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6 Disciplines For Improving Church Website UX

MonSep262011 PostedMonday, September 26, 2011 @ 9 AMByBryan YoungTaggedUser Experience (UX)

After years of testing, evaluating, and surveying, the customer experience experts at Forrester Research, Inc. have identified the 40 key practices organizations should follow to reach the customer experience apex. These practices all fall into six key disciplines. Here are the User Experience (UX) disciplines you can perfect to ensure your church website users have a positive experience.

1. User Understanding

It is impossible to please your user if you don't know who they are and what they want. Only after knowing more about your visitors can you hope to make them happy. Your church website visitors are most likely a reflection of who visits your physical ministry.

In Practice
If your ministry members are voracious readers, start writing a blog with "inside information" on what your ministry is up to. If they skew more young and tech-savvy, post some videos and integrate your social media feeds to keep them connected.

2. Measurement

There are several ways to find out if people are happy with your website. Analytics can show you how long people stay on your website, which pages they like, and which ones they don't care so much about. User surveys and tests can give you insight on your website's strengths and weaknesses. Successful organizations get feedback from their customers and use it to make changes.

In Practice
Set up a simple user test in your church lobby and grab some volunteers on Sunday morning. Give them a few tasks to complete on your website, then record the process. Was it easy or difficult? Did they get frustrated or give up? Fix the issues that several people came across.

3. Governance

Organizing your website maintenance responsibilities will help you ensure that your website meets your users' needs. Having your ministry leaders write their section's content keeps away inaccurate information. Giving your church admin. assistant access to Contact Us form submissions assures that questions will get answered quickly.

In practice
Establish your authority over web content. Create a Web Standards Guide and use it to keep your website's content at a high quality level. Hold regular content audits to make sure content is up-to-date and relevant.

4. Strategy

Before you start posting pages or writing content, you have to know what you want to achieve. Look at discipline #1, and determine what your users want and how you're going to give it to them. Putting a clear web strategy into place will keep you (and your partners in ministry) from posting anything and everything on your website.

In Practice
Write down your ministry's goals and distinctives. How will your website meet these goals? Formulate your content strategy and only post content that follows it.

5. Design

After your web strategy is in place, you'll need to figure out how your website's design can help you reach your goals. Make sure that your church's brand (logo, color scheme, key phrases or ideas) is firmly in place and that the look and feel expresses what you want it to.

In practice
Use banners, ads, images, and quicklinks on your home page to direct users to the pages they are most interested in.

6. Culture

In order for these disciplines to become habitual, you'll need everyone to buy into a user-centric attitude. Your web team, volunteers, ministry leaders, and even yourself will only practice these six disciplines if "user first" is your true culture.

In practice
Make these disciplines fun, interactive, and with the user in the forefront of your mind. Have quarterly "Web Summits" where you brainstorm new ideas, re-emphasize your disciplines, hold user testing, and audit content together.