredder to really delete things across tasks?

In simple terms give me a desktop per task (where I can have the relevant documents, contacts, e-mails, etc. just persistent around, even if they may be shared across tasks) that I can switch between easily and a virtual room that I can control what communication comes through the walls to intrude with the tasks that I’m at.

And I don’t start talking about sharing resources/documents across users for collaboration. That would be the ultimate virtual room/desktop, although who loves someone else rearranging one’s desktop, so I probably wanted my private view

For over 8 months I have been working on a Mac Pro now. Let me share some of my experience with the you.

First I ran the beast with Windows XP on it. And this machine is a beast! It’s quad core server type processors are fast and the box in itself is put together in a way that it deserves the “Pro” for professional in its name. After realizing that memory under Windows XP was limited to 2 GB for some reason and we could not get it to even accept 3 GB of the 6 that it was configured with, I decided to switch to its native Mac OS X.

Let me share a few of my impressions to use a Mac OS X for programming, lots of reading/browsing, e-mail and Office work:

• It does use memory economical. I can run way more apps at the same time than on my Windows XP laptop with the same amount of RAM (only 4 GB of the 6 GB it originally had). Not to mention that is stays responsive even with my usual 20 – 30 tabs in Firefox.
• It is rock solid. It runs weeks w/o reboot, unless I start Windows in Parallels. The Windows VM does bring the machine to a crawls after a day or two. Don’t know if it is Windows or Mac OS X.

More in my next post.

Today, I re-checked to see if the BBBOnline website is still unsecured.

The good news is, the expired SSL Certificate is gone. Instead the online form which asks all kind of confidential business and personal information is completely unsecured (http:// instead of https://).

Apparently they BBB is not willing to invest $50-$200 in a SSL Certificate to secure my data I submit to them. Way to go Better Business Bureau!