A major focus when we started building our Blackbaud Interactive group was to provide a comprehensive set of design services. This meant bringing in a lot of talented designers with experience in both the for-profit and nonprofit world. I’m proud to say that we now have one of the largest and most experienced interactive design teams serving the nonprofit industry operating from both our Charleston and London offices.

Blackbaud Interactive recently began work on its 100th complete website redesign project built on NetCommunity. What started out as a new part of our overall online design services has grown dramatically. The team does a variety of redesign strategy, information architecture, usability testing, content analysis, creative concept and styleguide design, and other services for our clients. I thought I would share some important lessons learned to help organizations about to undertake any website redesign project.

Don’t Accept Blind Designs: There is still a practice of design shops offering to do “blind design” or “speculative design” in an attempt to earn a client’s business. This usually involves a design shop taking some thrown together or recycled designs and presenting them as part of their RFP or proposal. There might be some initial “ohs” and “ahs” but these fade once discussions start about a client’s goals, objectives, brand, etc. Good creative work never happens in a vacuum. Good creative work takes careful analysis, two-way discussion, and uses a proven process that brings the best ideas to the surface.

Don’t Design by Committee: A camel is a horse that has been designed by a committee. Committees often destroy the creative process because more minds don’t necessarily mean more great ideas. Groups of people have the tendency to pile on so many extras that the original concept collapses under its own weight. Getting buy-in from various stakeholders is important, but our experience has shown that making a single individual or small group responsible for approving creative concepts is the best approach.

Don’t Fall Prey to the NASCAR Effect: The homepage of a website is one of the most important parts of any online presence. And everyone wants to have their program featured front-and-center. This explains why the main page of so many sites resemble the front quarter panel of a stockcar. Lots of graphics, icons, links, sections, callouts, and content in a small space — all fighting for eyeball attention. If everything is important, then nothing appears important. Not to mention that their are actually some heuristics around how much is too much and what is usually just right.

Don’t Move All of Your Old Stuff: If you bought a brand new house, then you probably wouldn’t you just move all your old stuff in without doing some clean-up. Otherwise you end up with a great new place that quickly starts looking just like your old digs before too long. A site redesign offers a great opportunity to go through all of your content, images, etc. and give them all a good scrub down. In addition to any new information architecture or content analysis activities there should be some content cleansing. A good rule of thumb is updating or dropping any non-historical content that hasn’t been updated in eight months. Also check the website traffic logs for least visited pages that might need to be revived or retired.

Don’t Launch without a Soft Launch: Sadly, I’ve seen it too many times. After months of redesigning a brand new site comes the big public unveiling and within minutes someone finds a typo or a broken link or something worse. This usually happens because there wasn’t a soft launch of the website to certain key insiders and a select group of external constituents. Get a fresh set of eyes on the site before launching it to the rest of the world. Even the best designers and content authors develop a certain amount of “tunnel vision” from staring at the same pages for too long. They practice the coin toss for the Super Bowl. You should practice the launch of your website.

These are just some of the key pitfalls to avoid when launching your newly designed online presence. The website you save might be your own.

Whatever your comfort zone, these technologies are here and as the public grows more Web savvy, they expect you to be up on the latest trends. One of my favorite parts of this new tech wave is that it’s relatively low impact on one’s budget. The Internet has in fact given Joe Public the keys to authorship through numerous free social networking and blogging sites. (They even let me on!) So, aside from the obvious commitment of time and creativity there’s no reason for you not to join the game.

Next question: What might a nonprofit use such tech for? Well, on a VERY informal basis, I surfed to a few well known nonprofit Web sites who I figured would be up on their tech and might offer some good examples. I found stories of volunteers and people touched by the organizations, but they had pretty much all gone through marketing first. What I was hoping for was a direct voice of organization members and volunteers.

Never fear, this building is full of people who work with wonderful people like you every day. So I asked around and found an org (who is a client) who is doing some very cool things—Jesuits of the California Province. I do want to say that I’m not trying to hawk our products here. I just want to point out some of the ways this org is trying to connect with current and new constituents as soon as they surf in. And if you have some other great examples, send them in! The more people see, the more ideas we can generate.

The Jesuit Home page offers options to compose multimedia prayers, listen to or download podcasts, join discussion boards, read blogs, or listen to music composed by Jesuits. There is lots of other information on the page, but these are all interactive ways to give surfers a full picture of what the organization does. It also gives them access to other constituents and the people who make the organization work. This means that surfers are connecting at a person-to-person level with real, unedited people. And that makes a big difference.

I can offer up another example—Science online. Science is a well-known, high-profile scientific journal, also part of the nonprofit community, that normally serves just the scientific community. On their Web site, however, they’ve expanded their outreach to try to include educators and a broader audience. Full articles are restricted to members, but you can see right in the middle of the page a link to their podcasts, which provide free access to the same topics covered in the journal. Their multimedia site also offers interactive videos perfect for use in the classroom and complete with teacher resources.

In this case, Science is opening up parts of their value that is normally reserved for members only and sharing it in a new, more accessible way (way more user-friendly then the peer reviewed articles). This offers extended benefits to teachers, who may surf on more often for teaching tools, and students, who may start by saying “This is neat” and end by having a serious interest in science.

The point is there are ALWAYS ways to make your site more interactive, adding value and a gee whiz factor at the same time. That translates into more people who want to check out your site, who want to spend more time on your site, who tell their friends about your site, and who ultimately may be more likely to get involved.

• Consider your audience. You have people of all backgrounds and experiences surfing as equals. To accommodate this wide-spread audience, you’re going to want to write at about a ninth grade reading level or less. Newspapers generally follow this principle. They want their work to be as accessible as possible and so should you.
• Think about attention span. (again) As we continue on in our sound-byte driven, media overload world, people’s attention spans seem to shrink at a rate equivalent to the speed with which new toys for them to play with are developed. Not to be cynical or anything. What I’m trying to say is that you need to get to your point quickly. If you don’t capture attention quickly, your reader might surf on.
• Think about the mechanics of reading on screen. Depending on the machine a person is using, the screen size and thus the amount of text seen can vary widely. This is one of the reasons that long Faulkner-esque paragraphs don’t work well. Also, it’s really hard to follow visually as you scroll. Keep paragraphs shorter with a decent amount of space in between them.

Another quirk of Web reading is the effect your Web site’s design might have on readability. Always think readability when you’re looking at design! It doesn’t matter how pretty your site is, if you’re using yellow text on a checkerboard background, I, at least, will have a headache about five minutes after I start trying to read. If I even decide to put in the effort.

I’m absolutely sure none of you have gone to that extreme; however, color choice may have a bigger impact then you think. For example, my mom once had a boss who was colorblind. Someone sent her an email with callout text in yellow. Guess what? She didn’t see anything.

If you want to learn more about Web readability/accessibility, check out the Web Accessibility Initiative.

Keep these high-level tips in mind, and all the wonderful things your high school English teach taught you about grammar, and you should be headed on the right track.

But a huge part of facilitating processes involves communication among people and departments. I’m wondering what we can do to better allow users to communicate with each other through our products? And where would this type of functionality be most useful? We’ve already taken steps in this direction in specific areas - Major Giving cultivation, for example, where we’re looking to improve the ability of fundraisers and their managers to communicate progress and status on their prospects. But I think this is an area we can explore further and really take advantage of some of the newer tools available to us.

It seems like there are some key characteristics of situations where in-product collaboration would be most useful:

• The specific context lends itself to questions, clarification, and a general discourse on the value, interpretation or significance of what is being shown. Obviously, part of this characteristic includes the need for multiple people to be interested in the context.
• There is some value in being able to capture this conversation in a centralized place and in close proximity to the subject of discussion.
• The relationship and proximity of the people involved encourages online communication. People who share a cube are less likely to use something like this than are people who are spread across departments and separated by some distance. Probably more value to larger organizations than in smaller ones.

Examples where in-app collaboration might be useful include:

• KPI dashboards and other reports - this type of data display can immediately provoke questions, clarification and discussion around its meaning and implications. Why is this trend happening? Can we expect to make this goal? What events may effect the future of this data? An ongoing discourse of this kind if very healthy for an organization, and could further enrich the usefulness of this type of display.
• Major giving cultivation - all of the intricacies involved in cultivating a prospect are often difficult to capture in a set of pre-defined fields. Ongoing conversations about the propensity and inclination of prospects could potentially be managed through in-product collaboration features.
• Event management - planning large events takes a huge amount of communication, and decisions are made quickly constantly throughout the lead-up to the event. Centralized management and documentation of the decision-making process could help ensure that decisions are communicated clearly and people don’t spend time repeating past discussions.

Relative to other more prescriptive features, in-product collaboration solves an “ill structured” business problem. In some ways, we may not know how (or if) users would employ it until it is in actual operation. How might this type of feature fit into your organization? Do you see opportunities for improving communication through in-product collaboration?

These were existing RE users, so our hope is that they were just reacting to a change in the pattern they’ve grown accustomed to. But “they’ll get used to it” always makes designers really uneasy. Will they? How can we be sure this was an issue of familiarity and not a fundamental design flaw?

We’ll continue to test this issue with both RE and non-RE users, but I think this highlights the reality of user feedback and decision making in the design process. User input is one of several tools designers have at their disposal to help make the tough decisions, including design patterns, design principles, usability heuristics and personal experience. All of these are invaluable resources for informing the design process, but rarely do they make design decisions crystal clear. They are all very open to interpretation. In the end, it is still up to individual decision makers to make the “right” call based on the information they have.

For this reason, the real power in user-centered design comes not from a few usability tests and design heuristics, but from the development of a culture that puts a priority on user experience and encourages an ongoing, iterative process of feedback and refinement. This process doesn’t end when a product is released - existing features should be constantly re-evaluated and every new customer treated as another opportunity to evaluate your design decisions. Through these ‘layers,’ the experience becomes more and more refined:

When your decision makers are making user-informed, skillful design decisions, the difference between these levels are minimized. The process is then allowed to focus primarily on adding efficiency and smoothing out rough edges while functionality is gradually expanded. And when changes are required, this isn’t seen as a failure, but as a natural part of the design process.

I see the conversations you have with other customers on the discussion boards and I get jealous. There’s passion and connection there – an energetic give-and-take that builds relationships and opens new doors to success. Why don’t we talk like that?

Sure, we do the usability testing thing. We get an hour of quality time together, you get to tell me about what you like and don’t like, and I nod understandingly while throwing in a few “hmmmms” and “interestings” here and there to try and look smart, but it’s not really a conversation, per se. Yes, we get some great, useful feedback and at least it’s a start, but it’s just not enough, is it? It’s like speed dating. Just when things are starting to click, the bell rings and we’re off to our separate worlds and it’s a heck of a time getting back together because we’re both so busy and I’m left feeling empty and alone and you’re left to wonder whatever happened to those suggestions you made and the magic of the moment slowly fades away like some distant memory.

When we saw each other at the Blackbaud conference, you were very clear about your needs. I can live with the little deficiencies, you said. You wish they weren’t there, but you know nobody’s perfect. Just tell me why it is how it is, you pleaded. Tell me when it’s going to change, if at all. Tell me what I need to know and what I should do about it. Talk to us, you said. And I listened, and others listened and we’re totally on board with you. And this blog is a first step towards that discussion we’ve needed to have for years.

So let’s talk. I’m Cason. I’m interested in user experiences and usability and software design that empowers and delights. What are you interested in?