Volume 1, Issue 3
Table of Contents:
The Business Case for Usability Testing
By C. David Gammel, CAE
Usability can be more than simply making it easier to do or find stuff on your Web site. There are many tangible benefits to usability improvement that include an identifiable return on investment.
Critical Outcomes
Anywhere your site supports the creation or completion of specific outcomes is a great place to look for a return on your usability testing investment. Here are a few common opportunities for membership organizations:
- Membership join and renewal processes. One organization I worked with realized a six-figure revenue increase by making one usability improvement to a renewal e-mail blast to existing members. Every organization should constantly test and improve this critical function of their web sites.
- Event registration processes. It is very common for a majority of conference registrations to come online. If this is a significant revenue item for your organization, look at how you can improve the process to get registration dollars faster and earlier than before.
- Members-only login process and support features. The login is often the gateway to much of the value membership organizations offer to their members. Can you imagine living with a 75% success rate of customers opening the door to your offices? You shouldn’t settle for that online either.
Investing in the critical outcomes of your web site is always going to pay off significantly.
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Deep Thoughts on Usability
By Lindy Dreyer and Maddie Grant
When it comes to creating community online, great content is not enough. You need to create engagement, and that means also giving people something to do with the content and a reason for doing it. So we’ve come up with three usability concepts that can help all of us keep our eyes on the prize. Buzz, Action and Ego.
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Best Books on Usability
By C. David Gammel, CAE
Below are some excellent books if you want to get up to speed on usability quickly.
Don’t Make Me Think (Second Edition) by Steve Krug
If you only buy one book, make it this one. Steve Krug explains how to make sites very user friendly in plain language with lots of examples. It is web usability for the layperson. The book includes a very useful chapter on how to conduct do-it-yourself usability testing.
Complete Book List
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Usability Testing You Can Afford
By Frank Fortin
Meaningful usability testing doesn’t have to cost a boatload of money. The bad news is you can’t do it cheaply AND quickly at the same time. If your budget is short, you must put some time into it.
I recommend doing it in two stages.
Step 1: Interview at least 15 members about their use of the Web, and their use of your current site. Do this before you draw any new wireframes or site maps. Encourage them to be completely honest – assure them that you want to know the whole truth, even if it’s ugly.
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Two Quick Tools for Making Your Website More Focused
By Dina Lewis
What’s your tipping point for making your website more member and customer-focused? Is it:
- I finally got tired of hearing (pick one) membership/marketing/convention staff complain about the calls they get from people who need help finding things on our site
- Our registration and product sales are down, but our site traffic is up. I noticed the abandon rate on the store pages is spiking
- I finally got approval for a website redesign
Why not be proactive and practice ongoing no cost/low cost usability assessments of your organization’s websites? There are many tools and techniques available that don’t require big budgets or a big time investment. Two are described here.
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The Avectra Academy Reading List
Snippets and links to blog posts and other things we have been reading
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