This is my message from the Biola Digital Ministry Conference 2012.

First I discuss why usability matters (giving both the practical case and the biblical case, which is very interesting). Then I go into the nuts and bolts of how to make your website usable, focusing especially on how to create good information architecture (the key to usability).

And here are my slides for the message (which you can use to follow along on the message, or just click through all on their own):

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…]

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.