Why do I need…to improve my website UX?

If your charity’s website is more than a year or two old, there’s a strong chance that someone may have said to you “we really need to improve the website’s UX”. Or perhaps you have been planning to do it for a while, but haven’t yet managed to convince people internally that it’s important enough to allocate time and budget to.

In this article we take a look at some of the key reasons why you should consider improving the user experience (UX) of your website, and how you can help show others the importance of doing this.

What is UX for websites?

Let’s start by taking a step back to provide clarity on what is UX. The Neilson Norman Group (key proponents of UX since the 1990s) have defined it as: “User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services and its products“.

Applying this to your website, UX is therefore the experience that your website users will have when navigating it. Think of website UX as a related specialist area of web design, where the focus is on ensuring that you create something that meets the needs that they have and is easy to use.

As we saw in our previous article, ‘5 quick wins to boost your charity website’s user experience‘, some of the specific areas you might look to improve in relation to a website’s UX could include:

• Website navigation
• Optimising for mobile devices
• Making the website speed faster
• Improving accessibility.

Reasons to improve your website UX

As you might have gathered, a good user experience is important for any website – just think of your recent experience of browsing different websites and the times when you have been frustrated as they are not working as you want them to. And now put yourself in the shoes of your website users – do you think they would find it easy to use and meets their needs?

Here’s our top reasons as to why you should consider improving it:

1. Increase donations

It’s likely that your charity will rely on donations in some way and also likely that your website has become an increasingly more important platform for that to happen. This means that ensuring the UX for your donation journey is the best it can be will be critical. The good news is that you might be able to make some fairly simple improvements – such as making donation forms simpler or providing more information to help evidence your requests for donations – and these can have an immediate impact for you.

The simpler, easier and more attractive it is for people to donate, the more likely they are to do so.

2. Build trust

Related in a way to donations, a trustworthy site is going to give users the confidence that you are a charity that is worthy of their time (and maybe money). You want first impressions to count, especially in a time where users attention spans are shortening.

To build trust, you want your UX to position the website (and charity) as professional, honest and trustworthy. This can be done by things such as having a modern, clean design look and feel, plus providing trust points, such as testimonials, reports and content that highlights the charity’s history, people and those it aims to help.

3. Improve engagement

As well as donations, you may well be relying on your website to engage people in different ways. This could include them becoming a volunteer, registering to receive your email updates, signing a petition, watching a video or reading some content. Good UX will make it easy for people to find what they are looking for, plus make these engagement options much more attractive, with a combination of good visual design and great copy.

Ensuring you have clear signposting and calls-to-action (CTAs) is important, so people can be guided as to where to go next and what to do.

4. Be more accessible

This is an important consideration for any website, but especially so if your charity works with people who have differing user needs and abilities.

To improve your accessibility UX, then have a look at things such as colour contrast, fonts, headings and images (including image descriptions).

Put simply, if your website is more accessible, then it’s going to be used to better effect by a more diverse range of people.

What next?

If you feel like you need some further reasons why that are specific to your website and organisation, then we would suggest gathering your evidence that clearly shows why the UX is not as good as it could be. Try to work out the impact of inaction here too – what happens if you do not make improvements – as well as what impacts could happen if you do make changes to it.

Look for relevant data and insights to support your case, using both quantitative data (i.e. what can Google Analytics tell you about engagement rates?) and qualitative data (i.e. specific feedback from users that you might capture during some research or even that they actively tell you via email or your socials).

If you feel that you are lacking in evidence, then consider doing some quick user testing to gather more.