CUA of the Month – July, 2010

Evangelizing Usability in an Evangelical Company

by Jim Garrett

Jennifer Sheets had a challenge. As Director of Creative Services for In Touch Ministries, she was responsible for making a 10,000 page website with videos, magazine articles, and a store useable for almost 40,000 visitors a day.

With a long time fascination for design, science, and psychology, Jennifer was wishing for something that would make these different areas intersect. Then she found HFI's certification program on the internet. "I was so excited to find this, it was absolute perfect timing," said Jennifer.

In Touch Ministries is the global, multimedia broadcast teaching ministry of Dr. Charles Stanley, senior pastor of First Baptist Church Atlanta. Television broadcasts are viewed weekly by over 2 million people, and radio broadcasts are heard by more than 800,000 people in the U.S. every week. This wide-spread exposure draws people to their website in droves for more inspirational messages, to shop, to subscribe to the In Touch magazine, and to download podcasts.

With this huge task at hand, Jennifer became an advocate for usability. "It was perfect timing to complete the certification program with HFI. I was able to take the information back to the company and put it to use. I had to push, but I got project managers, marketing people, and designers together in a room and put them through the exercises I had learned. We accomplished what would have taken two to three months of brain storming in two or three hours. It was so amazing how it worked," said Jennifer.

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Evangelizing Usability (Continued)

"The course gave me the encouragement and perspective I needed to get the usability ball rolling. I was able to tell the decision makers, 'Let's not guess, let's do this with purpose.' It gave me the right words and research to present and explain to them – here's a good reason why to do this and why not to do this," Jennifer added.

Jennifer made a significant step of progress by getting the company to understand that finding out what people want and expect, not just guessing what they want and expect, makes all the difference in the world. Jennifer then spent the last three months going through the design process, card sorting, gathering information from users, and developing a new GUI. The new website is scheduled to go live sometime in mid-July with glowing reviews from the executive level of the company.

"During the design process, the card sorting exercises came in extremely helpful. We were trying to manage thousands of pages of content and get them organized into areas our users could understand and find helpful. We listed out every single content element type we'd have in the site and grouped them into categories that made sense. It was quick, painless, and actually fun. And it allowed us to build our architecture and sitemap that everyone could agree on from that point," explained Jennifer.

"We also did paper prototypes of several design comps and had individual users from our target demographics look and tell us what they liked and it helped confirm design choices to the overall GUI. Using research data presented in the Putting Research into Practice class, helped me present to the ministry many best practices and standards for font styles, sizes, use of color, chunking of data, and how users read long articles, etc. This information allowed us to make a lot of smart design decisions based on real human behavior patterns, and not just one designer's personal preferences," Jennifer added.

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Evangelizing Usability (Continued)

"Our new bookstore goes live in late July. We will be doing cross-promotion and linking to other related products as you view products you're interested in. We will also implement some social networking capabilities and be able to rate products and see what other users think. This is a huge improvement from what we have now," explained Jennifer.

"With the knowledge I received from the certification, I was able to get people to understand that the time spent with this process would save time in production. I had to really lobby for taking the two months to spend with designers and developers before starting any development. They see the value of that now that we are moving into production and know exactly what we want," said Jennifer.

Jennifer feels all aspects of usability from the HFI courses, especially the design process techniques, translated into practical application for her company. "I was really impressed with the knowledge of the instructors and inter-activity of the classes. I was able to come home with real hands-on knowledge I could apply the next day at work," she added. Through Jennifer's work, the In Touch Ministries website is now recognized as a major broadcast media, not just a place to go for contact information. It's actually seen as an interactive form of media that is becoming one of the biggest tools of the ministry.

Through her mission, Jennifer was able to convert people at In Touch Ministries to true believers in usability. Mission accomplished – and why we're proud to name Jennifer Sheets as HFI's Certified Usability Analyst of the month.

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