Have you ever had to decide where to go for dinner in a group of six people?
Even with low steaks, (see what I did there?) these conversations can cause much pain and friction amongst even the best of friends. How much more, then, when mission-critical resources are on the line? When a decision represents the degree to which a mission’s identity is properly represented on a web page? When we must consider how to best optimize the impact of an organization on the world at large?
Our work is aimed at making the world a better place. The folks alongside us in this effort are incredibly passionate about doing so to the best of their ability. This makes conversations about what form a digital asset should take tricky in the best case, near-impossible in the worst.
It is difficult to bring quantitative reasoning to a design conversation, often resulting in the infamous “I just like this better” argument. Once your team has stepped into that quicksand, it can be impossible to escape without someone’s feelings being hurt.
Enter: User Feedback
Regardless of your team’s aesthetic taste differences, there’s one thing you all agree on: the donor’s opinion reigns supreme. The core of every good marketing strategy hinges on understanding, no, embodying, your ideal audience.
You can infer a lot about your audience’s preferences by analyzing your analytics data, and you should be doing so as often and precisely as possible. However, there’s a more direct approach to gathering quick and valuable feedback on the proposed design of a digital asset:
Ask for it!
We recently conducted several user tests for a client’s website as they tried to decide between two versions of a campaign page. This means we had a selected demographic of users test the site, and we asked them specific questions about their experience.
Employing these principles in your test design will maximize the value of the responses you gather.
Now, the question on everyone’s mind: What did we learn?
The most common complaints we’ve collected across three rounds of testing are as follows:
- Credibility Is Massively Important. A huge percentage of the users had a hard time locating trust-building content like external organization accreditations, testimonials, and payment security indicators. These factors pushed them away from feeling comfortable donating to the organization.
- Connotation Bias Abounds. Terms that were ambiguous caused the users to become confused and frustrated. The last feelings you want an incoming site visitor to be feeling.
- Value Proposition Absence. Many users struggled to find what makes the organization special compared to similar organizations. This means the unique value proposition of the organization was difficult to find or was missing altogether.I can feel you tense up at the mere mention — drawn out battles of opinion vs opinion almost always end in a stalemate, with some folks disheartened because of the concessions required of them. , always position yourself as the best possible solution to the problem you’re trying to solve!
- Usability Over Ornamentation. Certain design choices, like cool flashing animations or fancy page transitions, were often cited as more confusing than anything else. Remember those 8 Steps to Gift! It doesn’t matter how cool your website looks if it’s not educating and inspiring your visitors to join the cause.
- Financial Transparency Is Critical. We’re not just talking about annual reports. Where does each dollar go? What is the tangible impact of the money donated? How many Units of Good (UoGs) are being generated with the gift? (Yes, I made that metric up, and yes, you can use it. Free of charge.)
Okay, I’m throwing a lot at you. What does it boil down to?
Revisiting, and perhaps testing the limits of, the earlier metaphor.
You’re sitting around a table, playing a game with your friends. You collectively decide it’s time to eat. Imagine you could get direct feedback from the “user,” each person’s tastebuds and stomach, telling you exactly what would be the best food option. By removing preferences as the supreme deciding factor, you’ve made the deliberation more objective and less personal.
User feedback can do the same thing for your next digital asset. No longer will you have to go head-to-head with your peers about whose aesthetic preferences are the most “correct.” Incorporating outside, demographically relevant, opinions brings blessed solidity to a conversation that traditionally remains in the unstable realm of “Nuh uh! Yeah huh! Nuh uh! Yeah huh!”
You get it. Now go forth and ask some users to test your web page and tell you what they think!
