Tip of the Week: Use user stories to design or re-design your website

Are you creating or re-doing your website? TechSoup Global’s Elliot Harmon, author of Chapter 15 or “A Cooperative Approach to Web Design” in Nonprofit Management 101, has some words of wisdom for you. He shares that it is critical “to define clear goals for your site, conceptualize a site based on how real users will interact with it, and measure your site’s performance.”

Your website is the first place many of your potential donors, volunteers, and other supporters will come into contact with you. It is important to design your site with them in mind, so imagine individuals with different needs and backgrounds, and how they’ll interact with your website before building it. Think through what they’ll want to actually do on your site (known as in the tech world as user actions), such as donating, signing a petition, signing up for a newsletter or to volunteer, or requesting information.

Think about what steps they need to take through the process, what your goals are for each interaction, and how to streamline these to as few clicks as possible. All of this will help your designer immensely.

Read more and discover related resources in Chapter 15 of Nonprofit Management 101.