Rachael Rainbow and I had a fascinating day out at the Digital Communications for Charities conference back in January, where I gave a talk on ‘Effective fundraising through better user experience’. The focus of the conference was online fundraising for charities and it was really refreshing for us to get the client-side perspective on this.

There were some excellent talks throughout the conference. My highlights included The Good Agency discussing how they used free social networking tools to track the effectiveness of various social networking activities for Compassion in World Farming, and more surprisingly, a talk by the Charity Technology Trust on the legality issues inherent in online fundraising.

The session I ran discussed how charities could build a framework to support building business cases for making improvements to the user experience of their online fundraising. This framework took quantitative data from web analytics along with the findings of usability evaluations to estimate the revenue potential in resolving specific user experience issues. From the feedback on the day, I think that this empirical approach really struck a chord, especially in the current economic climate.

If you’d like to find out a little more about this talk, please take a look at the presentation here.

During a recent usability study, I wanted to share some thoughts with our client about how to encourage people to engage with their site a little more deeply, as this is currently a key objective for them. I suggested that they consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a framework for developing online engagement.

Originally this was developed as a way of understanding how people’s needs develop and their goals change as those needs were met, but appears to be equally useful and relevant online.

In this context, we could say that:

Functional needs typically drive the first interaction with a site - “I need to know…”.

Once functional needs have been addressed, safety needs come to the fore. In this context, this includes privacy issues, as these will prevent further progression.

From safety needs, we move on to belonging, or a sense of inclusion in a desirable group as a key motivator. In this framework, this is the first real motivator for social networking.

Next up, esteem suggests the need for hierarchy and recognition within online communities (and there are loads of design solutions out there to support this).

And finally, self-actualisation. All the others are fairly well supported in existing sites, except for this. To me, this is where it gets interesting, generating ideas about how this could be used to deliver the highest levels of engagement.

Maslow talked about self-actualisation as relating to “a desire to realize all of their potential for being an effective, creative, mature human being”. In the context of online communities, we were discussing opportunities to support people developing their creative and critical skills - becoming a well-developed or respected photographer through participating in a photo-sharing community like Flickr; becoming a trusted reviewer on websites like TripAdvisor (for hotels and tourist destinations) or RottenTomatoes (for films)?

Another element of self-actualisation is problem solving, this correlates quite nicely with the old idea of promoting people to moderator status within a community, as self actualising people are supposed to be interested in solving other people’s problems.

If Maslow’s theory is as applicable as it seems to be, could online communities do more to encourage this sense of personal achievement?

I got the opportunity to speak at an event held by the Usability Professionals Association and LBi a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel on ‘openness of information and communities in Healthcare.’

Also there, were members of the NHS Connecting for Health team, who are developing some amazing interfaces and hardware, including this rather nice tablet.

The tablet has quite an interesting story behind it. Designed to be used by health care workers in hospitals, it has to meet an amazing list of requirements. The initial spec. was drawn up by the Connecting for Health team, and taken round a variety of manufacturers, they said they wanted something that was wipe clean, could be dropped without damage, had a five hour battery life, could be immersed in alcohol for sterilizing, had wifi, secure bluetooth, biometric security, barcode scanner, rf-id scanner, camera and just about everything else, for under £1000. Amazingly they now have the machine.

I spoke briefly on how we need to look beyond simply delivering health information, and understand the barriers to behavioural change that stop people getting the health outcomes they want. I was very pleased when, later in the day, the results of the user research project for the NHS Choices site was presented by another team. These findings broadly vindicated my position, and the fact that we are getting the same findings, on a research project that is a fraction of the size, really supports our approach.

For those interested, click the link for an outline of my talk:
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