Heal Your Church WebSite

Below is my take on a case study comparing 6 common navigational methods by the Usability Professionals Association including among them Rollover, Flash, and Flyout menus I often see ‘crufting-up’ various church and/or charity websites. The results, while not surprising to me, may sober-up others drunk with GUI gadgetry:

While overhauling their internal website, the designers for one of Fidelity Financial ran into some tough questions regarding which navigational approach best suited their site. As a result, they fielded six different version of their website, and gave about 120 some-odd people about 4 common tasks each.

The results - at least to me - are not surprising:

You can read the article to see how each menu style is defined, sufficed to say that the simplest - and least glamorous - method yielded the best usability results:

• Yahoo-style menu: 15%
• Rollover menu: 23%
• Flash menu: 23%
• Expand/Contract menu: 22%
• Drop-down menu: 15%
• Fly-out menu: 26%

But here’s the real kicker the study results renderd:

• There was no time savings in using ‘geekier‘ menu methods over simpler; and
• Users reported, subjectively, no preference of ‘flashier‘ menu methods over simpler.

So does this mean you need to rip out your existing navigation on your church website? Perhaps … but that’s not my point today.

Instead, if you walk away with anything regarding this study, I’d like it to be these two things:

1. Design user interface based upon common user workflow/tasks; and not what’s nifty; and
2. dare to take time to test these tasks against different types of user interface methods across at least 5 different users.

Of course this implies the following:

• that you understand your users - and understand you are not one of them
• that you’ve enumerated the common user tasks and/or workflow
• that you use a test site to test development before going live

So why not read the case study … and even better, the associated PDF: “Extreme Makeover: UI Edition” … as examples of how to go about making user interface decisions for your next church and/or charity website do-over.

Who knows? You might actually wind-up with website navigation as relevant to your user’s context as last Sunday’s sermon!

Stumble it!