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The Meaning of Usability for Ministry Websites – Why It Matters and How to Do It

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Note: Building on Matt Heerema’s post on the importance of usability for good websites, I’m posting this document, which was originally created to outline the usability strategy my team and I developed at Desiring God. My aim was essentially to give a clinic on the most important aspects of usability and information architecture in about 8 pages. I believe I wrote this in 2009.

Though it applies these principles specifically to DG, the broader principles that are applicable to any website should remain clear. Hopefully seeing their specific application to the DG website will help reinforce and illustrate them.

It would be great if every ministry began to make usability and good information architecture a top priority — and therefore learned the principles to effectively implement these priorities. It would make an absolutely huge difference. 

For more on usability and how I see it as not only central to website effectiveness, but also grounded in the Christian command to love our neighbor, see my messages from the Biola Digital Ministry Conference How the Gospel Should Shape Your Web Strategy and Practical Usability.

 

History of the Site Development

At the very start, we identified that usability would be our governing principle in the site redesign. The goal of the site redesign was: “To redesign the Desiring God website in accord with sound principles of usability and design.”

So we researched in detail what made for good usability. This involved not only studying the best books on the subject, but also user testing on our current site to determine what worked and what didn’t, and user testing on some other sites.

It also involved detailed analysis of the best sites out there (almost all of which were secular). We analyzed in detail how sites like Amazon and others organized their content and created an optimal user experience.

Last of all, we researched the principles of sound classification and categorization. This is because the site not only required that we create a good macro organizational structure, but also required the effective grouping of 2,000 plus resources into several different types of categories, including resource type, topic, and more. We wanted to know the principles of how to effectively categorize things so that we weren’t just making decisions on the basis of what we thought would be right. We wanted to know what we were doing.

To synthesize all of this information, we created several documents: “Usability & Design Principles for Desiring God,” “Usability, Our Basic Philosophy of Web Design,” “DesiringGod.org Classification Principles,” “DesiringGod.org Category Schemes,” and “The Vision for Our Website.”

 

The Importance of Usability

Its Priority

As mentioned above, usability is the central principle of our site design and presentation. This means that:

  1. We prioritize it above looks.
  2. We prioritize it above cool functionality.

We want a good graphic look for the site, but when we have to make a call between what looks better and what is more usable, usability wins. Likewise, we don’t have a problem with cool functionality, but if it creates an interesting experience at the cost of making the site harder to use, we are not interested.

Tie to Mission

The centrality of usability to the site flows from our mission. Our mission is to spread. But a hard to use site creates friction, which thus reduces spreading. An easy-to-use site reduces friction, thus serving the cause of spreading.

Good Usability Makes Everything Seem Better

Good usability makes everything about a site more effective. “Making pages self-evident is like having good lighting in a store: It just makes everything seem better. Using a site that doesn’t make us think about unimportant things feels effortless, whereas puzzling over things that don’t matter to us tends to sap our energy and enthusiasm—and time” (Krug, 19).

The importance of usability will be discussed in more detail below, when we discuss the need to be content-centered behind being user-centered.

[Read more…]

Why Most Websites Are Hard to Use — And What to Do About It

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This is an excellent post at Challies.com by my friend Matt Heerema.

Most websites are hard to use because the designers paid insufficient attention to information architecture. Information architecture has to do with how the site is structured and organized.

So, how do you fix this? By giving usability the priority it deserves and learning principles of sound information architecture.

You can do this by reading a book like Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think — still the best book out there on web usability.

Or, if you are engaged in a web redesign or soon to start one, I would highly suggest contacting Matt and his company, Mere Agency, to see what they might be able to do for you.

You would find it to be well worth your time and investment. The impact of good usability is huge. When we first redesigned the Desiring God website on the basis of sound usability principles back in 2006, within four months page views increased 356%, audio listens increased 359%, and visits increased 99%.

Matt’s company understands and specializes in those same information architecture principles that we developed at Desiring God. In fact, before starting his current company, Matt came and worked with us at Desiring God and led subsequent redesigns of the site. If you work with Matt, you will be putting your website in great hands.

Apple's Marketing Philosophy

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This is the marketing philosophy that Steve Jobs learned from Mike Markkula in the early days of Apple, as summarized in Isaacson’s biography Steve Jobs. It clearly continued to guide Jobs’ thinking through his entire career and very much goes to the core of what sets Apple apart.

First of all, though, a point on business in general: “You should never start a company with the goal of getting rich. Your goal should be making something you believe in and making a company that will last.”

That is foundational to the next three points, because if you are only doing your business to make money, then it will be impossible to have the genuine passion for meeting customer needs that is essential for creating a long-lasting, effective company that people actually like. The foundation of effective marketing is one thing: to care.

Now, the three points on marketing.

  1. Empathy. Have an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer. “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.”
  2. Focus. “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”
  3. Impute. “People form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys.” Thus, “if we present [our products] in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.” Hence, even the experience of opening the box is intended to “set the tone for how you perceive the product.”

Millennials: Bringing Back Entrepreneurship in America

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This is a great post at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics on how Millennials are rejuvenating the entrepreneurial spirit in America after 30 years of decline, and how entrepreneurship is very much in sync with Christian values.

It begins:

Entrepreneurship has been in a slow decline over the past thirty years in America, according to a recent study by the Brookings Institution. Today, more businesses are failing than being created, as this graph shows.

But Millennials may be the generation to change this decline.

The National Journal reports that in 2011, 29% of all entrepreneurs were between twenty and thirty-four years old, and Millennials launched nearly 160,000 start-ups each month that year.

Is it possible that Millennials might bring back the entrepreneurial spirit?

Read the whole thing.

Is it Really the Case that People Don't Value that Which is Free?

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When I was at Desiring God and we were implementing the vision of posting everything online for free, this was a common objection.

I think the people who make this objection are very smart. Further, they have some good evidence for their thinking. For example, who hasn’t returned home from a conference with a huge pile of free books that they are not interested in and might actually just throw away? Or who doesn’t get annoyed by marketers trying to stick them with “free” stuff as they walk by.

And I have to say that one of the most annoying things to me is websites that try to promote their newsletter or other stuff by putting FREE in all caps, as if we are dogs programmed to salivate at any idea of “free” and as if we don’t have enough to do already. My question whenever I see that is always “who cares if it’s free; will it actually add value to my life?” Much of what is “free” actually takes value away from you by taking your time and creating hassle.

In other words, “free” is often a value vampire.

Of course, though, the problem here is that in these cases, we really aren’t dealing with free at all. We are dealing with low-value stuff that imposes a cost on us — the cost of time and hassle, all in the service of the marketers aims, not the recipient’s aims. By definition, that is not free. That’s called taking. It’s taking in the guise of “FREE.”

Back to something like abundantly free online sermons (like at Desiring God) or even the case of free books. The fact is, sometimes we do value free stuff — and sometimes we don’t.

You can’t just make a blanket statement that people don’t value free stuff, or that they do. Experience constantly contradicts this.

For example, think of your favorite TV show (if you have one). If it’s on one of the major networks, it is free to you. Does that make you value it less? For years my favorite show was Lost, and I didn’t value it less because of the fact that I didn’t have to pay to watch it. Likewise, just because I do pay for an episode of something now on iTunes doesn’t mean I am going to value it more. I value it based on how much I like it, not based on how much it cost me.

The biggest factor here of all, though, is the issue of salvation. Salvation is fully free (Romans 6:23). Does that make us value it less?

Of course, based on the behavior of some Christians, some people might actually argue that the answer is yes! But we know that can’t really be the case, for God would not set things up such that the way he grants the right to heaven is intrinsically flawed so as to make us devalue it.

I think the answer is this. People value free things when those free things meet immense needs or enable them to invest in things that matter. 

In the case of free online sermons, if a person simply has a consumer mentality, they might not be valuing those free sermons the way they should. But the free sermons aren’t there for such people. The sermons are there for the people who want to take what they learn from those sermons and invest it into their lives and into other people. 

Note that in these cases, the person is actually doing a lot of work. But the work is not to earn the right to the free items (in this case, sermons), but in learning from them, applying them, and living them out. That is very demanding, and causes people to value the sermons very much. (I’ve spoken to pastor after pastor, for example, that has remarked on how they use the sermons in their research as they are preparing for their own sermons.)

And that’s why making something free does not necessarily diminish its value. Sometimes, it actually enhances its value by enabling the person to focus on the real purpose of that which is free — namely, putting it to use.

Why distract people from that purpose by putting up additional barriers?

Why Do So Few Organizations Get Going on Their Good Ideas?

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They are too busy on the tasks of yesterday.

Drucker:

There is no lack of ideas in any organization I know. “Creativity” is not our problem. But few organizations ever get going on their own good ideas. Everybody is much too busy on the tasks of yesterday….

The need to slough off the outworn old to make possible the productive new is universal. It is reasonably certain that we would still have stagecoaches — nationalized, to be sure, heavily subsided, and with a fantastic research program to “retrain the horse” — had there been ministries of transportation around 1825.

Stop Marketing Like It's Still 2004

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This is an excellent, insightful, enjoyable, and easy to follow slideshare from Gary Vaynerchuk.

Here are a few key points I took down:

Most marketers simply treat social media as a distribution channel—as another form of mass marketing. Big mistake! You lose all the benefits.

This forgets that what’s unique about social platforms is that they are a two-way conversation, not one-way. That’s what distinguishes them from mass marketing.

Social media is like a cocktail party. And a good cocktail party doesn’t come from talking about yourself the whole time (that’s one-way marketing), but from talking about others and interacting.

You bring value by engaging with users. That means replying to them—not just shooting stuff out there.

The trick is to learn the uniqueness of each platform and tell your story in a way that syncs with why and how people use that platform.

“Those who don’t learn how to tell their stories on today’s platforms are the ones who will go out of business.”

This has taken down some very smart, rich, and well-supported companies (for ex: Blackberry; AOL).

Entrepreneurs Must Save America

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That’s the title of an excellent interview at the Gallup Management Journal with Jim Clifton on his book The Coming Jobs War.

Here are a few excerpts that are especially worth noting:

The U.S. has no shortage of great ideas and innovations. What the country needs now are highly motivated entrepreneurs who can turn those ideas into great businesses, says Gallup’s chairman. [But]…by concentrating on innovators and neglecting entrepreneurs, we may be making it harder to create the jobs the world wants and needs.

…The country that invents the future wins the jobs war, and inventing the future is what great entrepreneurs do.

…Businesses like the one Steve Jobs created and businesses like Intel and Microsoft and Amazon and Groupon and Facebook and eBay — nobody else sees that stuff coming. Nobody else says, “Hey, we need a site where we can post pictures from the weekend. We need a site that’s basically a 24/7 garage sale.” That wouldn’t have market tested well. But look at Facebook and eBay — they’re multibillion-dollar companies that created jobs for thousands of people.

We’ve got to accelerate that. To imagine that we’ll compete with China and those manufacturing jobs will come back is hallucination — or at best, wishful thinking.

…Engagement is a precondition for the state of mind that creates entrepreneurs. Miserable workgroups chase customers away. Miserable workforces don’t create any economic energy, so those companies are always cutting jobs. America will not come back and win the world unless we have the most spirited workforce. Spirited workforces create new customers. New customers create new jobs.

Physical Books May Offer Better Reading Comprehension than Ebooks

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This has been my experience, and it’s good to hear that science may be bearing this out. Here’s a key quote from a brief article on this subject:

“Some scientists believe that our brain actually interprets written letters and words as physical objects—a reflection of the fact that our minds evolved to perceive things, not symbols,” writes Carr. “The physical presence of the printed pages, and the ability to flip back and forth through them, turns out to be important to the mind’s ability to navigate written works, particularly lengthy and complicated ones. We quickly develop a mental map of the contents of a printed text, as if its argument or story were a voyage unfolding through space. If you’ve ever picked up a book that you read long ago and discovered that your hands were able to locate a particular passage quickly, you’ve experienced this phenomenon.”

The question for me is whether there’s a way to be able to replicate this phenomena with e-books. I haven’t found one yet, but perhaps there is.