I still don’t know what to say when people ask me what I do. After 13 years of being in the user experience profession I should have a standard response by now. But I either over complicate it by explaining in detail what I do, or I over simplify with “I’m a design consultant”, “I do market research” or” I’m in web design”. Recently I’ve tried explaining that I help companies design products that look great, work well and fit users needs but I still get that vacant expression in response.

Having a difficult to explain job means I’m always seeking good examples of communications that help people ‘get it’ quickly. That’s why I wanted to share the following 3 videos from Google. They offer a great example of why user experience is important. It’s easy to identify with the scenarios in the videos and they do a good job of making the problem obvious. Sadly, Google Analytics is not the right solution to the problem, but putting that aside the videos are great.

Online checkout user experience

Landing page user experience

Site search user experience

I’m not sure these videos solve my party introduction problem, but I could whip out my phone and show a quick video if I really struggle explaining things.  If you have any suggestions for some nice simple ways to explain user experience to people at parties, I’d love some advice!

If you’d like to learn how to improve the experience for your customers, we’d love to meet you for a chat. Please get in touch.

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

A report recently published provides an overview of charitable giving in the UK. It says that charity donations are down by 20% since the previous year. The report suggests that the overall number of people donating fell as well as the amount they are giving.

So what can charities do to boost their donations in difficult times? From hours of research with users we found the following 5 actions any charity can take to ensure they keep online donations pouring in.

1. Clearly demonstrate why donations are needed

Some charities are guilty of assuming that people understand what they do and why donations are needed. However, in our research we found users would search for a specific cause they were concerned about i.e. a particular disaster, or a broader theme i.e. cancer, then struggle to understand what specifically each charity did to solve the problem.
Users need to see a clear mission statement along with examples of what projects and initiatives the charity runs to support the cause.

2. Show them where the money goes

In addition to a clear mission statement and examples of charity initiatives, users look for case studies and concrete evidence that the charity is actually making a difference. They want to see what the money they give goes towards and specifically how donations are allocated to the different projects they are running.

3. Tell them how much money will reach the cause

Once users are convinced that the charity is a worthy cause, and is a credible candidate for their support, users then want to see how much of their donation reaches the cause. Users can be sceptical of how much of their money actually sees the front line. Those charities that did well to reassure users were the ones that broke down how many pence in a typical pound went to the cause, to future investments, internal administration costs, and future research.

4. Allow them to donate to specific campaigns/disasters

Users who were concerned about specific campaigns or disasters run by a charity were frustrated when they were unable to donate to that specific cause. Instead, they were forced to give a generic donation which the charity would allocate for them. This prevented some users from donating, which can result in them Googling an alternative charity who tackle their concern directly. Allowing users to choose which campaign or disaster to donate to would encourage more donations.

5.Provide easy ways to give one-off donations

Understandably, many charity websites encourage users to donate on a monthly basis rather than a one-off donation. However, this is often dealt with poorly making it confusing for users to select the one-off option instead. We found several users would give up easily on their donations if they found it difficult to select the one-off option. We were also surprised by the high proportion of users who prefer to donate by Paypal as an easy alternative, yet many charities did not offer this option.

In Summary

Whilst the economic climate is resulting in many people being more frugal with their spending, charities can improve the amount of donations they receive online by following the above guidelines. Donors have a variety of charities competing for their attention, meaning that charities have to work much harder at demonstrating why users should choose them.

If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you get more online donations, please get in touch or read more about our charity expertise.

Further reading:
http://www.ncvo-vol.org.uk/sites/default/files/uk_giving_2012_full_report_1211.pdf
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20304267

About Ali Carmichael

Ali (or Alasdair) is an experienced project manager who loves his Gantt charts and milestones! He has over 12 years' experience managing successful online experiences for world class brands. Ali is responsible for ensuring our clients love what we do for them. Follow Ali on twitter @AliJCarmichael

 
I remember in GCSE Business Studies being taught about how to write a memo. Though I never got the chance to right a real memo as by the time I had finished college and university the business world was using email.  I wonder if pupils are taught how to write emails in school today. I hope so. If I were teaching them how to write a good email I’d ask them to think more about the recipient of the message, or the user if you will. Here are my five tips to make it easier for the recipient of your email to read, understand and action your message.

1. Include your phone number

Many people include the option to ‘phone me if you have any questions’ in their message. Yet, it is surprising how many emails don’t include a phone number. Make it easy, even if you’re not offering an option to call you back, leave your number and save the reader the hassle of trying to dig out your number from somewhere else when they want to call you.

2. Provide a response deadline

You need a response quick smart. The person you sent the email to scan reads the email and prioritises a few other things over it. The deadline comes and goes, you get frustrated. Explain that you need a response by a specific time in your email so your recipient can respond accordingly, or at least let you know that the deadline is too tight! Either way, the risk is mitigated.

3. Don’t Cc anyone

Over my years as a project manager, I often received emails just to keep me ‘in the loop’. But when everyone does this it becomes a chaotic mass of noise making it difficult and time consuming to know where to focus. How many emails in your inbox are actually for you? How many people do you Cc, just in case? When sending an email ask yourself, who really needs to receive this? If the recipient doesn’t warrant being in the ‘To’ field, why are they receiving this email? Remove them, save them time, and if you need to communicate with them email them directly.

4. Keep it short

Long emails are laborious to read, and often most of the information isn’t needed. Use emails to stick to the point. If a deeper level of discussion is needed, pick up the phone (see #5), or if you have a lot to say to lots of people, don’t write a long email and send it to everyone (see #3), write a few short emails and send it only to those that need it. If you have lots of discussion points and activity to go through, use collaboration tools like Basecamp, Evernote, and Pinterest.

5. Pick up the phone

When you have quite a bit to say, or the subject matter is quite difficult to word in an email, just pick up the phone. The amount of lost  time mulling over the content of your email, combined with the time for the recipient has to decipher it is rarely worth it, especially when the thread can get quite long. Often the whole point can be resolved in a five minute phone call. So ask yourself, will this be easier to talk through? Will the back and forth emails take too long? If yes, don’t be afraid to pick up the phone!

 
This may not be what they teach in GSCE business studies, but if we all apply these tips we’ll all be much happier receivers of email, and our inboxes might be a little more manageable.

If you’d like to chat about how we can help you communicate better with your users, get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

About Ali Carmichael

Ali (or Alasdair) is an experienced project manager who loves his Gantt charts and milestones! He has over 12 years' experience managing successful online experiences for world class brands. Ali is responsible for ensuring our clients love what we do for them. Follow Ali on twitter @AliJCarmichael

As with any topic in the field of interactive media, it’s tough to know where to start if you want to learn more about user experience (UX). Many of our clients find our newsletter and blog useful, they might read other blogs and read the occasional book but rarely get the time or budget to attend formal training (either with us or elsewhere). Many of the organisations and charities we work with are finding less training budget available each year and are struggling to find viable learning opportunities.

We’re often asked for recommendations for ways to learn more about UX. Although we have plenty of books and blogs we can suggest, we’ve struggled to recommend courses people can do in their own time for little budget. So we’ve been doing some research to put together this list of short courses you can do in your own time for free or without breaking the bank. In this guide you should find plenty of inspiration for courses specifically about UX or in a related field.

We have grouped the courses into three categories: free, pay per course, and paid subscriptions. Under each of those categories, we’ve grouped the courses by source website. Each course gives a summary outline of what’s covered and who delivers the course material so it shouldn’t be too hard to assess credibility.

Free short courses

Coursera.org

Human-Computer Interaction

Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative

Gamification

Udemy.com

Introduction to Web and eCommerce User eXperience Design

Pay per course

Udemy.com

Practical Statistics for The User Experience I ($199)

How To Develop & Document Personas & Scenarios ($89) 

Secrets of Intuitive & Usable Design: The Conceptual Model ($179)

Web Usability Made Simple ($199)

Design Your User Experience in 7 Simple Steps ($197)

How To Develop & Document A Task Analysis ($129)

Optimizing The Early Phases of Innovation ($20)

UXDesignEdge.com

UX Design Basics ($295)

Uie.com Virtual Seminars

A range of future and past virtual seminars offered from $129 per seminar

Paid subscription

Lydia.com (Subscription from $25/month or $250/year)

Interaction Design Fundamentals

Fireworks CS5: Rapid Prototyping

Interaction Design: Process and Inspiration

Dale Herigstad & Schematic, Interactive Design Agency

Web Form Design Best Practices

Hot Studio, Experience Design

Web Accessibility Principles

Pluralsight.com (subscription from $29/month or $299/year)

Creating User Experiences: Fundamental Design Principles

We hope you find this a useful learning resource for UX. If you have any other suggestions for short courses you can complete online, in your own time let us know so we can keep this list up to date. If you give one of the courses a try, we’d love to hear how you get on with it.

If you’d like to talk to us about bespoke UX training please get in touch, alternatively you can keep on top of what’s new in the field of user experience with our monthly newsletter (sign-up below).

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

When usability testing charity websites we see the same user need being unfulfilled time and again. Before making a decision to donate, volunteer, or fundraise for you, users need to know where the money goes.

They’ve heard about charities eating up all the money themselves and only a small amount getting to the people who need it. They want to know your charity isn’t like that. But you also know that users aren’t going to read your AGM notes and won’t invest time reading about your financial structure. So what do you do? In this article we’ll show you some of the sites doing it well and give you some inspiration on how to fix your site to generate more online donations.

Offer a simple ‘where the money goes’ graphic

The simplest way to show users their money is going to the right place is to show them where the money goes using a basic graphical representation of the income you receive and what happens to the money. Users just need a simple understanding to tick the box in their mind which either adds you to the credible list, or puts you in the reject pile. Here are some examples of how some charities have done this well:

Unicef provide a page summarising where the money goes with a simple pie chart and a summary of their spending in 2010. A little out of date and wordy, but still a useful overview.

Plan UK is one of our clients and testing showed that users struggled to understand where the money was going. We recommended they create content for this and then in subsequent usability tests we found it worked well.

Oxfam provide a very simple overview using a pie chart. Like Unicef they also provide a useful understanding to show what happens to the money from every £1 donated. This is a great example of how to cover this off for users in a very small piece of real estate with a link to find out more.

Action Aid take more of an infographic approach which incorporates a summary of what happens with the money donated as well as a good overview of how users can help.

Centrepoint show that a pie chart isn’t the only way to show this information with a very simple breakdown of where their money is spent.

Key takeaways

• Show simple overview of where the money goes, a simple pie chart is enough (Unicef, Oxfam, Plan UK)
• Infographics can be a useful way to demonstrate lots of information easily (ActionAid)
• A breakdown of how the money has been spent is useful (Centrepoint)
• Simplifying the spend in terms of pence in a pound is useful (Oxfam, Unicef)

Provide evidence of what impact the money has had

For some users seeing a basic overview of where the money goes is enough to move them on to donations. However, for other users in our research, we’ve seen them look more into what the charity has actually achieved. They get an overall sense of what causes it supports, but often we observed users seeking direct evidence and tangible examples of what impact the charity has had. Users want to see the good their money can do.

Ideally they want to see brief case studies and news stories showing some of the recent success stories you’ve had. Giving them a basic overview of some recent projects with some engaging content such as video and photos would be a fantastic start, however we struggled to uncover many good examples of easy to find summaries of the impact voluntary support and donations have had. Our recommendation is to stop hiding this content deep in the site in impact reports, newsletters, and PDFs and bring it right to the front of the website. Show the proof of what successes big or small you’ve had in the last year. Here are some of the better examples we found, but we did struggle to generate many great examples:

Oxfam provide an area titled ‘The impact of our work’ which provides compelling video and imagery. The layout of the content also allows users to scan the content and get a good overview of what Oxfam are doing.

Shelter provide an excellent visual slideshow which takes users through a summary of their recent achievements. The content is visual, doesn’t take too long to go through, and easy to digest.

War Child offer a video highlighting the impact of their work last year. Users get an excellent visual overview of what the charity has been doing.

Comic Relief offer an excellent statistical view of the difference they have made. This is an excellent way to deliver a lot of information in an easy to glance manner.

Key takeaways

• Not many charities do this well
• A well presented statistical summary is a useful option if you want to avoid detailing recent projects (Comic Relief)
• Simple and easily digestible chunks of information showing this year versus last year is useful (Shelter)
• Videos and images offer compelling ways to show impact (Oxfam, War Child)
• Using inclusive language such as ‘see for yourself’, ‘we did this’ helps users engage (Oxfam)
• A section called ‘2011 highlights’ is a useful home for this content (War Child)

Helping users understand where the money goes and what impact their support will have in tangible, easy to understand ways is critical to receiving more support through your website. With these examples you have some inspiration to take action on your website. If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you generate more revenue and support online, please get in touch.

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees