What to ask your constituents before a website redesign
Redesigning your website can be a great way to realign your branding, expand your online presence with new functionality, and enhance communication with your constituents. A common step in the process for many organizations is to survey their audiences to get feedback on what to change and how to plan accordingly. But what should you ask?
The following are some questions that may give you useful insight into how your constituents interact with your online presence.
1. "What is the primary reason you visit the organization's website?" By leaving this question broad and open-ended, you are more likely to get truthful answers on why people actually visit your website. This will help you understand the objectives of your audience without bias.
2. "What type of content (if any) from the organization's website do you share the most on social networks?" This will tell you what people really find valuable. If people are consistently sharing content from your blog, for example, this tells you that you have a high-value blog that is working for you. If you find that most people don't share any content, then you may need to work on providing higher-value content. When people find something valuable, they naturally want to share it with others.
3. "What is the number one thing you wish you could do on the organization's website that you cannot do today?" This will uncover frustrations that people might have as they use your website. Maybe they wish they could make payments or donations online. Maybe they wish they could post comments about content on the site and engage in a conversation. Maybe they wish they could find out more about your board members and communicate with them directly.
4. "If we added one thing to our website, what should it be?" This is a very open-ended but blunt question that should encourage your constituents to really drill down to the one thing that they want to see changed.
5. "How would you like us to communicate with you?" This allows your constituents to give you feedback on how they like to receive information. If most people respond with "email", then you might consider investing more resources into improving your email campaigns. If many of your survey subjects respond with "RSS" or "Facebook", then you may want to create tighter integration with these tools. If you get a lot of responses like "phone", then you may want to start capturing phone numbers more aggressively on your website.
6. "What is one thing we do that annoys you?" This may seem like a scary question to ask but hopefully you want the truth. For example, if your constituents overwhelmingly respond with "you send me too many emails and give me no way to unsubscribe" then you know what to change. Sometimes the best way to grow and succeed is to stop doing things that annoy your constituents. Keep in mind that even if you get an answer that is not even website-related, this will still tell you something useful.
7. "What about our website makes you feel good?" This is a nice, open-ended closing question that lets people end on a positive note and gives you feedback on what their emotional response is to your website. People tend to make decisions based on emotion and this will help you understand how your online presence is currently making them feel.
Notice that these questions avoid any kind of specific structural items about website navigation, what should be on the home page, and so forth. Specific structural decisions should be left to the design and usability experts creating the site and/or through card sorting. What people say and what people do are often quite different so it's important to focus on high-level content-driven questions. This will encourage your constituents to avoid getting caught up "in the weeds" of site structure and instead focus on how they truly interact with your website.
Do you have any other questions that you ask your constituents during a website redesign? I would love to hear them through your comments below.
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