Do your nonprofit’s supporters sign up and then disappear? Hidden usability problems on your website could be to blame, especially if it’s been a while since you last reviewed your website. Use my checklist as your guide to finding and fixing usability problems that could be costing you supporters.
How to spot usability problems
Start by identifying the top 2 or 3 reasons why supporters come to your website. Is it to make a donation? Learn more about your programs and services? Register for an event? Complete a program? We’ll call these reasons, “tasks” later on.
Now, choose 1 or 2 that are most related to your primary concern: increasing supporter acquisition, engagement, or retention. Focusing on just one will make this process much easier.
For example, let’s imagine that your organization offers a digital education program for K-12 schools. To successfully complete the program and receive a certificate for their school, teachers and students must complete several objectives and provide evidence of completion via a digital platform. Many schools have signed up, but not many follow through and complete the program.
As the nonprofit’s education manager, your primary concern is increasing engagement with your digital education program. So you’ll review your website and education platform with that in mind.
A simple usability checklist for websites and digital platforms
Visit and test these key areas on your website or digital platforms:
- Create an account.
- Reset your password.
- Make a donation.
- Sign up for your newsletter.
- Register for an event.
- Save an event you plan to attend to your calendar.
- Enroll in a digital program or service.
- Complete the steps in your digital program or service.
- Any other tasks or steps that your supporters need to complete on your website.
As you review your website, you’re looking for things that are confusing, frustrating, or broken.
Make notes and take screenshots as you go. Record the steps you followed, the pages you visited, etc. Keep track of your notes in a document, on your screenshots, or in a whiteboard tool like Miro or Mural.
To help you see your website from a supporter’s perspective, ask yourself these questions. (I’ve paraphrased from Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics.)
- Are users informed about what is going on? For example, are error messages easy to understand so supporters know how to recover from them?
- Is your website organized in logical order? Does it use words and concepts familiar to your supporters rather than jargon?
- Are there clearly marked exits that make it easy to go back and undo actions?
- Does your website follow conventions? Does it work like most other websites do, especially ones your supporters are most familiar with?
- Does your site prevent problems from occurring in the first place?
- Are the actions, options, and other information required to complete a task plainly visible to the user?
- Is your website or member area designed so that both brand new and long-time supporters are able to complete their tasks without help?
- Does the website contain irrelevant or rarely needed information that distracts supporters from what they really need?
- Are error messages in plain language that help users find a solution?
- If you have help or support content, is it contextual and easy to search?
Make a top 3 list of usability problems you found
Pick 3 problems you found that are most related to engagement or retention. These are the problems that you’re going to try to solve in the next step.
This isn’t the time to worry about your sign up form if your goal is to increase engagement after supporters sign up!
Also, be sure to choose things you can actually fix. If you’re using an out-of-the-box donation software or digital classroom solution that you can’t customize, then those problems may need to go to the bottom of your list (also see “High effort, high impact” below).
This is where having someone with objective eyes (and knowledge of interaction design) review your website can be beneficial. If you’re running into trouble with this step or just don’t have time to do it on your own, grab a free 20-minute chat with me.
How to fix usability problems
Brainstorm ideas for solutions
Brainstorm 2-3 ideas for potential solutions for each of the 3 problems you identified as most related to your primary concern. Ask your team and your web developer to help you come up with ideas. Even better, ask a few of your supporters.
Prioritize your potential solutions
Next, rank your 6-9 ideas based on effort and impact. A chart makes this easy to visualize:
Place your ideas on the chart according to how much effort they will take you and/or your team to implement and how much impact they will have on your goal to increase engagement or retention. If you work with freelancers or consultants, this can be a good time to bring them in to help with estimating effort.
You’ll end up with ideas in each of the four quadrants:
- Low effort, high impact = Yes, do now!
- These are your quick wins, do them.
- Low effort, low impact = Maybe.
- Consider doing 1 or 2 of these ideas if you have the time and resources.
- High effort, low impact = No.
- Table these ideas, there’s no point.
- High effort, high impact = Yes, plan to do later.
- These ideas have potential, but are risky, so you’ll want to do a little more research before you proceed.
- You can reduce risk by testing potential solutions (aka prototypes) with users first before you decide to build or buy something.
- You can also dig into website analytics to confirm that the problem is big enough to warrant the effort (and funding).
Now you’ve got a prioritized list of solutions, including some quick wins you can do right now with little effort.
Measuring success
Before you jump into making changes to your website, you need to answer one question:
How will you know if your improvements actually improved anything?
Sometimes you fix one issue only to create a new one. Or your assumptions about your supporters’ needs were wrong.
To make sure your fix is actually a fix, you’ll need to figure out how to measure it.
In our example about the education program for schools, increasing engagement was our goal. So our metric could be a few things: returning users, completing 1 or more objectives in the digital program, completing all objectives in the program, etc. Pick one or two that will help you know if your solutions were successful or not.
If you need help figuring out your metrics, here’s a guide for that.
Don’t forget to take a baseline measurement before you make any changes to your website. Otherwise, you won’t be able to compare before and after the changes go live, and you won’t know if your improvements were successful or not.
Implement your solutions and monitor your metrics.
Now you’re all set to fix those usability problems on your website. You’ll want to repeat these steps any time you make major changes to your website or digital platforms.
Remember, keeping existing supporters engaged is cheaper than acquiring new ones (1). If you don’t fix your digital usability issues, your new supporters won’t stick around either.
References
(1) “a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than 25% increase in profit.” and “Loyal relationships that by their very nature keep costs to a minimum are far better positioned to remain strong in the face of market turbulence.”
Source: Fred Reichheld, Prescription for Cutting Costs, Bain & Company, 2001.
Could you use a pair of objective, knowledgeable eyes to review your website? I’d love to help. Sign up for my free 20 minute chat.