Let’s be honest: The vast majority of church and ministry websites simply suck in terms of usability. Perhaps you know of a few?
*Phew*
Now that we’ve been honest and visceral, let’s fix it shall we?
Userfly.com might be a good place to start. Userfly is a super-easy way of identifying how well your site performs and how well your users, visitors, congregation, etc. use your site. It’s completely free and installation is a breeze.
Just add one line of code to your website and you’re ready to go.
You’ll essentially have “eyes” on your users as they walk through your pages. You can record a screencast of the behavior and it’ll provide some fun (and perhaps depressing) feedback about how they really interact and engage on their site.
I tried it and it worked as advertised. I really can’t believe this service is free. When I used to work for a very large Fortune 50 company we paid some 3rd party vendors millions of dollars for this kind of usability studies.
Millions of dollars.
Apparently, this is a far better alternative.
Check the vid for some more juicy information and let’s all make 2009 the year of great church websites that are designed well with the user in mind!
userfly.com from Chris Estreich on Vimeo.
Tried it but Userfly didnt log any traffic.
gotta give it a sec.
Usability does suck if you can't get to the website. Keep getting an eternal "Loading" message from Fx when I try to access the site.
That is incredible. Knowing usability is so vital to the effectiveness of a website and companies online marketing strategy. Thanks for the recommendation.
sure sure.
WOW! That looks like an impressive tool. I'm definitely going try this out.
let me know what you think!
I installed it, and I've just started receiving the first captures. It's very interesting/informing to see where people are clicking, how fast they scroll through pages, and how they navigate. I can already tell that this will end-up being pretty useful as we collect more data through it.
Thanks for sharing! This is a killer resource.
cool, let me know your findings and if they were valuable.
Thanks for sharing the great find! I just tested it out and it is REALLY cool.
yah, isnt' it?
Wow. I'll be giving this one a test drive real soon. Give me a good reason to pitch a redesign to some folks too maybe…
sweet! let us know how that goes.
yeah. they have some server issues.
After some time, what do you think about UserFly?
I have found it to be an awesome service that really tells me what people are doing; however, the load time on my website is dramatically increased. The page load time has increased by a minimum of 10s and, at times, has even been 45s.
I am not sure it is worth knowing what people are doing if they are completely frustrated (or will have left) by the time the page finally finishes loading.
sucks.
I'm with Leo. I love what I get to see from the user experience. But the impact on the real-time load times has gone up. On average, I'm seeing an increase of up to 10s per page. And the message in the status bar is invariably "waiting for asset.userfly.com". Over the weekend, I had several 0.0s captures on userfly. I can only assume that the user got tired of waiting for the page to load.
Summary: Nice idea, great admin ui, impact on end user is too big. Taking it off the site.
Peace.
yeah. it was lame. just like this post now.
i hope they bump it up. cause it's losing people like bubba!