Make it easier for people to find what they need, no matter their ability.

Don’t Argue; Test!

If you can, run some usability tests. It’s amazingly powerful to watch people try to use your site or app. You can often catch (and fix) 80% of the most glaring problems with only five testers.

When egos or ideas conflict during the process of building and maintaining a website, it’s invaluable to refer to test results—or more powerful yet, video—of people utterly failing at some critical task—or succeeding at something that everyone thought would be just awful.

Find out what works instead of speculating about it!

• Rocket Surgery Made Easy is a fantastic resource for learning about and running usability tests.
• Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users: the best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford. But remember, it’s not about five users: test until you find problems, fix them, and test again.
• Usability & Web Accessibility from Yale: learn how to conduct a usability test in 5 steps.
• HiPPO reminds us that good design isn’t about pleasing the boss, it’s about serving the user. Data beats gut feelings, no matter who’s in charge.

Cover the Basics

Usability Guidelines for Non-Profit Web Sites covers all the basics of creating a site that’s clear, clean, and easy to navigate.

Try to look at your website with fresh eyes, and ask yourself the following questions.

Is it obvious who you are?

Is your mission statement clearly visible on your home page? Don’t bury this basic information on an “About” page—be sure your home page answers the most obvious question about you.

Review this basic checklist to make sure your site has all the essentials covered.

Do you have an explicit welcome to newcomers?

Website usability studies show that “fluff” text tends to deter visitors. Web users don’t read—they scan to see if they can find what they’re looking for, so you’ve got three seconds at most to convince someone to stay on your page.

Don’t waste valuable space with long text about how happy you are to welcome everyone, but do have some menu item or callout that specifically calls to newcomers and lets folks know where to start.

Does your navigation offer clear pathways to additional information?

Analytics may help you consider the words you use in your navigation, to be sure you’re using language that’s natural to the people coming to your site—and to make sure that the things people are looking for most often are closer to the top of your navigation tree.

Navigation is not the place to educate or inspire—it’s the place to be completely obvious, transparently clear, and almost boring. Once people find what they’re looking for, your content can take care of the education and inspiration.

Optimal Workshop has some tools (which are free for small samples) that might help you do some card-sorting and tree-testing to come up with and then test a navigation.

Do you avoid “insider” language?

We might know that Unitarian Universalist (UU) churches are well-known for their social action, so perhaps we can guess what a menu item like “Serving” means, but consider what your choice of words might mean to a person with no context. Program names may not be familiar to outsiders; consider using descriptive text instead or in addition: “Sexuality Education” will be more meaningful to more people than “Our Whole Lives” alone.

Do you follow basic accessibility rules?

Read some basics of web accessibility and be sure to test the readability of your color scheme.

What are the things your visitors are most likely to want to do?

Find out how to visit? Review the “Sunday School” class schedule? Read sermons? Is it obvious how to accomplish those things?

Does your site work just as well on a small screen?

Ever-increasing numbers of internet users are using mobile devices. Search engines like Google give preference to mobile-ready websites in their results. Make sure you’re mobile-ready!

Analytics can help you know and prioritize the tasks that most people are coming to your site to accomplish, and usability testing can help answer the question about how easy it is to do so.