Website usability is something most website visitors won’t notice or even think of, if done well. When done poorly, it jumps right out at them and can damage the perception of your website and brand. It will cause them to hit the back button on their browser – even if they are desperate for what you got.

So what is website usability anyway? And why should non-profits, small businesses or politicans even care? (Or maybe you want to skip to the fancy top 5 tips list below…)

Because, mes amis, it can mean the difference between:

• Sales for your company
• Participation & support for your non-profit organization.

Or, in the case of political campaigns….

GETTING THE SUPPORT OF VOTERS!!!

So, since I’ve shouted it out loud are you listening?

Rather than give you a long, theoretical lecture on website usability (which I probably couldn’t give you anyway) I’m going to use an AMAZING report by Angela Schmeidel Randall and her team at NormalModes.com. Entitled “What the People Want: Investigating the Voter Experience with Republican Candidate Websites“. This basically means what GOP Candidates websites got right and where they failed.

Before we begin, it should be noted that:

MITT ROMNEY was a big, fat LOSER!

He placed #5 out of 6, only beating Rick Santorum (Link NSFW!) which barely event counts IMHO.

Here is a great quote from the report, which you can download here:

“The Romney campaign website suffers from mission-critical failures that are relatively easy to resolve such as lack of a homepage navigation item and hard to identify secondary navigation in the “Issues” section. These problems kept participants from accomplishing their tasks, believing that content they sought did not exist.”

Misson critical? While Romney can apparently build successful businesses, building websites… not so much.

While they may be / have been GOP flavors of the month (IMHO), Bachmann & Cain tied for 1st place. What the what?!?

I read the report and kept a list of key points I wanted to share. Except there were so many damn good key points, that even if you’ve read this far into the blog post, you probably will still not want to read all of them. So, (AGAIN) I encourage you to read the full report.

Lastly, I’m going to share my top 5 tips/quotes from the report. Yes, they are at the bottom of the blog post… and if you were my client I would tell you to immediately put them at the beginning. But in the immortal words of South Park’s Eric Cartman: “What eva, I do what I want!”

My Super Fancy & Favorite TOP 5 TIPS From the Normal Modes Report:

1.  NO Splash pages with email collection or donate buttons before the homepage! They are “annoying and confusing to participants often to the point that they leave the site entirely.” YUCK!
2. Make it easy to find info on the issues! “Cain and Bachmann won several rounds based on the availability of content, even if the participant disagreed with the candidate’s position. Conversely, Romney was repeatedly penalized because participants were unable to locate the secondary navigation in the “Issues” section.”
3. “Most participants believed that information about occupation and employer was collected to judge their relative value to the campaign.” (i.e. You need to explain why you need it and reassure your contributors you aren’t spying on them.)
4. JOIN THE CAMPAIGN = SCARY COMMITMENT ISSUES “A major cause of confusion is the use of the phrase “Join the Campaign”. This is related to the funnel process detailed above. Participants indicated that “Join the Campaign” was too high a level of commitment when they simply wanted to subscribe to a newsletter.”
5. Top & Left wins the race. “Most participants indicated they were “used to seeing navigation on the top or left.” As a result, participants felt the site “is terrible with the navigation on the right” or indicated they would prefer navigation to be “on the homepage” instead of off to the side.”

While I haven’t been guility of all these sins in my past design projects, I have gotten close to the edge once or twice. Hey I’m not perfect! But I pledge to take them into account when designing new campaign websites, even if I’m not a hotshot designer working on a presidential campaign.

And the grand question at the way too long blog post… why is this important to YOU the reader?!?

Because, maybe you’re a campaign manager or field operative. You could even be a non-profit or small business. Many of these lessons are universal in website design. While you should always take them with a pinch of salt, you should definitely take them into consideration and discuss them with your web designer in the future.

ENOUGH SAID!

Fin