Nintex Reporting – Most Popular Query Report

You’ll find this report (or chart) in the Search category of reports. If you go to the Nintex Reporting Report Center it’ll look like this :

This is without a doubt, one of my favourite reports that come out-of-the-box. Sounds strange, yes, and you may be asking, why do I care what my users are searching for?

Curse your tongue!

You should always care what your users are doing. Did you not watch 1984? Are you not big brother? What if your users are doing it wrong? What if one person is doing it right, and the rest are wrong? What if everyone is doing it right, but one person?

All that is important information to know so you can improve your organization and make everyone more productive. Because really, when it comes down to it, why are you using an analytics type of product, if you don’t want to know this information?

Ok, enough jibber-jabber (Thank you Judge Robert Sanders from Boston Legal for that).

One of the big questions to ask when looking at the Most Popular Query report, is why are my users searching for this particular term? Is there something we can do, that might minimize the need to continually search for it?

Let’s use the following screenshot as an example and treat the numbers on the x-axis as 1000’s.

In this situation, we see that our users have searched for the word “energy”, 2000 times. So I go and run this by a few users, and find out that they are all looking for the link to our internal “Energy conservation” site. Well, each search through our portal might take 5 seconds. 2000 search = 10000 seconds = 166.66 mins = 2.77 man (or woman) hours.

Doesn’t sound like a lot, but think about it over all the searches that are performed through SharePoint.

Wouldn’t we all benefit, if on our main portal, we just have a link to the Energy Conservation site? All of the sudden, there’s 2.77 man (or woman) hours that we have saved.

Now to a similar, but probably more relevant to every company, scenario. What if the term you find your users search for most often is “timesheet”, and funnilly enough it happens every Friday. *lightbulb turns on*. Lets add a link to our portal that takes our users straight to the timesheet.

Conclusion

There are going to be reports in Nintex Reporting that different people will find useful in different ways.

You sometimes need to take a look at these reports and think about – What is this telling me about my specific environment or company? Can I use this information to somehow improve things?

Statistics and Charts are great, but it’s what you do with them that’s really important.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *