Case Study: Voices for America’s Children Web Renewal
CHALLENGE:
Voices for America’s Children was at the starting point of evaluating what the next steps were to take with their current website. They knew that the site wasn’t performing up to par, but didn’t know where to begin in tackling a redesign or developing their requirements.
The Voices for America’s Children site was an HTML-based site written with a distributed publishing model. Public policy experts created content on their areas of expertise, and somebody in the IT Department published it. Nobody at the organization had ever evaluated the site as a whole against best practices in usability. There were no publication guidelines. And no one had received any training on writing for the Web and how it differed from writing for offline content consumption. As a result, the site was inconsistent and had a messy appearance. Content was often dense, published with errors such as typos, and had poor readability.
They needed to build internal support to hire a technology vendor to create a new website; however, they needed something more. They sought to integrate the technology project with usability and training expertise to ensure a successful long-range Web improvement project.
SOLUTION:
This was a book-end project to help their organization guide development and make wise choices and decisions about managing the site build and maintenance. We began this consulting project with a baseline review, inventory, and audit. After the site launched, we returned to train their team on how to effectively manage their new resource. End-to-end, we were on call to help this organization achieve its top performance goals.
Usability: Preparing for Success
We decided to start with an expert review using our scorecard and establish a standards-based process for evaluating their current site performance and determining the next steps to take. The expert review deliverable is a reusable Excel spreadsheet format that enables the client to continue tracking their progress after the initial evaluation, allowing them to monitor their improvements over time.
The Web scorecard serves as a roadmap to help identify areas where adjustments are needed, where changes are required, and where you are excelling.
We also used the PowerMapper tool to examine their site inventory, assess the site’s depth, identify broken links, and evaluate the poor file structure.
The scorecard process involved applying my usability skills by sampling pages to assess the site’s performance against 36 known performance factors for compelling content, navigation, and feedback. I spent a day conducting a thorough evaluation of their site and then prepared briefing documents to support a two-hour meeting with their senior leadership to discuss the results.
Training: Web Publishing for Non-Techies
Our training effort with this organization began with reviewing their needs and then fashioning an afternoon session that covered the landscape.
We created and presented a half-day “Web Renewal” training, in four parts:
- Writing for the Web
- Being Search-Engine Friendly
- Using Graphics on the Web
- Putting PDFs on the Web
Later, we led a workshop at their annual conference on effective adoption and use of social media and reprised our training for DC staff, re-delivering our “Web Renewal” training package.
RESULTS:
Our engagement with this organization was a model effort in helping a team and the organization as a whole reset and recharge its digital life. Often, the technology built into a new website benefits from an independent, vendor-neutral voice to help the organization drive toward its goals and fill skills gaps that the tech vendor may not bring to the table.
Voices for America’s Children utilized my independent evaluation to garner support for a comprehensive overhaul of their website. In addition, the DC training, written materials, and conference workshops equipped key people with the information they needed to take immediate steps to enhance the presentation and editing of content on their sites.
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