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Impact of Ask a Librarian content rearrangement

In August, we rearranged the content on our Ask a Librarian page to bring more focus to our treasure-trove of frequently asked questions called Quick Answers and to promote self-service. These changes were prompted by the desire to decrease emails the Library was receiving with questions and issues outside of our scope (e.g. permissions to access the library) and a desire to get students to the correct team to assist with their question as quickly as possible.

Previously, we had displayed contact information for when to contact our Writing Center and student technical support team at the bottom of the page; however, this information was not being seen. We decided to integrate this information into our Ask a Librarian email form, which routes students to the correct team if they need help with APA or technical issues, for example. This provided a good opportunity to rearrange the content and give Quick Answers more focus. Here's a view of the new layout:

Ok, so how effective has this reconfiguring of the Ask page been? There's a few questions I wanted to answer:

• Is the Quick Answers search box being used more since this change?
• Have email or chat submissions gone down since this change?
• Are more students using the contact routing options for the Writing Center and student technical support team since integrating it into the email form?

Answering these questions required gathering data from several different sources to get a decent picture of what's going on, including Google Analytics (events and referrals), heatmaps, LibAnswers Query Spy (Quick Answers), and chat and email form submissions. Because traffic ebbs and flows with our academic calendar, I primarily looked at a 2-month year-over-year analysis of Sept-October 2019 and 2020 to see how things have changed.

The main takeaway is that rearranging the page to make Quick Answers more prominent significantly increased use of the search box (+30% users; +34% sessions). Interestingly though, only 55% of those queries resulted in the user viewing a Quick Answer. This is an area for further investigation and improvement.

Meanwhile, email and chat submissions went down significantly (-16%) despite an enrollment increase in 2020. I would attribute this, at least partially, to the Quick Answer prominence.

As for integrating the Writing Center and student technical support team contact info into the Ask a Librarian email form, I'll say the status of this change is "it's complicated." We added two new to options to the "I need help with" dropdown: "APA style or writing" and "Technical issue":

These options present a message to students with a link out to those respective departments' contact pages:

Previously, students likely selected the "Other" option for technical issues and writing questions. Year-over-year, "Other" saw a 22% decrease, and students are clicking those contact links (83 sessions) and a new link to our system outage dashboard (27 sessions). Together, that's 110 sessions. On the other hand, in 2019, there were 113 clicks on the contact info previously linked at the bottom of the page. It seems not much has changed in that regard. But perhaps having the additional information in the email form messaging has helped steer students to the right department (even if it means they decided their question was more appropriate for the Library) and reduced the number of touch points to get their question answered. This doesn't target students drawn to the chat service, but it's only a start.

So there you have it. A quick study in how a simple rearrangement of boxed content on the page can make an significant impact on user behavior. Now I'd like to learn why more students are not finding what they seek when using Quick Answers to get their questions answered.