 Is your site usable? This module is made available to you through a joint initiative between the Legal Services National Technology Assistance Project, the Legal Services Corporation, and Idealware under a Creative Commons by-license. Why should you prioritize usability when there's so many things to do? If you think about what you hope to accomplish with your site, such as identifying those that need further help, providing helpful information, getting more volunteers or more donations, all of those goals are helped by a usable site. Your website represents you. If you present a face for your organization that is, say, hard to use and hard to interact with, then people will think your organization itself is puzzling and baffling. Not that we are saying that's the case with the Legal Aid Society presented here, but creating a website that is usable and valuable to your audiences should be one of your overarching objectives. It sounds easy. Make your website usable. But for whom? Are you looking to help those who want representation or to get volunteer lawyers? You can be a lot of things to a few audiences, but trying to be everything to everyone will just make your site confusing. As we talked about in the Goals module, it's important to think about what your users want to do on the site. It's easy to think in terms of your mission. Well, for us, everyone comes with a complex legal problem. And while some people do, as many might come to find your phone number or find out whether you can help. Users are often looking for tactical information, so make that information easy to find. Most of the time, people have what they think is an easy question, and they are looking for just a simple answer. That's not always easy to do, but it's important to keep in mind. The idea here is to balance your goals with your visitors to make sure that your visitors can get what they need while you encourage them to do what you want them to do. If the idea behind your website is to encourage those who need legal help to come in and visit with you in person, then you're going to want to put the information to do that front and center. On the flip side, if you really want them to self-serve, whereas they want to come in and talk to someone, make it easy for them to start using your self-help resources. But don't fight your users. If you know they're going to want a way to call you, give them something that at least lets them know that they can't call you, as opposed to just not giving your phone number. How can you be sure that your web visitors will be able to find what they need? The elements in your navigation summarize your site and tell people what you have there. When people look for a page in the menu, you'll want them to feel that it was intuitive and felt fast and easy to do. To do this, provide straightforward navigational labels for them. Think about the navigation as a directory of your services. This one is from Iowa Legal Aid. It's worthwhile to spend time selecting labels that are meaningful to your users. Simpler and specific terms are always better than complex or vague ones. The homepage itself is another critical piece to usability. It is not the only driver of usability, but it is an important one. The homepage sets expectations as to what there might be on the site. On the page we're showing you now, one might think, oh look, I can get information about disability, education, and work topics. If I come in and I'm being evicted, however, this homepage would create the impression that housing issues aren't covered. But of course, you can't put everything on your homepage. Instead, the key is to succinctly summarize in plain language what you do. It's also critical to remember that not everyone will scan your site for information about what you do. Some people will jump right into a search box, so it makes sense to have that as well and to make sure it works. If you don't prioritize and everyone in the organization throws a whole bunch of things at the homepage, what you get is a very ineffective and confusing page. In contrast, the Illinois Legal Aid Society presents a very clear set of options. Do you want legal aid help? Are you a legal aid attorney? Or are you a pro bono attorney? Find a finite number of things you want people to be able to do on the homepage and make those your options. It actually doesn't matter if your audiences have to click through many pages to get to the information they need if each click is easy and obvious. What matters is that they're confident they're on the scent of what they're looking for. Scent is actually a usability technical term, believe it or not. How do you know if people will feel they're on the scent? User testing is really helpful, and we'll cover that in a bit. We would be remiss if we talked about usability without talking about the content. It doesn't matter how easy it is for a person to get to the information about what to do if they are being evicted, if the information presented is unclear or 50 pages long with no paragraph breaks. You want to make sure that people understand what services you provide. It's obvious to you, but you want to make it very clear to your visitors. For example, Pine Tree Legal Aid greets visitors with this message. Put yourself in your user's shoes. From their point of view, they don't want to know everything, just, well, the one thing they came to find. It's much harder to find that one thing if there's tons of unscanable text. Obviously, your website can't read their mind to figure out what that one thing is, but you can get closer. What are the 10 things that they're most likely to want to know? What do they need to make a decision? You don't need to tell them every detail right away. How do you present those 10 things? Lots and lots of text is much worse than presenting information succinctly. Keep your paragraphs short. Put the most important thing first in the paragraph. Write your content, and then cut your word count in half. Use lists and bullet points to break up long paragraphs. Most people don't read every word of text on a website. Rather, the research shows that they scan the page for the information they're looking for, or they scan until something catches their eye. Breaking up paragraphs into lists will help people scan the page. Links directing users to content about specific topics can be easier to navigate than trying to fit all the information on one page. This would be a good strategy for a home page, where you can provide links to draw people into other parts of the site. Images and video can help explain topics on your site for people who may have more trouble reading or understanding English. Keep accessibility in mind, though. Not everyone can see images or a video. We'll cover that more in the accessibility module. We've looked at a number of best practices for usability. You can run through a checklist to think about navigation and content, but there's nothing as useful as actually talking to people. You can ask people, or you can evaluate the data that's available to you by conducting user tests, sending surveys, or reviewing your site's web analytics. User tests are easier and more useful than most people think. Tests show how your theories of usability work in the real world. Usability experts don't say, I know what I'm doing, therefore I don't need to user test. Instead, they say, I know what I'm doing because I user test. How do you do it? Define a few things that you'd like to see if people can do on your site. Next, recruit three to four people from each target audience you'd like to include. Sit each person down at a computer. Ask them to talk aloud as they look at your site and attempt to complete a task. Their thought process will give you unexpected insights and information about where they get slowed down or stumped by your website. If they stop talking, your key question should be, what are you thinking as you look at this page? You could plan the task in advance, or ask them to think of one on the fly that allows them to explore on their own terms. To get buy-in to fix the problems that the usability test will uncover, and trust me, you'll find things. It helps to record the user tests and show them to your management staff and board. Set up a video camera to record, or record the screen and an audio track. Playing it back for people can be a great way to get buy-in from your organization, especially from those people who would say, no one could confuse those things, or everyone knows what that means. User testing or interviews are very good if you want detailed information about what things might be problematic. On the other hand, if you want a lot of people to answer a few questions, a survey can be helpful. You might ask them if they found your website to be helpful. Simple things like, what's your purpose on the website today? Or, did you find what you are looking for? We'll give you a sense of what people want to do on your site, and what their experience was like. Online survey tools, like SurveyMonkey, will make creating online surveys, or ones that pop up on your website itself, a straightforward process. Web analytics are also useful for figuring out what people want from your website. Install Google Analytics, if you haven't already. You'll need someone with some website savvy to do it, but it shouldn't be a large project. After it's set up, Google Analytics will begin to provide numbers, charts, and graphs about your site. What are the most popular pages? What paths do users take through the site? How do visitors come to your site? What page did they enter the site on? If it wasn't the home page, you can ask yourself, will they be able to find what they came for? To sum up, the core of usability is to define, usable for whom, to do what? Most people default to navigation when thinking about usability, but it's also important to think about the content and the way you present it. If you're concerned about the usability of your site, user testing is often more straightforward than you might think. There are plenty of usability resources available to help. Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think is a terrific book, and the User Interface Engineering Library covers many, many topics. The Nielsen Norman Group provides tons of information from Jacob Nielsen, one of the most well-known usability researchers.