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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.

Steve Jobs: Find Work You Love

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Steve Jobs:

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.

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.

Values Should be the Ultimate Criteria for What Career You Pursue

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How do you choose a career path? You shouldn’t decide it first based on what you are good at. You should decide based on what matches your values (assuming, of course, that your values are in line with correct principles). Sometimes, you may find yourself doing something you are good at but which doesn’t fit with your values. In that case, get off that path.

Peter Drucker nails this, with an excellent example, in his classic article “Managing Oneself“:

What one does well — even very well and successfully — may not fit with one’s value system. In that case, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one’s life to (or even a substantial portion thereof).

If I may, allow me to interject a personal note. Many years ago, I too had to decide between my values and what I was doing successfully. I was doing very well as a young investment banker in London in the mid-1930’s, and the work clearly fit my strengths. Yet I did not see myself making a contribution as an asset manager. People, I realized, were what I valued, and I saw no point in being the richest man in the cemetery.

I had no money and no other job prospects.

Despite the continuing Depression, I quit–and it was the right thing to do. Values, in other words, are and should be the ultimate test.

And, note this as well on how knowing your values (and having them right) can be even more fundamental to success than hard work:

Successful careers are not planned.

They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values. Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person — hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre — into an outstanding performer.

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.