Building a Habit of Tiny
Website User Studies

We don't do nearly enough user research in the nonprofit world — for websites or for anything else. This is a shame. Small research projects can give you significant information with a minimal time investment. Even the most experienced user experience designers rely on user testing to ensure that their designs are usable; all the rest of us should as well.

To start on the path of doing research, it helps to start small. How small? In this article, I’ve defined seven different miniature research studies that you can do from beginning to end, from planning through to defining what you’ve learned, in eight hours or less.

1. Website Homepage User Testing

Ask four to five people to each spend 20-minutes with you on a video conference. Ideally, these people would be typical users of your website, but if that’s not practical, recruit friends and family who are unfamiliar with your organization. At the time of the meeting, give them your homepage URL and ask them to share their screen. As they look at your homepage, ask them what your organization does, and what key things they think might find on the site. Pick two to three key things you want everyone to be able to easily do, and ask them to do them while thinking out loud as they go.

If you haven’t done any user testing before, this can be an eye-opening introduction to how quickly visitors scan a website, and how easy it is to overlook things that seem obvious.

While an experienced facilitator certainly can bring value to a usability test, don’t feel like you can’t jump in as a beginner. A few key tips:

• Be careful with the words you use. Avoid phrasing things in a way that makes the right answer obvious what the right answer is, and don’t ask them to find something using the same words that are in the navigation.  

• Ask your question, and then let silence fall. Wait, even if it’s uncomfortable. 

• Don’t answer questions. If they ask you something, ask them what they’d do if you weren’t there, or tell them you’ll answer at the end.

• Let them struggle. Give them 60 seconds or until they’re very frustrated before gently helping them (“maybe on the upper right?”) 

2. Internal Page User Testing

Similar to homepage testing, but instead chose one of your most visited internal pages. To conduct this type of test:

• Share the URL with each of those four to five people (preferably from your target audience) via email right before your scheduled time to talk. 

• Give them a scenario that describes what they were looking for, with what question in mind, when they found your site, and tell them to click on the URL you send. 

• Ask them about the page (for instance, whether it provides answers to their question in the scenario, and what next action they would take based on it). 

• Wrap up by seeing if they can tell you what organization wrote the information and what that organization does.

This is a good quick test of both whether your important internal pages are providing expected information, and how easily people can find out about your organization when they land (as is common) on a page other than the homepage. 

3. Website Task User Testing

Another type of user testing: define two or three tasks specific to your nonprofit’s site. Ask your four to five people to complete each of these tasks on your site from beginning to end. Note any confusion or places they trip up.

A great kind of testing to come back to again and again, task testing shows you how people use your site to do the most important actions - perhaps, donating, finding specific information, or signing up.

4. Interviewing

Reach out to 20 random individuals from your nonprofit’s email list to request 15 minutes of their time to help your organization. On an average list, 20 emails will result in about four people willing to talk. Interviews are a great way to understand the real perceptions and needs of your audience.

If you want to talk to a specific subset of people on your list, but can’t filter down the emails in that way, just send the email to more people and specify who you’re looking to talk to. 

In general, it’s better to stay away from questions that ask directly for opinions about your organization or site. Instead, look to understand how they currently do things, what’s important, what sites they like and why, what information they look for, etc. People are typically happy to share their opinions (often, at great length), but those opinions often don’t reflect what they actually do in real life.

For more, see my article User Interviews on a Shoestring.

5. Website Intercept Survey

If you have access to the front end code of your website, you can use an online survey tool to create an “intercept survey”, which pops up when visitors arrive or leave your site. Ask a maximum of two or three questions - perhaps “What were you looking for on the site today?” and “How easy was it to find that?”. Any of the major online survey tools will work. They will charge you $20 for a month or two, and give you a snippet of code to paste into your site.  

The answers to the survey are often illuminating. Most organizations find that a high percentage of visitors are  looking for very basic information (and, potentially, struggling to find it)

6. Testing your content

Choose one or two articles that you feel are clear, well written, and good examples of your content. If possible, find people who are legitimately interested in that information - can you sign up 3-4 people from your email list, as per the above? Alternatively, create a straightforward hypothetical scenario that allows people to imagine why they might want the information. In person or via video call, give them a few minutes to silently read the page to figure out how they would move forward with the scenario. Ask a few questions to see if they could determine the main points. 

Understanding how ordinary people parse your information can be very valuable, especially when the content is complex or written by subject matter experts. Even if you can’t easily reach your exact target audience, it’s often useful to test it with anyone who isn’t familiar with the topic.

6. Shadowing Your Users

For specialized audiences,  it can be remarkably informative to simply watch them do what they do. With permission, shadow them in person or via video conference as they engage in activities relevant to your site. It might be useful to ask them to set aside the type of work you’re interested in. For instance, maybe you want to observe teachers as they pick what science activities they’ll use for their next unit. Or you would watch as they decide what donations they’ll make that year. Shadowing is easy to plan, and it provides a lot of context as to how your real visitors think.

Research that Can Be Worse Than Nothing

In general, almost any test, conducted by almost anyone, is better than no research at all. But there are specific approaches that can be difficult for non-experts, causing misleading results or a negative perception of user research. Some things to avoid:

• Focus groups.  Interviewing multiple people together in a room requires skilled facilitation to avoid "group think" and gather genuine insights.

• Asking people what they want. People are really bad at predicting what they will actually use or prefer. Instead, ask questions to determine what they do now and how they think. 

• Asking opinions about a design. Testing the success of a graphic design is tricky. Stick to whether people can understand the site and complete tasks easily.

• Surveying an informal group. Social media polls and quick email surveys can engage users, but they reflect only the views of the people who answered them, not data on which to make decisions.

Building the Habit

If your nonprofit don’t yet have a culture of user research, the only way to build the habit is to start with something small. Pick something from the list above that seems useful and doable, put aside eight hours over a few weeks, and see how it goes. The worst thing (and best thing!) that can happen is that you’ll learn something about how to do it better next time.