Understanding the Health Score (SWOOP for SharePoint)

Each page or news item is assessed on three criteria and a score is assigned out of 100.  The criteria are: 

• Quality
• Experience
• Engagement.

The health score for a page represents the average of the three components and is given out of 100.  Where we give a score at an intranet, site, page or audience level, it is the average of all the individual pages that make up the site or intranet, or have been visited by the particular audience.

Understanding how each component impacts the overall health can help determine the actions you can take it make improvements.

We currently only score pages and news items that contain text webparts.  Those pages that are made up entirely of summary webparts will show "-" for all the health scores as we do not have access to the text to calculate readability, estimated read time, or to identify spelling errors or broken links (but we are looking to incorporate other webparts soon)

The scoring of the Health Score

Quality Score

The quality score is determined by looking at the number of spelling errors and broken links on a page, along with the age of the content since it was last updated.

Ideally, a page should have no spelling errors or broken links. The quality score will drop substantially if there are spelling errors or broken links present and will further reduce if there are multiple issues.

For the ageing content, we take the view of the user and how this might impact their trust in the content.  If content starts to age, the trust and confidence users have in the content diminishes regardless of whether it meets the policy requirements of whether it is current. It's about the likelihood it could be out of date and the perception of how reliable that page is. This is why we have the under 3 months as "Great", 3-6 months as "Good" 6-12 months as OK and over 12 months as "Poor". It is looking at the impact on quality from the intranet visitors viewpoint. Stale content is seen as a big issue for intranet success or failure.

Experience Score

The experience score provides a way to assess what the visitors experience of interacting with a page may be. It is based on:

• readability (relates to the number of long words that make something difficult to read)

• heading length (relates to the length of headings and how they help people understand the page)

• text structure (the number of paragraphs for each heading indicating if a page is structured well)

The readability score looks at the length of words and sentences using the Lix score.  The lower the score the easier the text is to read.   Lix scores below 30 are particularly easy to read.

The heading length takes the Australian government recommended length for headings of 70 characters and compares the headings on the page to this.  When visitors look at the page, they tend to scan headings for context.  Short headings make it easy to see what the page is about, whereas longer headings take more effort to read. 

The heading to paragraphs ratio looks at how well the text is broken up into digestible chunks.  Large blocks of text with no headings are more difficult to read on screen.  Visitors can loose their place in the text for example.  Where content is broken up with clear headings the visitor can find their way around the page easily and search or read the parts of the page that are relevant to them. To calculate this we divide the count of the number of paragraphs by the count of the number of headings.  A ratio of 5 or fewer paragraphs for each heading is seen as ideal.

Engagement Score

The engagement score provides a way to score how engaged visitors to a page are by comparing how much time they spend on the page against the estimated time it takes to read a page.  We use an estimated 250 words per minute as a reading speed that allows a person to comprehend what is being read.  People can read more quickly but are likely to not fully understand the whole text.

Once we know the estimated read time, we compare all the visitor's time on page against this and rank them.  This means that the closer to 100 the score is, the more people are spending enough time on the page to understand it.

We are also researching other engagement indicators, such as scroll depth, reactions, comments and click-throughs to build a better engagement score.