Universal Precautions for Trauma-Informed Design

In the medical field, there is the concept of universal precautions. Universal precautions were created to prevent the exposure of healthcare workers to diseases. This includes viruses, bacteria, or anything else harmful (for example, HIV, hepatitis B). Healthcare workers take these precautions with all patients. They aren't used only when there is suspicion of infection.

A familiar example would be medical gloves. Healthcare workers and others exposed to blood, such as athletic trainers, use gloves. The CDC encourages all who may come into contact with blood or other bodily fluids to wear gloves.

Note that if you go to have blood taken, there’s no invasive conversation or disclosure required. No healthcare person asks you, “Do you have a disease I need to worry about? Should I put on these gloves?” They just put on gloves when interacting with anyone. It’s a preventative action to keep healthcare workers safe and the patients safe. Medical gloves are used with ALL patients to protect ALL parties.

Universal design precautions?

I propose we develop a similar concept in trauma-informed design research.

We can’t predict who might have a strong emotional response to our questions and how they might react. Trauma responses can be triggered by thoughts, images, music, smells, and other things. Some of these things are out of our control. But are there universal precautions we can take for items that are often problematic for people? We need to do this so we don’t harm anyone inadvertently.

To apply in many situations, we would use research to develop trauma-informed universal precautions. We would want to avoid speculation or anecdotal evidence. Research is better than guessing.

To develop any precautions, first, we could look at related research in other fields. The social work, medical, and psychology fields could offer us direction. But we also need to conduct our own research as well to fill in gaps, particularly around tech and design.

Universal precautions in trauma-informed design research might include things like:

• Having a care provider present or on-call during all research sessions. This is helpful if trauma response occur in a research participant. It could be a therapist or someone trained in support for those with traumatic backgrounds.

• Making sure that our research participant never has their back to the door. Some trauma survivors have said they always prefer to face the door to avoid any surprises.

• Debriefing with teammates and/or a care provider after research sessions. This helps process information to avoid vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress. These are potential impacts of indirect exposure to the difficult and disturbing stories of others.

These are just a few ideas that designers have started to use that I know about. It's excited that more and more people working in tech want to be more trauma-informed.

We need MORE research!

We may discover from conducting research, that there aren’t many truly universal precautions. Perhaps there is a lot of variance between cultures, demographics, or psychographics. Different precautions to offer trauma-informed care for various groups may be needed. 

Also, keep in mind that trauma-informed care needs to be intersectional. We must remember people's various identities such as race, class, gender, and more. These identities affect our exposure and experience of trauma. Historical trauma and generational trauma also need consideration.  

There’s not yet much research, academic or otherwise, at the intersection of tech and trauma. Few people have been doing trauma-informed design work for a really long time. Combining design principles and activities with trauma-informed care principles is fairly new. (I could find nothing on it when I was scouring the internet and talking with others about it in 2015.) Since then, the interest in it has risen tremendously, which is excellent. 

If you are interested in this area, there are lots of opportunities to contribute to our tech field. What can you add to the growing body of knowledge? Help us make tech more trauma-informed and if universal precautions are advisable. 

Want to learn more?

See more resources to be more trauma-informed in your design and research. 

Become a More Trauma-informed Designer

Recently, I’ve given a few talks about trauma-informed research and design. Here are examples of questions I received afterward that might be useful for you. If you are new to this topic, you can learn what trauma-informed design is here.

Q. How do you talk about trauma-informed design practices with those who may not know about it?

A. Most people in tech have not heard about it! I ask them if they have ever heard of trauma-informed research or design before. The answer is usually no. I then talk about how trauma has long-term effects on cognition, emotion, and more. I explain that we need to be aware of and plan for this as digital designers. I then send them resources to learn more.

It's kind of like accessibility though, to be honest. Lots of people may say they care about it, but how many actually do the work to practice it...well, that's another thing. We are all pulled in many directions.

Q. Are there certain skills to develop to become a more trauma-informed designer?

A. Understanding trauma, its impacts, and trauma-informed care principles is the first step. But if that’s all there was, nonprofit and healthcare organizations would have much better websites. Having trauma-informed clinicians doesn't mean your tech or design practice is trauma-informed.

Being a trauma-informed designer stems from a combination of trauma-informed AND design skills. It’s both. Learning design principles is essential as learning about trauma-informed care principles. Both are based on many years of research.

Strong skills in mobile design and accessible design are very helpful too. They overlap with what is needed to be a trauma-informed designer.

Working with different populations helps us step out of our bubbles. If possible, volunteer your time or services where you will meet people unlike you. Open up and read about others’ perspectives. Important books such as Design for Real Life and Design Justice are eye-opening.

The racial equity training I've done through The Racial Equity Insitute has also been valuable. It's helped me understand systemic racism, build empathy, and see others' perspectives. We suck at this as humans. We are extremely self-focused. Anything that pushes against that is helpful. It allows us to get the empathy and motivation to do trauma-informed design work. 

Finally, being curious is critical – you need to be continuously learning. I don't know any great designers who aren't curious.

Q.What is the biggest thing you’ve learned since incorporating trauma-informed principles into your work?

A. That we in tech inadvertently exacerbate trauma all over the place. Once you see it, you can't NOT see it anymore. For example, we do it with online forms by forcing people to work with websites that don't work on mobile. We do it by asking sensitive questions in research without authentic consent.

We have a lot of work to do. Want to join us and be a more trauma-informed designer? Be part of the monthly trauma-informed design online discussion.

You can access more resources to be a trauma-informed designer here.

Contact me if you have questions or want to discuss!

The Starter Book to Learn about UX Design and More

If you are new to the idea of user experience (UX), perhaps you found me because of my trauma-informed design work. If so, the best place I can tell you to start is to read “Don’t Make Me Think.” This book by Steve Krug is terrific.

It’s the first book I use in my UX classes. It’s the first book I recommend when a friend tells me they are about to create a website. It will point you down the right path when you want to be more trauma-informed, inclusive, or accessible.

I love this book because:

• It is short.

• It is clear.

• It has pictures.

• It has excellent tips on both design and content.

• Non-technical people can understand it.

• Steve Krug is a funny guy.

• It might be found in your library because it’s not new.

This book will give you a foundation of understanding of UX design. The principles of UX have significant overlap with being trauma-informed in your design work. For an understanding of being more trauma-informed in research practices, see the Code for America Qualitative Researcher’s guide. Many of the suggested practices are trauma-informed.

So start with the Don’t Make Me Think book to get a foundation, then check out more trauma-informed resources here.

Any questions? Contact me.

How to Write Better than "Conversationally"

Best Practices for User-Friendly Titles

User-friendly headlines will help more people find and enjoy your content! Watch the video below if you want to learn how to better your writing of headlines and titles quickly.

Linking on Nonprofit Websites

The video transcription is below. You can get the best practices and gist of the learning even without the images in the video…

So here I have the American Red Cross website, and I'm looking at a page about the blood donation process. Let's look at the links on this page. So here we have one that jumps out to me right away "basic eligibility." I love how when I hover over it, there is an underline. 

Longer Links May Have Better Information Scent

One thing that's interesting, though, is "basic eligibility" doesn't have a lot of meaning for me. If I click in here, it says, OK, so we're talking about "requirements by donation type." So I'm talking about basic eligibility requirements. I think even...Oops, there's a pop-up, sometimes that's great. Sometimes not so great, right? 

Sometimes even just saying "basic eligibility requirements" would have better information scent than saying "basic eligibility." 

A lot of the other links on this page work pretty well. Here's one on the blood donor app. I would actually even include "download the" in the link itself. I think that whole thing would then pop out, and I think that would be really great. 

Don't Make the Links Too Long

Here is the Surfrider Foundation. They do really interesting work. This is another non-profit organization. And you can see their links do a really nice job of popping out. I think they're dark enough to be accessible. You always have to double-check that in some kind of color contrast checker. This is a free website color checker I use. 

You can see, though, that this link is really long. It starts to lose its effectiveness when most of the sentence is the link. This is a great length link here in the middle. 

Avoid Saying "Here"— Bad Information Scent 

Here's a link that just says "here." Instead of saying "More on specific goals" and just highlighting "here," I would actually make the entire item a link. 

Don't Forget Accessibility 

I also really wish when I hovered that something happened here to show that these are links. Otherwise, if it's color alone, it's typically not accessible. 

I like this link here, it says "actively encouraging new members." It looks like there must be some new members of this California by the Biodiversity Network, and I could learn more about it. Surfrider has some things they could change about their links to make them even better. 

Make Sure Links Stand Out

Our last example is from the Shed Aquarium. I believe it is located in Chicago and wow, it clearly has some very cute animals like this otter. And you can see their links here. 

They have an underline which I think is really important because they're going with a navy color for their links. They could definitely be a little bit missed with the black regular text. So I like how they have this underlined, and I also would love it if the color would change when I was over it. But I have to say at least the underline really makes it clear what is a link. 

They also seem to be doing a pretty good job of making sure it's not just like one word. These seem to be meaningful information-rich links and that we know will help your users.

Better Information Scent Leads to More Clicks

So just keep in mind that you want to have information-rich links. You want them to be very clear so that the user can make a good decision about whether that is a good link for them to click on or not. We don't want them to be guessing. We know that uncertainty tends to lead people not to click on things. So we want to be very clear on what you will get should you click on this link.

Keep Learning!

Want to learn more UX best practices? Here are 3 free UX lessons you can watch immediately after signing up. These classes are created for busy, non-tech people who need to make better apps and websites.

Getting Started with Accessibility with Expert Joel Crawford-Smith

Don’t want to watch? Check out the transcript below instead:

Melissa: Hi, Joel, thanks for joining me today.

Joel: Hi, how's it going?

Melissa: Pretty good, pretty good. Can you introduce yourself and your job?

Joel: Sure. I'm Joel Smith. I'm the Web accessibility administrator at the university for their public-facing websites.

Melissa: Great, thank you. And can you tell me a little bit about how you explain accessibility to people who maybe have never heard of it before? They don't know what you do when you say that at a barbecue or wherever?

Joel: It can all come down to just being inclusive, including everyone in what you do, providing people with disabilities equal access to the web, because I do web accessibility. But accessibility is more than just the web, but it's my expertise. But you do this ideally through universal design, which I think is the word that people will really understand because we don't know who's coming to our websites. We don't know their abilities. So it needs to be universally ready for them before they arrive. 

Disabilities like having no vision or low vision, being deaf or hard of hearing, ADD, that has an impact even in motor impairments, having shaky hands like Parkinson's. 

And whenever people think of people with disabilities. People are not inherently disabled. I think of it is as doing something, not being something. So people do not need to be disabled from using a website or an application because you can change the environment. The physical world is a good metaphor that I like to use with people because this anybody would pick up on this. 

Think of a task like voting, someone in a wheelchair needs to go vote. If there is no ramp into a building, then they're disabled from voting, but if there is a ramp, then they're able to vote. So there's no disability there. And then everybody loves ramps. People with strollers, people who don't have much mobility as they used to. People with temporary disabilities like a broken leg. So whenever you do something for people with a disability, everybody ends up like you. 

I like a digital example, maybe these are buzz words people haven't heard of yet. Providing good color contrast for people with low vision. Alternative text descriptions so blind screen reader users can understand an image. Captioning for deaf or hard of hearing, large touch targets - that might be something the user experience people are familiar with. Making buttons large enough to click or tap. So those are all digital types of things. That's accessibility in a nutshell for me.

It's just being inclusive and thinking of people as not being inherently disabled.

Melissa: Those are some great examples, thank you for sharing all that, Joel. Despite your great examples, do you bump into people still like who may not care as much or maybe don't prioritize accessibility as you would like? How do you get them to care?

Joel: Yeah, it's a thing still for sure. It depends on who it is. Sometimes people just need to know about it. I call them the do-gooders and once they're aware of an issue, they want to do the right thing. They want to learn how to help people. So just being aware can help a lot of people. 

UX people are usually pretty easy to get on board because almost everything that's good for accessibility is good for user experience for everyone. I mean, being inclusive, but also, as I mentioned, like a touch target being large enough to click, that's good for everybody.

For business people, it's an untapped market - 26 percent of people identify as having some type of disability. Not all of those are web-related, but that's a huge market. And lawsuits are a big motivator for business people. Making things accessible is cheaper than getting out of legal trouble. Does that answer it?

Melissa: I think it does, yeah, yeah, I think the lawsuit thing is definitely a motivator too, but who wants it gets to that point or to the bad press that you might receive.

Joel: Exactly. It's the carrot and the stick. Like as an accessibility person who I need to work with a lot of people and get them on board. And people, you work on this, so it'll help people. But then if that doesn't work, then you've got to get the stick out and be like, “Listen, it's either you fix it now or you're going to fix it later.”

Melissa: Yeah, that is that makes a lot of sense, everything you say. And you have been doing accessibility a long time, Joel. And I'm curious about how it's changed during your career, maybe when you got started in it and maybe even how you got started in it and then how you've seen it change.

Joel: Yeah, how I got started with it was. I was kind of the accessibility heartbeat where I worked, I was really into it and I really got other people into it. And then there became a need for a full-time web accessibility person. And since I was the main accessibility heartbeat, being the subject matter expert, I got the job, or earned it over time. 

So I try to tell people just know a little bit about web accessibility with your job, and you might be the subject matter expert because maybe no one else knows anything about it. It can open up opportunities. But I guess to your question about maybe how things have changed. Everything is getting more complex with the Web. There's new technology always coming out and it gets harder and harder to fix things after they're built. That's the biggest change.

Melissa: Awesome, thank you for sharing all that, can you talk a little bit about what your day-to-day is like in your job?

Joel: Yeah, we have to make sure that new websites that launch are accessible and compliant. So I do assessments of them based on Web content, accessibility guidelines that are kind of the rules that everyone has to follow. So that can happen a lot. And then also monitoring - is the new content or functionality still compliant on a site?

Checking for captioning to make sure videos are captioned, checking PDFs for accessibility because any document, anything on the web as web content needs to be accessible too. So it's a combination of new stuff and then keeping an eye on old stuff. And a lot of training, I do ton of trainings for people.

Melissa: I would imagine that it's a lot of education for a lot of different people who are creating the content.

Joel: Yeah. I do at least training every month or more, maybe six in a month. It's sometimes it's one on one with people. And sometimes it's going to be like, you know, just maybe 40 or 50 people that you can get together.

Melissa: So this is a ripe area. It sounds like, for other people who might be interested in delving more into accessibility, because we need more education, we need more people to know about it. There's a demand for training. With the rise in lawsuits, more people are aware they need to have expertise. What is frustrating to you as a professional working in this accessibility space?

Joel: People who don't care or they just try to sneak through like, “I'm going to launch this website - maybe nobody will notice.” And, you know, that can happen. Just really, the frustrating thing is it's just people who don't want to just do it because it's the right thing to do.

Melissa: I hear you. And Joel, what do people misunderstand about accessibility?

Joel: You know, a lot of people think that making something accessible makes it ugly. That you're limiting the design of something, but it's not really - I think that's the biggest myth from some designers. Something about like think about color contrast. That's one of the things that maybe a designer might be not into.

Color contrast is the color of text on top of a background color. So making things easy to read. So having high contrast. Everybody likes to be able to read text. And nobody's impressed when they can't read the text or maybe the text is hard to read. So making compromises actually is kind of like providing the ramp from the earlier example that it can help everyone. So it might have a couple of limitations, but overall, it's for the best.

Melissa: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What advice would you give to somebody just getting started with trying to make their websites or apps more accessible? Somebody watching a video might be their first kind of encounter of like, oh, I see. This is important.

Joel: Yeah, yeah. If I had to tell them anything, I'd say Google WCAG. It's the web content accessibility guidelines. That's where it all starts. That's the measuring stick that we use to decide if something is compliant and accessible. Depending on the industry that you're in, the Web content accessibility criteria might be the law actually, and you don't really have the option. You might accidentally not be doing it. 

So, it's also sort of a double-edged sword - the good part is if you follow the web content accessibility criteria, you can back up your design decisions with the law -  like the color contrast or some of the other design features. If they are compliant and somebody doesn't like it, it's not an opinion. It's like, hey, I'm just following the rules here. It's not just an opinion. So learn the web content accessibility guidelines. And if nobody else knows it, that makes you the subject matter expert where you work.

Melissa: That's right. That's right. And then it's possible to do that down the line, too. That will be the law for everybody. I know that the courts are mixed in terms of websites being a public accommodation and apps, that sort of thing. But we should really be heading that way. I'm hopeful to kind of just make accessibility the standard. And so let's say, OK, maybe somebody has gotten to explore those guidelines. They did their Googling, and are there other places that you think have good learning around accessibility?

Joel: Yeah. Yeah. Twitter. So the accessibility hashtag for Twitter is the least accessible thing you can think of. It's #a11y. That's accessibility. So if you follow that you'll see all kinds of cool tips and tricks, people posting articles. That is probably the best place. There's also a Slack channel for it too. But I'd get started with Twitter. That will get you really far to really dive into it.

Melissa: That's great, that's a great resource. Can you explain a little bit about why it's a11y?

Joel: I don't quote me on this, but I think Accessibility is 11 letters.

Melissa: I think that's my understanding, too, of how it ended up being.

Joel: And then everyone spells it "ally" because the ones look the same, they look like "l"s. So it makes it even less accessible. That's right. That's what somebody chose probably 10 years ago to make it.

Melissa: Yeah, well, that's a good to know, that's a great hashtag for learning.

Joel: Yeah. A really, really a good place to start.

Melissa: Ok, cool, nice, neat little tidbits too, right? To not get overwhelmed. It seems like with accessibility, you just got to start somewhere like start by capturing your videos.

Joel: Everything. Yeah. Any small thing you do can reduce a barrier for somebody. So it doesn't have to be perfect to be better and, you know, to be much better.

Melissa: Yeah, I like that. Doesn't have to be perfect. Just keep moving the right direction. OK, Joel, we know that people will have a limited cognitive load in their head. And if they can only remember one thing from our interview, what would you want them to take away about accessibility?

Joel: Making things accessible and inclusive makes things better for everyone. We're not just doing it for like a tiny minority, we're doing this for everyone. And all of the things that we implement will help - you never know who is going to help.

Melissa: I love it. That's a great message. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today. I really appreciate it.

Joel: Yeah, no problem. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity.

Want more learning? Check out Birdcall’s UX classes for nonprofits and small businesses!

Five Typography Tips for Better UX

Prefer to read? The transcript is below. Slides are here.

Let's talk about typography! Typography is the way we arrange letters and text on a screen. I'll give you some tips that are going to help you be more user-friendly on your website.

Tip #1 Add White Space

From research, we know that we can get a significant improvement in reading comprehension using white space. The increase can be 20 percent - that's a lot!

So when I see a with a long paragraph and little white space (also called negative space,) I cringe. I feel squished just looking at this! It's way too much information. It comes off like a wall of words. There's very little white space, which sometimes designers will call negative space.

Look what happens if I just add a little white space, all I've done is add in some spaces, just hit enter a few times. I've also added in some bullet points, and this seems like a much more accessible passage. And I do know that reading comprehension of this will improve. Remember that online line, that a paragraph could be just one sentence. That is extremely different than other kinds of writing.

On the web, things are different, so every kind of inch, inch and a half, I look to try to break up the writing. This could be with bullet points, a space, a callout quote, or something so that it never feels like a wall of words.

Tip #2 Pay Attention to Line Length

Line length is important, and it's sometimes called “measure.” If you hear somebody refer to it like that, you'll know what they're talking about. It's how far the words go across your screen.

You don't want them to go all the way across the whole width of someone’s browser. We don't want something like that. We want a line length of forty-five to 90 characters.

In the slides, I have about forty-five characters across, so 90 — it gives you a little bit more room. And here you can see this paragraph is about five hundred fifty pixels wide. So I'm usually somewhere around this seventy, seventy-five characters wide range. Anywhere in there will be good.

The main thing is to remember to not have text go all the way across the screen. This should make it easier to read for people.

Tip #3 Have Good Color Contrast

Also, keep in mind the colors you are using. Look at this screen. (See slides here)

Are there certain text phrases that are easier for you to read than others? I can easily read, let's see, the darker one and the black one and even the darkish, burnt orange one. But some of the other ones are more challenging for me. So it will depend on everybody's eyes. And some people who are colorblind are going to have a different experience than maybe I might.

There's been a trend in the last 10 years to use grey a lot more on websites. Instead of black on white, it's been common to see grey on white. And that's interesting. People have said, "Oh, it's easier on the eyes." I actually don't know if there's research on that. There may be. But what I do know is the text at the bottom here totally fails accessibility tests. That's going to be problematic.

We want to be sure we are accessible to as many people as possible. That requires good color contrast between the foreground color and the background color. So you need to test your text. I go over to the WebAIM Contrast Checker, it's a free website.

I can put in the foreground color, whatever the color is that I'm using for the grey font on my website. Next, I can put in the background color of my website. I can then see, you know, does it pass what I'm looking for, that it passes this kind of test. And if that one passes (WCAG AA), I'm like, "OK, that's good. I have a good contrast ratio.' Definitely important to do - make sure your greys are dark enough. That's typically where I run into issues. I'll have designed something, and then I'll go, "Oh, wait, I think some of that text is a little bit too gray." It's too light of a grey and needs to be darker. So keep an eye out for that.

Tip #4 Size Text Properly

People want to read your writing and not have to squint or lean forward and look into it or anything like that. Typically 16 pixels is the size that we expect on most websites. It's kind of standard text body size. Developers will size it in something called "ems" so that somebody could increase the font size as well. We want to give people that possibility. So don't be too small, and you don't want to be gigantic or else you're going to take up all the room on things like mobile.

Tip #5 Use Decorative Fonts with Care

There are also different kinds of fonts. I've got some examples of decorative fonts which are really fun. I enjoy looking at them, AND we definitely don't want to use them for body text. Fun for headlines, not for body text.

As you can see on the left, when I'm using Arial, it's much easier to read. It's harder to read when I'm using Bangers on the right side, which is more like a comic book kind of font. So we just need to be mindful that online we really want to stick to more traditional fonts for the body text. Open Sans, for example, is a very common font to use. In our titles maybe could have a little bit more flair with a decorative font. But we always want to make sure that things are readable over everything else. 

In Summary

1. Use white space to increase readability

2. Keep your line length (measure) short

3. Provide good contrast for your text

4. Ensure fonts are large enough

5. Use easily readable fonts

Follow these tips to improve the typography on your website, make your writing easier to read, and satisfy your website visitors.

Want to learn more? Check out Birdcall’s affordable UX classes for further learning for non-technical professionals!

Best Practices for Links on Websites

Prefer to read? Here’s the video transcript about links on websites:

Here are some things I want you to keep in mind.

First off, links need to have really good information scent. You might be wondering, "What the heck is that?"

Information scent refers to the visual and textual clues that suggest what information the link may lead to.

That's why things like "Click Here" aren't great because they don't provide good information scent. (Plus that's not helpful to anyone using a screenreader either.) Somebody needs to have a sense of what they're going to get if they click on a link.

Help USERS Make INFORMED DECISIONS

Here are some examples of information-rich links using descriptive text. This language is pretty clear about what you're going to get if you click on it.

• "Meet our interim program director," is probably going to be either some kind of video or some kind of article about this new person.

• "Newest animal babies" - that totally makes me want to click on it, I don't know about you.

• Here it's very clearly an article about "4 signs of alcohol abuse."

These are the types of links that we want. These descriptive links will have a lot of meaning for people. This will help them make an informed decision about whether they want to click.

Words to Avoid

Here are the words you want to be careful with:

• “Click here”

• “Read more”

• “Learn more”

• “More”

These words are really vague. If I come across those on a website, and links like this will catch my eye, I still don't know what exactly I'm going to be getting into.

Should I click on these links? As much as possible, avoid using these vague words without context. If I have to use them, they need to be very closely related visually to whatever the item is.

For example, it's some beginning of the article and you get to continue the article, you can read more. So at least I know, OK, I'm continuing with this same article, that sort of thing. Otherwise what happens is these words pop out to me on a page as links, but then I have to kind of sit around and wonder what they're connected to.

Be aware that it's always better to have good information scent. It's better to be more clear about what somebody is going to get when they click on the link.

Link Length

The best practice I've seen based on research would be having a length of three to seven words. When it gets beyond seven words, it feels too long, but sometimes one word isn't enough. So here is the best practice to aim for on your links.

Here are some information-rich links that are better and longer than if I just wrote, "Learn more."

• “Learn more tips to stay healthy”

• “Read about our newest program”

• “Top tips for better eating here”

These will help the user make good choices about whether this link is worth clicking on it from their perspective. Great UX helps people make informed choices.

Color

Let's talk about color now. Color is fun to talk about and you can definitely have variety with your colors before your links. They definitely need to be accessible. So that means there needs to be a good color contrast between the color and the background.

So, for example, I've seen websites that have chosen orange as a color for links. That is not accessible on a white background. So you want to be sure to check color contrast.

I use a color checker called the Web AIM color checker. There are other ones you can find online. Use whichever one because you definitely want your links to be accessible.

Underlined Links

There's a good argument that links probably should be underlined, right, because not everybody sees colors in the same way. And if a link is underlined, it's very clear that this is a link.

If you don't want to underline from the get go, you would want to change that on. But, you could change the color as well as add an underline.

Visited Links

You may use another color to show visited links. Then it's very clear that, hey, this is a link after somebody has visited a page on your website. This is especially important if it's a larger site with a lot of content. Visited links may be in purple or whatever other color might be helpful. This is for the user to know, "Oh, I've already explored that area of the website in those pages."

So you can have fun with links, but just be sure they are accessible. We want to make sure we have great links that are information-rich that people want to click on.

Want to learn more about UX, check out Birdcall courses for nonprofit and small business websites.

What is Trauma-Informed Design?

Prefer to read? The transcription is here:

Introduction

I wanted to share a little bit about trauma-informed design with you. And I'm really speaking about design as it relates to websites and apps because that's my expertise. That's what I've been doing. I'm a UX designer and I've been doing design for ten+ years now.

I've been exploring this idea of trauma-informed design for, let's see, since about 2015 when I first learned about it. I just want to share what I learned, what's been helpful to me. And this is just my perspective, my experience, there are various ones out there and I encourage you to seek them out as well. But this is what I learned and I'm hoping that it will be helpful to you.

Talking About Trauma May Be Triggering

I also wanted to say that talking about trauma can bring up our own stuff sometimes. I want you to be aware of that because that's certainly happened to me. Take care of yourself while you're watching/reading this. Certainly, if you need to talk to somebody afterward, I encourage you to seek a friend out or a therapist. Or you're free to reach out to me if you just want to touch base and talk about any of the ideas we've discussed in this presentation.

How I First Heard About Trauma-Informed Design

I first learned about trauma-informed design on this playground. This is in Durham, North Carolina, in the United States where I live. And this is the playground where my daughter went to preschool. She spent a lot of time here, and she got to play with this other wonderful little girl.

And her mom was there, too, of course. And so I got to know this other mom, whose name is Elizabeth Johnson. She's a wonderful, I call her an educator, really, in Durham, North Carolina. She had been doing a lot of education and helping nurses and doctors, other types of clinicians, be more trauma-informed in their practices.

And she kept using this word "trauma-informed" when she discussed what she did. And like a good UXer, I asked her what she meant by that, because that's what we do. We ask questions when we're not sure. What is, you keep saying this word trauma-informed. What does that mean? And she explained really by giving me examples.

For example, she talked about the police officer who might come up on a crime scene. And maybe there are a few kids who are nearby and he or she would perhaps get down on the floor to talk with them or at least kneel down. So they were at the same level. So it wasn't kind of a conversation from a commanding authority down at a small child.

Other times she talked about a nurse could be trauma-informed if the nurse was asking questions at a medical appointment. Maybe asking about past sexual history or abuse or anything like that. That nurse would be would be explaining why she was asking those things. She would also be informing the patient whether items shared were going into the medical records or not. That would be trauma-informed.

So she gave me these interesting examples. I thought, "Wow this seems really important. This is really interesting to me." So it really made me think about this book that I love. And this is by Ginny Redish. She is, Ginny is a contemporary of Steve Krug. If you've ever read, "Don't Make Me Think!" It's a great book. And this is another great book that came out around the same time frame in general. And I really like it. And one of the things that Ginny just talks about in this book is that a good website is like a good conversation.

A Website Should Be A Good Conversation

And so I always have that in my mind. That a website is somebody initiating a conversation with you. What are you going to say with your website to them? And as I was listening to my friend Elizabeth talk about being trauma-informed, about about how people were talking to other folks. I thought, "Gosh, well, it seems that websites also should be trauma-informed." We should be making sure that people are having a good conversation and a good experience when they're coming to websites. So I started to learn more about trauma in general. I ended up on a project where I helped the North Carolina Coalition Against Domestic Violence help make their website more trauma-informed. And it's been quite an adventure.

So I started by learning more about trauma. And so if that's kind of where you are, if this word trauma-informed is new to you, just start by learning a little bit more about trauma. And I'll just give you some highlights here and certainly give me more resources at the end. Trauma, this definition that I'm using is it's an emotional response to a terrible event. And this is from the APA. There are different definitions of trauma.

So it's not just one agreed-upon definition. Some tend to focus more on the event itself, like an event being traumatic. And they're probably events we could definitely agree seem to be traumatic. But it's interesting because this is really focusing on the reaction people have to whatever kind of terrible events occur.

The Tricky Thing About Trauma

So here is the tricky thing about trauma. And I think this is why sometimes people don't understand it well or don't understand other people very well. Trauma can show up in different ways at different times with different people.

So in 2014, we were, it was Christmas Day and we were waiting for grandparents to come. And on the screen you can see that's my husband, that middle picture of me with brown hair. And that's was my daughter back then. She's older now. And we were waiting for our grandparents and we just had to take a walk on Christmas Day around like 11 or 12pm. We decided to just walk down the street and I think my daughter just didn't want to go. She was too lagging behind by about 20 or 30 feet.

And we were walking our dog and we hadn't gotten very far at all, just a few houses down. And all of a sudden we saw this really big dog jump its fence and it was big and brown barking and it was scary. But it paused for a moment. We thought, oh, maybe it'll be friendly. And nope, that was not what happened.

There was a dog attack. And I want to let you know, everybody is fine. But, you know, it did mean like that our dog got attacked. My husband ended up, you know, having to go to the hospital, too. And, you know, there's blood, the screaming. It was not good. It was bad enough that the insurance company was trying to just give us money to not sue. So that was a really strange thing we didn't expect to happen on Christmas Day.

And you would think that maybe from that experience, you know, my daughter Parker would be petrified of dogs, from now on. Well, that is understandable and that sort of thing. But that isn't actually what happened. You know she seemed to process the event with grandparents who were there later that day. She talked about it with different people and family. And she's fine around dogs today. I think about this probably more. Every Christmas Day I think about it. So this is just like one event that happened that we all had different reactions to.

You know, my husband, honestly, I think he forgot about it. And he was kind of like the main person who was able to get the dog by its collar and get it back into its yard. He handled the situation. But it was a scary day.

And that is one of the weird things about trauma is that we could all have the same event happen. We could all have different reactions to it. And some people may be affected for a very long time to a traumatic event and other people just not so much. It may just be a terrible event that happened, but that just becomes a bad memory and not something that triggers what's often called a trauma response.

And whether somebody is a trauma response or not can vary on so many different factors. I mean, I was reading research recently and there were eight different factors, but there's probably tons more too.

So we can't really predict like who's going to have trauma response, who's not necessarily. But even something small can trigger somebody to kind of think about the trauma, the experience. And they may start to go into thinking that is like negative and not helpful.

Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)

So when we talk about trauma, there's really no way to talk about it without talking about these things called ACEs. These are adverse childhood experiences, and this is from the CDC. And thank you to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which does a lot of good work and put together this graphic here.

And these are some of the various experiences that people may have in childhood. The things can affect them in the future and can have serious long-term effects. And as you look at some of these, you might think, gosh, I've got some of those.

And we do know that something like 70 percent of adults in the United States will experience some kind of trauma in their life. And that's I think research was mostly done with a mostly white population. So it's even more in minority populations. For example, people may experience multiple kinds of trauma. And if these happen, especially in childhood with where our brains are developing, that can be really problematic.

So over time, the community-level ACES have come up. We've realized that in those lists I just showed you of ACES that we weren't covering some other things that are a really big deal, right? So if you feel these things like discrimination or bullying, or if you witness violence, you know that things are happening in your community, that can also have a significant effect on your well-being.

And that the reason we care about these sorts of things is if you look at this pyramid. You see how the conditions that we experience as children, the social conditions, as well as whatever's happening in our own household, can start to really affect us early. It affects us early, and it can continue and even cause early death.

So that is a problem. And that is something that public health officials, we all, need to try to work toward - making sure that it's a safe place for everybody to live. And they're not experiencing this kind of trauma, whether it's in a neighborhood or a household.

Cognitive Consequences

And as designers, this is the area that really jumps out to me as an area we can focus on, right? So we know that somebody who has experienced trauma, could have long-term cognitive effects from that trauma. That might affect how they come to our website.

You know, Steve Krug has a great part in his book Don't Make Me Think about how people come to your site with some kind of reservoir of goodwill. And it's going to be really dependent on what just happened. And if what just happened was a bad experience at another site, then that's going to affect their experience on your site. And it's not just the goodwill, but the state of mind they're in, how they're doing, what kind of capacity they have.

We know that trauma has long-term effects — depression, insomnia, all kinds of things that relate to cognition. And that can affect, whether somebody is able to navigate a website really well or can get overwhelmed easily.

And it's interesting that it's not just happening the year after a trauma occurred. We also know there are things like complex trauma, where it's not one big event. It's a series of events over time. So trauma is the thing is something we need to all be aware of.

We can see that the hallmark symptoms of PTSD have to do with memory, attention, planning and problem-solving. Please know that someone doesn't have to have PTSD diagnosed to have some of these issues. It's a spectrum.

So there's a lot of us who may be affected by these long-term effects of psychological trauma. So to be trauma-informed or at least like begin to be trauma-informed. We're all just trying to get there. It's this recognizing that people can have different types of trauma in their life.

It could be interpersonal violence or the kind that we talked about as ACEs or people have other kinds of trauma. When a big hurricane hits the United States, we tend to have huge hurricanes and they are devastating. And that can have a huge effect on somebody's life, right. Or there's just a lot of terrible events. I'm sure you can think of many of them.

Being more Trauma Informed

So trauma-informed is also about being careful in our interactions. We don't want to re-traumatize people accidentally as we are conducting research or testing out an app or something like that. Even if we are well-intentioned, we can still cause problems. So it's being sensitive to this. We would call it being survivor-sensitive, trauma-informed in the way we go about our design.

The great thing is that SAMSHA, which is part of the United States government, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, created these principles of trauma-informed care. And these are great because these are things we can think about. How do these principles apply to design? Well, there is a ton of overlap with UX design in these.

Trauma-informed Principles from SAMSHA Overlap with UX Principles

• Safety

• Trustworthiness and transparency

• Peer support

• Collaboration and mutuality

• Empowerment, voice, and choice

• Cultural, historical, and gender issues
  

We are often trying to think about being trustworthy with websites and apps, and hopefully, we're giving people choices. We have a user experience principle about user control and freedom that is very much in line with trauma-informed care. Even ones like peer support, collaboration and mutuality. Those are things that we need to kind of keep in mind and think about. When we do something like participatory design, we are thinking about collaboration, mutuality. So I think the one, two, five and six are principles that we can cover pretty well in user experience and we can work more on three and four.

We can also be really careful about whenever we're conducting any kind of interview. Make sure that it is trauma-informed. People have choices and feel safe and really trying to give people what they need in order to not be retraumatized in any way or triggered.

Trauma Affects Everyone

You may think, "Well, I don't work with a population that has a lot of trauma. I'm not a social worker. I'm not a blah blah blah." But, you know, I worked at a sports startup, and I interviewed elite athletes. And I can't tell you the number of times that sexual assault will come up in our conversations or other kinds of like traumatic experiences with coaches or just sudden changes and that sort of thing. People have a lot of things going on in their lives.

An elite athlete is somebody we might look at and think, “Oh, they have it all.” but they may have struggled with an eating disorder or things that happen in their life. And when we talk about their life story, they often go, "Wow, that was cathartic!" And I think, "OK good," you know, because I didn't want them to feel on the spot. Or that I was soliciting stuff from them that they didn't feel comfortable sharing. So all of us have trauma in some form. Not everybody is going to have a trauma response by any means.

But we just need to be really mindful of how we are going about doing our design work.

Takeaway #1 Reduce Cognitive Load

So I have a few takeaways for you. If you don't really remember anything else, I would really think a lot about cognitive load. The great thing is that when you're working in UX design, you want to be reducing the cognitive load and making things so easy for people anyway. And that is only going to help anybody who has dealt with trauma in the past.

I once interviewed a guy who was in charge of four different e-commerce websites. He was really funny. And he just would say, "I just want people to, like, shake their butt and like buy products. I want it to be frictionless, an easy experience, as easy as you accidentally pocket dial somebody." It was just that simple to buy a product. We want it to be that simple for somebody who wants to get help, reducing barriers as much as possible.

It's keeping forms short, right, only asking what's absolutely necessary. Don't give somebody like twenty-five choices on the homepage, which I still see sometimes. Give them a few items, your website visitors.

Takeaway #2 Prioritize Mobile

The other thing I want you to think about is mobile. Mobile is really important. Not everybody has access to a desktop or laptop computer, especially when we're talking about lower-income folks.

The mobile phone they have may be the only way they access the Internet. And so we need to make sure our websites that are serving the general public are really working well on mobile. And somebody can do something, any kind of task there that they can do what somebody else can do on desktop.

Mobile is also important if you ever do design for anybody who's in some kind of crisis situation. They maybe don't have a lot of privacy. Maybe the only time they can maybe look up information to get help is if they have their phone in their bathroom by themselves. They've got 90 seconds to themselves to look up some phone numbers or that sort of thing. Well, then, gosh, I hope your phone number is like one click to call and they can at least, you know, maybe make contact. Or get quickly get from your website what they could do, what would the next step be, that sort of thing. So definitely keep mobile in mind. We want to continue to work on being more and more mobile-friendly, because that will be more trauma-informed too.

Takeaway #3 One MaKES A Difference

If you're watching or reading this, then I assume you have some kind of interest in being more trauma-informed. Maybe you're on a team of six people. I have like these six little figures on my screen. If one person is paying more attention to being more trauma-informed, you're probably going to be asking better questions. You'll be thinking more holistically about the experience you're providing people.

When you start asking questions and using the word trauma-informed and you help other people learn. You're going to help your whole team think more carefully about how we are working with our research participants, how we are building our websites and apps. So I encourage you to keep learning.

We have a trauma-informed design monthly call. Contact me if you'd like to be added to that Google group list and then you'll get that information. I also keep a list of resources on my Birdcall blog. I will make sure to keep that updated with more as I find them — there's new information coming in all the time. This topic has grown in the last few years. Everybody seems to be talking in health care, certainly, and in other areas as well, about how can we make things more trauma-informed.

So I hope that you will join me on this journey. Let's make sure we are being trauma-informed designers and helping everyone.

All About Data: Interview with Data Expert Alice-Anne Hardwood Sherrill

If you prefer to read the interview, here it is:

Melissa: Hi Alice! and we are recording now and I'm excited to get to know you a little bit better so tell everybody about yourself and your organization.

Alice-Anne: Sure, my name is Alice Anne Harwood. I am the Co-founder of Carnelian. We are a newly launched company. We're actually right in the midst of redoing our website, as we speak.

I’ve spent about 20 years as a practitioner in the nonprofit sector, and I have a specialization in the arts, but my expertise is program design evaluation and fund development organizational design and development as well. My main focus now is really centered around data and all things data so Carnelian is our new company and we're moving forward.

What we do is build tools and resources that help individuals and organizations operationalize change. So there are a lot of folks talking about the theory behind where we need to go. What we do is figure out what are the tools you need to get there.

Her Background

Melissa: Sounds great. Tell me a little bit more about, how did you get into data? Because you are really into data from what you told me.

Alice-Anne: Yes, that is a thing, so I've always been interested. I grew up in an environment that was very focused on exploring, focused on discovery. And so it was sort of built into me but I didn't fully understand that until I worked with a team of researchers at Yale for a little while and I had never taken a stats class I had zero formal training.

And here I am thrown into the midst of all these postdocs asked to to support them in both creative work and in development work.

And I had no idea what I was doing and I had to learn on the fly I had to suddenly be able to analyze data in a heartbeat in order to do my job to serve them in the way that I wanted to serve them, so it was this trial by fire.

It is actually very hysterical. There were some moments that I didn't fully understand who I was working with at the time, some very, very important people, but I was so young, and so green, I had no clue. No clue. The president of the APA was my boss, and I didn't get that like. It didn't click with me. I was so green, right? You know he came to me one day, “So everybody's busy. I need some slides. Can you do some data visualizations for me for my presentation tomorrow morning at nine?” Ok, yeah sure.

I had no idea. I went home and spent the whole night, up all night, trying to figure it out. I brought him some slides and what I discovered in that moment, the next morning.

Later, that afternoon I brought in the slides he did his presentation. I got called into his office later that afternoon and thought I am fired. I'm dying, right? I’m done and, instead, it was, “Thank you, you you clearly stayed up all night to do this, and I want to ask your permission to use these in my book.”

Melissa: Wow!

Alice-Anne: And it wasn't because they were these mind blowing interpretations. It was because his audience was me. His audience was the everyday person who might not be completely immersed in data.

And my interpretation was very straightforward, was very streamlined and clear, so it was the start of - data does not have to be this scary complicated thing. It can be something that becomes part of your process and part of your everyday. 

So that was sort of the start of it, and then, as I kept using it. Especially with an interest in program evaluation and program theory, along with development I think fund development folks were the original ux designers. Because when you start looking at moves management programs and how you work with a donor to engage them, that is the foundation of ux as well. The data feeds that moves management process. It also feeds the quality and impact of program outcomes. 

So it just kept layering it into my work more and more and more until it actually took over and became my life's work from there. So there's how I came to be where I am.

Melissa: That is a great story of thinking, you’re going to be fired and then actually...

Alice-Anne: “Can I put you in my book and I’ll cite you?”  I'm like, “What?! I'm going to be in your book?”

Data Is Qualitative and Quantitative

Melissa: When you use the word data I started thinking quantitative. Is that kind of the world you run in, like are we saying the same thing?

Alice-Anne: I actually work in both worlds.

So I love my work actually is about combining quantitative data and your qualitative data. So my work is about layering your data so that it's a learning tool.

So when I think “data,” it's not just about...my research centered around intrinsic and contextual data. Intrinsic is counting beans, right? It's the basic, it's the information counting heads.

Whereas contextual data is experiences, behaviors, environmental factors. What are those intersections that also inform the counting beans? That allows you to look at it and find anomalies, find discoveries, find gaps, and in that moment of discovery that can happen when you overlay information.

Melissa: That sounds great, yeah that sounds a lot like just mixed methods methods UX and when you were talking about the donors, I was thinking it’s like the user journey of the donors and that sort of thing and how it’s qualitative and quantitative combined. In my mind, I do go to quantitative when I hear the word “data.”

Alice-Anne: Yeah, I think most people do, and I think that is probably one of the traps, right? That's one of the little traps, there are land mines all over this world.

Especially in the sector that the work we do. That's one of the big land mines is stepping right on -  data is just counting data is quantitative.

Melissa: Great, well, I'm glad we got that cleared up right away. That, even if we're using our data there's lots of different kinds.

But Where to Start? 

Melissa: If I am part of an organization or I'm an individual, I know I need to start paying attention to the data that's coming in that you know we're all surrounded by. Where would somebody start?

Alice-Anne: I think if I were to say where to begin, it's three steps.

First understanding what data you actually collect and from where. Then looking at whether or not you use it. And do you have a process for maintaining its integrity. What is your process for making sure that data is not flawed, that that data is accurate, that that data is consistent and has a consistent way of being looked at as apples to apples, year over year.

I would say the second step, and something that came out in one of my research studies that blew my mind actually was this huge percentage, 70+ percent of participants in this study, have a self perception of the ability to analyze data as being very high.

Yet those same participants, when asked about what tools they use to actually analyze their data. Less than 10% of the available tools were put into use. So the perception of the ability to interpret it versus knowing actually how to use the tools to interpret it for learning doesn't exist. There's a complete gap between those two. They are completely opposite versus what the reality is, completely not in alignment, so if I'd say looking at skills, looking at developing data analysis skills, and just simply learning how to use some of the tools that exist.

I am by no means a data scientist. I know what I don't know how to do, but I know what's possible and I know what tools can make it possible, and if somebody who is a data scientist is working with me, I can help them talk them through it, so I don't need to know how to do it.

But as the LEADER I need to hire someone smarter than me who does know how to do it, but I need to at least understand:

• what do they need

• what professional development they need to continue learning

• how to use those tools

• what investment do I need to make into my infrastructure to understand what tools are necessary to actually utilize the data you have

I’d say that's where to start.

No More Excuses 

Melissa: Okay, that sounds pretty good now. I'm going to bring up another objection that people might now in general, which would be like, "That sounds really expensive and like a ton of work." Do you bump into that?

Alice-Anne: All the time! I think that's the belief that data is hard, data is expensive. Data is beyond our capacity, and I don't have time to do what I'm doing.

You don't have time to not pay attention to the data because the data should be informing every decision you are making. So I’m speaking now in terms of the nonprofit world. So if you're not using your data to make organizational decisions and to inform it, why are you doing any of it?

You're working completely in a vacuum. So that objection is to, “That's not us,” is, I just won’t accept it. I don't think so because it is affordable. I mean there are free courses everywhere.

Google is your friend. Anytime I need to know how to do something I can Google it and get a step-by-step. Just follow the steps printed out. Follow the steps. If you're an analog person use your printer. And there are courses, Lynda courses, that are free, which, when it was purchased right when it was bought out, I believe.

Melissa: It’s Linkedin Learning now.

Alice-Anne: You know and simple things, I mean, “Oh I don't have the tools to get data,” "Do you have a Gmail account?"

“Yes? Okay, what I would like you to do is set up Google alerts on this topic on this person on this, whatever you need to learn more about.” You can tap into it and tap into other people's data sources and start layering them into your own. And finding out who of my audience actually fits this data that someone else is pulling already and what does that mean? How does that inform me? So it doesn't have to be expensive. Go take an Excel course. 

Power queries in Excel are a basic simple way to learn how to analyze data. You can find them by Googling them, step-by-step. But you can also get a lot of free courses and just find someone who can teach you those power queries that are actually quite user-friendly. They're very intuitive - you know it's easy to use them.

Melissa: Yeah, it's also just great that we have so many resources available to us. I often tell people to go check out Google Analytics Academy because oftentimes we have Google Analytics on our website, but we don't actually know how to do much with it, and we were not excluding bots, are there just kind of weird things going on.

It’s Not Just Counting

Alice-Anne: Yeah. I think there's also that perception of it's counting. And so, looking at analytics and not understanding well how do I count, what where's the counting in that? Well, it might not be a counting thing. You might actually need to layer two different things together.

To find out something new, based on the information that's being out how are you synthesizing the different pieces of information, together, to tell the full story.

Melissa: Yeah that's what it's all about, right? The full picture of what's really going on so you can make great decisions.

Alice-Anne: Yeah, yeah, and I think data, for me, is how I use data, where I rely on it the most, is confirming my assumptions -  from the most basic assumption possible to things I may not have ever even thought about that came up.

So I'm looking at a program theory. I’m looking at my data. And I can't figure out why it's not coming out as the theory said it would - where's it broken - usually it's an assumption. Usually, there's an assumption. The same thing happens if you're thinking on the donor realm, the data and donor work in your fund development program. Usually, you've made a wrong assumption. You decided that the husband was the decision-maker. In all actuality, it's the daughter.

And you know there, there are so many assumptions that we make, so the data qualifies our assumptions and helps us determine what might be broken. So I think that's where I use data the most is helping me understand where I didn't see something or something I assumed actually was inaccurate. And so the data helps beef those thoughts up.

Melissa: Yeah that's great that is definitely a big part of user experience is like getting the assumptions, to the explicit knowledge enables so we can take a peek at them and be like, is this really true or is this just what all the stakeholders think and sends us down this really wacky path with a website, or whatever other digital tool we're typically working with.

Other Pitfalls

Melissa: Can you tell us other pitfalls that you see people fall into around data?

Alice-Anne: Oh sure. Manipulating it instead of learning from it.

So I have a colleague who calls me on a regular basis. He used to work for me and now he's at another, he said, an organization, now that is huge it's a giant organization. His frustration is they don't actually want to know the real results. They want certain results. 

It's like a researcher going in with a thesis and disregarding the fact that it's okay to disprove their thesis that that is just as valuable and just as quality work as proving your thesis but we are programmed for accountability. So we're always pushing what's right, how are we proving that what we're doing works, instead of saying how are we finding out it doesn't and needing to make changes based on what we're learning.

And I think the biggest pitfall other than the...thinking you have the skills and you really don't and counting is also trying to manipulate it to tell the story you want to tell versus letting it narrate the story itself.

Becoming More Open-Minded

Melissa: Yeah we've certainly seen that many different cases of course around user experience types of research and qualitative data and confirmation bias and those sorts of things. How do youtry to get people in the mindset of being more open minded? Like a true scientist would be?

Alice-Anne: You have to be open to failure. Your risk threshold needs to be set, I think, part of your assumptions has to include how do I articulate what my risk threshold is so that I know how much risk I can take towards failure so that I can learn. Without that risk of failure, there is no learning. We learn through our failures.

And if we're always only focused on - “Here we're doing it, we're doing it, we're doing it, - when you're not actually doing it. And when it comes down to it, eventually, that will come to the surface. Others will know that you're not doing it right. You're spinning your wheels in the mud.

So I think it's creating a culture that's not risk-averse that is encouraging learning. You know, I'm very much in support of those environments that have creativity time. So where Google gives 20% of your time is just exploring, figuring things out, failing.

3M, I mean 3M is amazing, and some of their biggest products, Post-it notes, came out of employee free creativity time. Explore, figure something out. They invest, what I think, is 3 billion a year, I'd have to look at the stats to know for sure. They invest so much money in R&D (research and development.) So what is the R&D threshold risk threshold of your organization? Most organizations don't even have an R&D aspect to their work. It’s succeed or else, there's no room for failure.

That's perpetuated from the funders, from the way that we're structured as a sector, of course, but you don't have to live within that. You can work to build in opportunity and funders actually are very supportive of failure.

I find that my relationships with funders are better when I’ve failed and worked through the failures with them to overcome the challenges and find new solutions and actually learn something together.

They're more apt to give me more funding to continue working than the one who I kept saying, “it's working, it's working, it's working!” And then suddenly it comes to the surface it's not working. You are never going to see funding from them again. 

So it's really creating a culture that is accepting of failure is this is the biggest step. That's just using a lot of influence. Slow wins. Little tiny wins fail and show how that fail helped move something forward. And work in those little tiny increments to overcome and bring people on board and help them see the value in risk-taking.

Melissa: That was a great answer. Thanks for sharing with us about that, I think that's a real challenge, I think there's certainly a lot of desire. I even see it in the startup world and other areas beyond nonprofits where we say we want to fail. We say that we're willing to take risk. But then, when it comes down to it, people are being punished for ideas, doing something that didn't work out, that sort of thing. We’ve got to get away from that and we're going to actually learn right.

Alice-Anne: Absolutely, absolutely, and that's all on the leader. That's 100 hundred percent on the leadership of organizations working to create a culture. It can't come from staff. The leader needs to embrace that risk and be okay with it.

Dark Data and Your CRM

Melissa: That makes sense. Are there other pitfalls that we should be aware of?

Alice-Anne: Understanding why you're collecting data. There's a lot of dark data in the nonprofit world. It's just accumulating and accumulating and accumulating - which creates a risk that could be mitigated. So there you're putting data into the system, but you're not ever using it. 

For example, if you're thinking of the donor world, right, you've got your CRM. And you're entering it all say, “ Look i've got the best CRM ever. It takes everything that you put in all these notes, I’ve got total histories, I can add anything.”

But guess what? You can only query on gift date, gift amount, campaign code. You can’t actually inquire about any of those other contextual things you're adding into your system. That requires a custom report, which requires paying for more or the tech team can even build it because they just don't have the capacity to do that.

You know, thinking about when you're purchasing a system - Does it do what you need it to do to help you learn? And many of the CRM that are touted as amazing are not thinking. All they can do is count heads, they count beans.

They can’t actually analyze or layer in anything contextual, so I think that's a major place where organizations get stuck but don't know what's happening. You think you have something. You think you have the tool that's going to work. But it's actually not working for you.

You can drive the simple systems just as well as you can drive the Cadillacs and Lexus's of CRMs in the same way. You just have to make sure that those reports can be built-in, and you can tap into that information and you're using the information. 

It doesn't do any good to have a crackerjack development person entering in data about your donors and no one ever utilizing it. It doesn't do any good to have a program person who's gathering, all of this information and you completely disregard it. It goes into a file folder and put into a drawer. 

One of the results, one of the things that blew my mind in a research project was seeing where does your data go. It’s put in a file and in a drawer. Not even a file somewhere on my network! it's in a folder in a filing cabinet. What?! Nothing is being done with that data. It’s only using what's mandated, only looking at data as a requirement and an added thing. Not looking at data as part of what you do every day, in every decision you make. 

You Need a Data Agenda 

I think the other major major pitfall, major landmine, is not having a data agenda, not having a path of data. If the Board has never seen data that would inform decision making, and the board makes decisions...how are you making decisions that are going to accurately reflect the outcomes and move your organization forward? 

Or if the Board is mandating data and the frontline people gathering it have no idea why it will be flawed. it will have issues in it that you can't interpret it in the way you need. So having an understanding at all levels across the entire organization that that data isn't just that program person's data or just that development person's data. This is the organization's data. It's all of ours, and we all need to understand how it comes in, how it flows, how it's managed, and how we use it to layer it for each piece of our work to make organizational decisions.

Melissa: Okay is what you just said right there is that the data agenda,? How we use it, why we use it?

Alice-Anne: All that -  how we gather it, who sees it, how it's stored, when is it purged, how long can it stay. You know, in a system when you know all of those really important pieces. Risk threshold, so your risk policy needs to be reflected in your data agenda. You know who determines what data is gathered and why, what is the process, what is the process for using it. Are you following ethical standards?

There are no standards for the nonprofit world. We don't follow the same research standards that a researcher would have to. Yet our subjects are, more often than not, human subjects, but we have zero training, zero awareness, no regulation about what that data capture is, and are we ethically gathering that data.

So that's a part of your data agenda is adopting ethical processes. Animals, even if you work with animals, there are the whole set of ethical standards. So learning IRB processes and making that part of your data agenda. It's bigger because there's a risk to it, there is a risk. There's always a risk. But the benefits of having it well planned, having it mapped out, Understanding where it's going and how you're using it -  that mitigates legal issues. 

It removes that barrier from people saying, “We can't do that because it's a legal issue.” No, you've got yourself covered. You've got a data agenda that maps all of this out that you're protected. You're making the right decisions. Your risk team, your risk policy is up to date and includes your data agenda. But then it's making sure that data doesn't sit and become dark data just sitting there, contributing to that huge pool of data that someone could tap into at some point. That’s a higher risk than data that's actively being used.

Melissa: Thanks for explaining all that! So you would want to have your data agenda explicitly written out, policies decided on, that sort of thing. It's interesting when you were talking about data gathering. A lot of the conversations I've been having lately are about being trauma-informed in our gathering. And being sure in our research methods and our process of talking to people that were being mindful that we're not making it worse, and the same way, the IRB is there to protect subjects in the university realm. A lot of things to think about.

Don’t Just Check Off The Data Box

Alice-Anne: Yeah, and I think sometimes organizations get stuck in, “I only collect what the funder tells me I need to.”

Melissa: Yeah, what the funders want.

Alice-Anne: How is that informing your organization? How is that making you a data-driven organization that's making the best decisions and proving to your donors, that you are the best investment?

“I'm just doing what I'm told and checking off the box.”

So that is probably the other pitfall — checking off the box.

Melissa: Checking off the boxes, yes, and also it's about probably when you are, you know collecting that data, and maybe just for funders you're asking a certain question explaining to the person you're getting it from why, why do you need it, why do you need to know that? 

Alice-Anne: And it’s having the audacity, which is wonderful. I don't look at audacity as a negative word. It's one of my favorite things to be, is completely audacious. It’s going back to a funder and saying, “This data point you're asking me to gather is a hindrance to my trust-building, it's not in alignment with the values of our program. Could we consider a different data point? Here's what we capture. Will this work?”

Funders love that! Yet most organizations think, "I just have to do what the funder wants, or I won't get funded."

Well, no, it's a dialogue. It's a communication. There's an ecosystem you're building here.

Part of that ecosystem is collaboratively coming up with, ”What are those data points?” If that data point they're asking you to collect is completely counterintuitive to the work that you do there's nothing wrong with reaching out to the funder and saying, “Can we work through this? Because this isn't serving our Program.” Here's what we want to collect and why and what we're going to learn from that data. 

That funder will…their mind will be blown! And you will get multi-year support and they will love you forever. You will now be the spokesperson for modeling how to do data capture and analysis. Your organization and you will be their poster child. So do not fear the foundation.

They have good intentions, but a lot of the problem is not the foundation. I hear a lot of people blaming the foundations. It's also our inability as a sector is to have a dialogue and communicate and build those personal relationships and collaborate in a real way.

Melissa: That is a great point. I love this idea of pushing back on data that might be requested that maybe isn't the right data — to really get to have a real conversation with people who are funding you. I love it.

Alice-Anne: Yeah they're not they're on the front lines with you. You're there. You're doing the work. And who better to inform and have that. That's setting up the model so you've got your data agenda incorporating all levels of the organization into what process.

And then you're bringing in the next level of your ecosystem and saying okay funders let's be a part of this conversation too. And understand the why because collecting data that you're not going to use is unethical.

Melissa: That's a great point too. Thank you. This is chock full. I love it. If people could only remember one thing about everything you've talked about, or one thing about data, what is important that they walk away with? 

Alice-Anne: It's not hard. It doesn't have to be hard. Start from where you are. Look at what you already have. What is it telling you. Then learn, find ways to grow from there, and make it a part....the biggest thing actually is making it a part of what you do.

Everything you do should involve data, everything, it's not an extra. It's not an add on. It's not, “I wish we could, if we had the money. If I had the human resources, if I had the tech infrastructure, I would.” You can do it simple, and start there. But do it and use it as a part of every single thing that you do.

Melissa: Thank you, I really appreciate you sharing all that. This has been really helpful!

Alice-Anne: Thank you, and thank you for all you do too!

Online Content Writing for Mobile for Nonprofits

If you prefer to or need to read, the video transcription is here:

We want to make sure that we are being very user-friendly with our writing on mobile. More and more people are using mobile to access information.

Careful with Conclusions from Analytics

Now, you may hear people say, well, we only get 15 percent of our traffic on mobile, so it's not that important. But that's really a limited view of the analytics. We don't actually know from analytics why people are doing what they do or the context around it.

Those 15 percent of website traffic visitors might be coming to the mobile site having a bad experience. Maybe that's why they end up on desktop. Or they might start their journey on mobile, move to desktop, and then back to mobile. We don't really know. For this reason, we want to plan for people on all different kinds of devices.

It is a very typical journey for somebody to hear about an organization that a business or nonprofit and start looking for it on mobile. Maybe they have a few moments to themselves. Maybe they're waiting for a friend or they are waiting in line. They move to desktop later to delve in deeper with the information. They might to do a transaction or whatever it happens to be. They might end up going back on mobile at some other point, looking at the organization again, we just don't know. But we do know people use a lot of different devices for a lot of different reasons. We want to make sure our writing works well on all of them.

Treasure Your Space on Mobile

So here are some things to keep in mind. First off, treasure the space. It is extremely valuable on mobile, especially the area above the fold. So here I have a screenshot of the Wikipedia mobile website. And you can see they are welcoming everyone to Wikipedia. We're in 2021 and we don't need to be welcoming anybody to our websites anymore.

I'm sure they're trying to be friendly. But it actually takes up about half an inch of space. We would be better served by it directly telling us what Wikipedia is, or what I can do here, or almost anything else. So really treasure your space and make sure that all the words you're choosing to use are impactful.

Calls to Action

I also want you to keep in mind any kind of call to action where you're asking users to do something. In this case at Sesame Workshop (2:10 in the video), they're asking people to donate. There's a cute picture of Grover there.

You see the donate button is up high enough that it doesn't disappear on mobile. We know from research that people do pay more attention to items that are higher up on the page. Be careful, especially about what we put in that top third, top half of any page, and how it's going to play out on mobile. Make sure our CTA, any kind of call to action, is up high enough so it doesn't disappear below the fold.

"The Fold"(s)

We also need to keep in mind that now we've got various folds to consider. Here's the challenge - it's in one place on desktop, it's another one on a modern phone, and it might be even higher up for an older phone. And as people who work with websites, we tend to have more recent technology. So you need to be sure to think about questions like these:

• What is the right screen size to plan for?

• What are common screen sizes for people who are not like me?

• What if they only have a mobile phone?

• What if they have a laptop that's 4 years old or even 10 years old?

Be mindful of these different kinds of folds. Get the most important information up high so that it will be visible to everybody.

Words on Mobile

The number one way you can improve your writing on your website may be to use less words. Get rid of those words that are unnecessary.

No welcoming, no filler words, please. For titles, keep in mind that they're going to be on both desktop, laptop and mobile tablet. Try to use six words or less, that will mean they probably won't be truncated on mobile, which is good.

Titles and subtitles

I want you to front-load titles with meaningful words. It's important to make sure you've got good words in the first few words of any kind of sentence or title. This is because we read, in the West, left to right, and tend to not read the whole line sometimes.

You also need a title accurately on each page. When I click on an item, say, in navigation or a news story, when I land on that item, I need to have some kind of title. It should confirm that I did land at the right place.

There are many reasons for this. First, sometimes people click on things without actually reading them or looking at them with care. People need to orient where they are once they land on a different page.

Other times, especially on mobile, we get distracted as we're moving around. So it's easy to get distracted from a page. You pull back to the page and you need to be able to see, "Oh, oh yes, I'm on this page and this is what I'm doing. "

So looking at an example here (4:41 in the video), I have a website, the mobile site for the American Red Cross. If I clicked on the menu button up here on the right. I would then see these different options pop up. Eligibility requirements, let's click on that one. And when I click there, I do have a title right there that reminds me, look, this is where you are. "Requirements by Donation Type" gives me a little bit more information.

Now, there are some things that are kind of funky, even about this site. I couldn't get rid of this chatbot person that was saying, "Chat with me." I wanted to get rid of it so I could read the text, but I couldn't do I had to actually scroll. So, you know, even well-funded websites sometimes have challenges.

Links on Mobile

Let's look at the Mayo Clinic (5:26 in video). I want to talk to you about links. The links are really important on mobile because we can't do the hover with the hand on mobile like we can on desktop or laptop. We don't get a hover hand or a hover underline or anything like that. So that makes it really important for us to be sure to identify what is a link and what is NOT a link. And the Mayo Clinic has some variety on their site that I think makes it a little bit confusing.

On this page of their mobile website, this entire paragraph is a link. This is pretty unusual - to make the whole thing a link. And I almost totally missed it, except I accidentally hit it. So that was interesting.

On another area of the Mayo website, I can see these are pretty clearly links. I could visit these different parts of the website. But if I go over here, these links are different color slightly and they're underlined. Also this time I have a breadcrumb.

Big organizations sometimes are stitching together different websites kind of behind the scenes. To be a cohesive organization and to help people learn what is a link and what is not a link, you want to have consistency.

So I would say, Mayo Clinic, go with this great blue with an underline that should be good for all your sites. And we also know that we don't need to be underlining entire paragraphs. That is overkill and it's not what people expect us to do. So it would be easy for people to not understand, "Hey, that's the link." "Oh, I thought it was just paragraph."

In Summary

So just to sum up, use less words, value the space, because, you know, on mobile, there's not very much. Keep your CTAs up high. Title accurately with mobile in mind, don't have a super long title. I know it's hard. And make your links consistent and obvious. We know that three to seven words is a good link length and that is a good thing to aim for. Don't just go with one word and certainly don't do an entire sentence as a link. Just make it three to seven words with really clear, good information. Send a very clear message about what somebody will get if they click on that link. Then they can make an informed decision. So these are things to keep in mind for a while. I hope you will go make your website look awesome on mobile now.

Learn More

Get more practical tips to improve your nonprofit homepage by grabbing 3 Free UX Lessons to Drastically Improve Your Nonprofit Website here.

Nonprofits - 4 Ways to Be More Inclusive and Accessible on Your Website

Nonprofit professionals often ask me how they can make their websites inclusive and accessible — this is terrific! What a worthwhile goal. Here are 4 ways to do this:

• Ensure content is being created by individuals with various perspectives. If you don’t have diversity in your staff, would you be willing to include some interviews? Or could you hire out for some website writing and/or editing?

• Use a variety of people (race, abilities, etc.) when doing usability testing on your website. (If you don’t do any testing already, get on that soon, it’s not hard. You can learn it in my Nonprofit Website Design Essentials course.)

• Start with basic accessibility moves such as captioning all videos and adding alt text to all images on your website and social media. Once that’s a regular part of your process, you can make further accessibility improvements.

• Make your text more user-friendly! It’s really easy to do. You can watch the 2-minute video here to learn how to make text easier by adjusting reading levels. You can reach more people this way.

There are many more things you can do to improve your website and make it better for a wider range of people. For example, understanding user experience (UX) principles will always lead you in the right direction.

Want to keep learning? Check out Birdcall’s practical courses on online writing and website design.

4 Tips for Donations Forms for Nonprofits

The transcript with donation tips is below:

I have four tips for you for donation pages that I think will really improve the conversion rate on those forms. 

Make Donation Pages Unmissable 

So first, let's just talk about getting people to the donation page. It should never be a mystery where your donate button is. It should never be hidden like this silly cat. t should always be very clearly either in your top navigation or perhaps in what we call the utility area, which is above the navigation and tends to be to the right-hand side. So let's first be sure that our donate button is not missable.

Keep Buttons Up High for Mobile

It's important to remember that this is key on mobile as well. So here's an example from the American Red Cross organization, and you can see that on their menu button. If I click it on mobile over here, you can see donate is the first link. We never want somebody wondering where can I give them money? We never want that to happen. So here's an example from Sesame Workshop, the organization that puts on Sesame Street, and you can see that even on mobile, they make sure that they're there. Donate Button is floating what we call “above the fold.” Right. So somebody doesn't even have to scroll to find the donate button. It is there from the get-go. These are key things to keep in mind. 

Abandonment Rates are High for Nonprofits

Let's talk a little bit about the abandonment rate. Oh, my goodness, 78 percent of people coming to a form are leaving a form in the nonprofit world. Tthat is a really high percentage. And if you can decrease that by a little bit, that can make a huge difference to your donations or, you know, your applications or whatever it is you happen to be. What we're talking about donations here. So if you haven't yet looked at the lesson on forms in general, please go check that out. That is important for making sure you have easy and usable forms. You want to be following best practices from now, not from 10 years ago.

We want to make sure that it is so easy to donate to your organization. It's as easy as doing a pocket dial. I'm sure you all have done this. I know I have. We want somebody to be able to shake their butt and give your organization money. We really want it to be super, super easy. So making your forms really easy to use is a good way to get there, making sure people can find them. That's really important, too. 

Anchoring

And the next thing I want to talk to you about is anchoring. So I get myself out of the way here. So this is Charity Water. We know they're used as an example many times because they're doing a lot of things right. So anchoring is this concept where, you know, the first number you put out is going to anchor decisions around the rest of the numbers cycle, it's a psychological term.

People are going to anchor to something no matter what. So you may as well decide what you want them to anchor to. If you are hoping for your donations or your average donation to increase, you would want to put on your donation form a preset amount. That is the amount you would like them to be donating. You want to make it really easy for people. So making things easy by giving them pre-set amounts, that's great. They don't even have to put in a custom amount. They can just go, "That seems like a reasonable amount. Maybe that's what other people are giving as well," and then they will make that donation. So anchoring is a concept you really want to pay attention to. You can see that they even do it on a monthly option. They highlight the higher amount. They choose forty dollars a month versus the ten dollars a month. They highlight that with this button, it's OK to anchor them at a good amount that will help support your organization. 

Another thing that I think Charity Water does really well, and this is actually a video in the background you can't exactly tell because these are still shots, but they're continuing while on the form to encourage and remind you why you're giving. So they have a child playing in the water.

Keep Encouraging Your Donor

Here's another image of somebody getting a cup of water. And so just because somebody got into your form doesn't mean that they're going to finish it. We know that from the abandonment rate. So we want to keep encouraging them with language like "you," with language like "join us," language like "you can help now," things that are immediate. So having imagery, I love the way Charity Water actually has put the form connected to imagery right there. So it's reminding me what I'm doing. So if there's any way you can put an image or language or quote or whatever it happens to be, that might continue that emotional connection once somebody is in a form, which tends not to be a very, let's say, emotional experience, you are more likely to get them to fill it out. 

So to wrap up, make your donation button super obvious, especially on mobile. You're going to have easy and usable forms because you're going to follow good usability practices. You're going to use the anchoring concept on your donation form with preset amounts that make sense for your organization and your donors. And you're going to keep encouraging folks to donate even on the donate page, your goal is to get them to complete that form, press donate so that your organization can receive funds in order to do your good work. I encourage you to follow these tips so that you're more likely to get more donations.

Keep Learning!

Get more practical tips to improve your nonprofit homepage by grabbing 3 Free UX Lessons to Drastically Improve Your Nonprofit Website here.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips for Nonprofits (and Anyone Really)

Here’s the transcript of the above video on SEO if you prefer or need to read:

If you don't show up in search results, all that hard work you put into your website may have been for nothing. You have got to get people to your website and a major way to do that is through search. So let's talk about SEO. This is increasing both the quality and the quantity of your website traffic. And we're talking about traffic that you're not paying for. These are the search engine results. They're going to come from Google or Bing or Yahoo! Search or whatever search engines that people are using now or they might be using in their future. Search engine results are really important.

We know that 70 percent of searches result in an organic click on the first page of Google. This has been shown multiple times, in many studies. Around 70 percent of people are trying to not even go to the second page. They are going to pick something on the first page and typically in the first five results. So being in those results when somebody is looking for an organization like yours is really important.

SEO Is About People

I love this quote from MOZ, which is this SEO company that's been doing this since 2004. They're really good at what they do. They say SEO is as much about people than it is about the search engines themselves.

What we really want to do is understand what people are seeking and then we want to provide it to them. This assumes it matches what we are trying to do as well as the organization.

So to improve your SEO on your website, you're going to first choose your SEO keywords, which is not hard to do. I'll point you in the right direction for that. You're going to use those keywords in the text and the meta description for the page. Your meta description is what shows up underneath the main title in your search results. So it's a little bit of text, usually just two or three sentences at the most that you need to be crafting.

And then you also need to review your analytics. You are very clear on how people are finding you and what search terms they're using.

If you do these three things, you're going to be able to improve the SEO of your website. This will then improve your ranking in results for Google or another search engine.

How to Do Keyword Planning

So let's talk about this kind of keyword planning. How do you do some keyword research so you know what words to choose? Well, the first place I always start is in the Google Ad space at this tool called Keyword Planner. So this will require you to sign up for Google Ads, but that doesn't mean you have to ever run a Google Ad. I've been using this for years and I've never run an actual paid ad. But what you can do then is under the Tools area, there is this thing called the Keyword Planner. So definitely sign up for Google ads, get to the Keyword Planner. Then you can put in terms that you think are related to your organization.

Let's pretend I run an organization that is trying to promote pet ownership for people who've never had a pet before. They might be thinking about their very first pet. So after I put in my term and I press enter, I then get a list of keyword ideas. This is the keyword I provided up here. And these are ideas that Google has based on searches that they are seeing for related terminology.

So you don't have to worry about the cost of any of these things because you don't have to buy the ads. What you want to see is people's way of wording things in Google. So "easy pet to take care of." Then you would start to say, "OK, let's choose some of these phrases that are maybe well used, that are being searched."

If I see something that has zero or one hundred searches, then maybe that's not a great search term for me to choose. But maybe something like "low maintenance pets" could be a term that I might want to do some competing on. And I'll compete, and I'll use that term in my writing. Another place I like to look at is "Answer the Public." This is kind of a weird website. I don't know why this gentleman is always on the website looking out.

I don't know the history behind that, so I have to kind of ignore the guy. But what you can do here is you can choose your country. Then you can choose an item, and you can search and you can see what people are asking about. And so this is great to see what is getting put into different search engines and what people are curious about.

You don't have to do a paid plan. It will let you do like two or three searches a day completely free. And you can download a CVS vile that you can use in Excel or Google Sheets. This will have the key terms with the questions people are asking. Ultimately that's what you want your website to do: to answer people's questions around a certain area or topic.

Another place to look for potential keywords would be YouTube. When you start to type into YouTube, like Google, there are other things that are going to come up. You can get a sense of what other people are searching for and that might give you other ideas for keywords. So maybe you decide, "OK, we're going to pick three to five keywords." We will write some blog posts that relate to these keywords. And perhaps we will make sure these keywords are used on certain pages on our website. That will help you "compete for the keyword."

Now Use Those Keywords!

You're going to use your chosen keywords in a few different places on the page and in your URL if that's possible. If you are able to get the keyword in the URL, that can only help you.

You're going to definitely use it in the article title. Rather than doing something super catchy, you can just do something straightforward. The closer it matches what people are putting into a search engine, the more likely it is that they're going to find your content.

You're also going to use any chosen keyword in the body text just one to three times. You don't have to do what we term keyword stuffing, which is where we used to write lots of keywords on a page. The search engines are smart enough they can figure out what the page is about if

• the article title has the keyword you're going to use

• the keyword appears a couple of times in the body text.

So I should be clear and say you're using ONE keyword or ONE keyword phrase for each page. So for, let's say a page, I might say, "OK, this is going to be "low maintenance pets." That is going to be the phrase that I'm going to use on this page in the title, as well as a couple of times in the body to help people.

I'm also going to be sure to use a meta-date description as well. You need one for each page on a website, including any blog posts or articles. You want to craft that media description to specifically reflect what that page is about. Do not depend on your general description for the entire site or the entire blog area. This will help more people find you.

I'm going to use my chosen keyword for the page I'm on a few times in the body text. I'll use it once in the article title and in the description, of course too. So after you have a list of three to five keywords, you're going to choose maybe to write an article. Or you're going to recraft one of your pages on your website with one of the keywords or keyword phrases.

Note that it's not using all the keywords on one page. It's using a chosen keyword or keyword phrase for ONE article or page.

• You are going to try to get the keyword in the page URL if that's possible.

• You're going to make sure that the keyword is in the article title.

• You're going to make sure it's in the body text a couple of times.

• You're going to make sure it's in the meta description, which is what shows up in search results.

If I'm going to try to write an article to target that "low maintenance pets" that we saw earlier come up with the keyword planner, I use that in the title, in the body text, maybe up to three times. I'll make sure that the meta description is specific for this page. Be sure to go in and do our meta description for each page on our website, each blog, post, and article we write. We don't want to just depend on the meta description for the site as a whole or the blog as a whole.

Google Analytics

Now if I put my content out in the world hoping for better, so I'm going to keep an eye on my Google Analytics. So here's an example of a website that I have done some work for, this is the Carolina Yoga Company. And you can see this is a key area where you want to look for your search terms. So under acquisition, I mean, Google, Google Ad Links is free.

So there's really no reason Google Analytics should not be on your website. It will give you lots of good information, and it's worth any data that they might take on your website traffic. You will get great information to help you do a better job at SEO and having a user-friendly website. In Google Analytics, under "Acquisition", look for "Search Console" and then "Queries." And this will show the search query and how people are actually finding this. So in this case, they're finding Carolina Yoga Company on these different terms. And it makes sense because there are different locations. And then they also try and specialize more in teacher training. They might decide they want to have some more pages that are specifically for teacher training.

This will help you understand what people are looking for. You might learn new keywords that you want to compete for if only a few people are getting through for certain keywords. So you want to be up to date with your analytics, you want to check them quarterly. I would say at least quarterly.

Make sure your analytics are set up correctly. Exclude bots and yourself. You don't want to add website clicks to your website data, right? Make sure analytics are set up so you're not having counting people in your own organization or bots as website traffic. And then you should have some good numbers and you should be able to look carefully.

You definitely want to set up Google Search Console. This sometimes requires a few extra clicks. But then you can see what are the terms people are searching for and then they end up at your website.

In Summary

So remember, here's what you need to know to get started with SEO:

• choose your SEO keywords

• do some research

• use your keywords in the text, the title

• use your keywords in the meta description for the page

• review analytics regularly (make it part of someone’s job!)

• These things will help you improve your SEO.

Keep Learning!

Get more practical tips to improve your nonprofit homepage by grabbing 3 Free UX Lessons to Drastically Improve Your Nonprofit Website here.

Best Practices for Testimonials

The transcript for “Best Practices for Testimonials” is below:

Testimonials are a common thing to have on a website that is public-facing. They help increase credibility and trust.

Why Use Testimonials?

Why testimonials? We know that people influence other people and how they act. Also, credibility can increase very quickly when others are talking about you positively. And trust is essential for most organizations to really connect with their target audiences. And that is what you want to do. You want to build trust. Testimonials are a way to speed up that trust.

To increase credibility and trust testimonials should have a few characteristics if possible.

Full Names of Real People

We love to have a full name attached to a testimonial. That means it comes from a real person that people could look up to see who that really is. Also, including a title or an industry gives the context of who this person is. Then nobody does have to go look up, "Who is Mary Jones?" Well, you can give them more information. They then say, "Oh, that's somebody who I recognize or somebody from an industry that I recognize or who has a title similar to me."

Photos if Possible

Showing a photo of the person giving a testimonial also really helps increase credibility. Now, sometimes you run into issues around anonymity or privacy. Those are more important than you getting a testimonial. And those cases, sometimes you can use the quote and you may not have a full name.

Maybe you'll only have a first name or no name at all. At least it is something, and at least it will be told in words that are not yours. Somebody else's words can feel more real to other people. But as much as possible, you want to show that these are real testimonials from people like those viewing your website.

Off-Site Testimonials

We know that recommendations on third-party sites are also really helpful for organizations. Things like GuideStar, Yelp, or Facebook are places where people may put recommendations. For an organization for e-commerce, that's a lot easier. There are sites like Amazon and eBay where people are giving things stars and making recommendations. But even if you aren't selling a product, it doesn't mean you shouldn't see if you can have off-site recommendations as well.

A Common Issue with Testimonials

The biggest issue I see with testimonials is that they are often too long. Here's an example of a testimonial about an event. It has lots of great things to say about the organization and the event and even the employees. But it's just like a wall of words. It's a lot of words here. And so it's more likely that somebody would just skip over it.

But if I picked the thing that I wanted to emphasize, and we use just that line from the testimonial, it might be way more powerful. It will be more likely to be seen.

Let's say I wanted to take this line, which is really an impressive testimonial line, and I would just pull it out. And I would let there be white space around it, so it really pops out on the page. That kind of white space or negative space around words makes them stand out and will draw the attention there.

Sprinkle Testimonials

So keep an eye out for testimonials on your website. See if you can make them shorter. If you aren't yet using testimonials, then think about how could you possibly start incorporating them in. Sprinkle them throughout the site, not on a separate testimonials page. Sprinkle them in to help increase your credibility and trust.

Learn More

Get more practical tips to improve your nonprofit homepage by grabbing 3 Free UX Lessons to Drastically Improve Your Nonprofit Website here.

Homepage Tips for Nonprofits

The video content transcription of “Homepage Tips for Nonprofits” is below.

You don't have much time to make a great first impression on your website visitors. In fact, 50 milliseconds is how long it takes somebody to decide what they think about your site. I didn't know how long that really was. I looked it up and blinking an eye is 300 to 400 milliseconds. 50 milliseconds is super fast. It's not a lot of time.

Numbers to Know About Homepages

Another number I think you should be aware of is five seconds. Generally, there's this idea that we should be able to understand what a website is about in about five seconds. So would your website pass the five-second test? For example, if you were an organization helping high school students with their studies? Could I get that after just five seconds of looking at your homepage? I hope so. That's a good test for your website. See how quickly what you do can be communicated. This is hard especially if you're a complex organization.

Also know that within about 10 seconds of viewing your home page, you should communicate your value. So you have to answer that question for people, “What's in it for me?” and also the question, “Why should I spend time here?” This is a tall order. These are a lot of things that are important for us to keep in mind around our home page. We don't have a lot of time. We have to get our message across straight away.

Does “The Fold” Still Exist?

We need to keep in mind is this idea about the fold. This idea of the fold comes from newspapers, which, of course, have an area that is above where it is folded. The area above the fold is the most viewed place. People have to flip over or open up the paper in order to look at the stories below the fold.

I hear much discussion online from non-profit professionals about whether “the fold” exists. Does it exist? Does it not exist? This is a debate even among designers themselves. But if we look at the research, I can assure you that the fold still exists. People look more closely at items that are above the fold.

The thing that is tricky is that the fold moves around since we have all these different devices of various sizes. So we have various folds we need to think about! And you can see here's a fold perhaps for a laptop in the middle is one for a modern phone, and on the right is where the fold might appear on an older phone. Just keep in mind that there are various folds. When you're planning your home page content, be it an image or a call to action, a news story, whatever it happens to be, make sure that it's above the fold for as many people as possible. Yes, some people will scroll, but not everybody. That area, that first third of your page, will be viewed more than anything else.

Calls to Action (CTAs)

Another thing to keep in mind is to have one call to action, if at all possible. It could be, “Donate.” It could be, “Apply.” It could be, “See our next event” or “Sign up for our newsletter.” It’s whatever you decide is most important. Make that the one call to action. So you aren’t asking people to choose between multiple things. I have seen it sometimes work with two calls to action, but I would suggest trying to keep it to one if at all possible. Sometimes I go to a nonprofit website and there are eight different choices. That is too many. We want to guide our users and make it really simple.

Carousels, also called Sliders

One more thing to think about in homepage design are carousels. Sadly, I'm not talking about this kind of carousel that's really beautiful and fun. I'm talking about those auto-rotating sliders that happen on many homepages still. Since 2012, I've been asking people to stop using these things. We know from user research from a lot of different groups that not only do people have trouble finding items that are in the carousel, they tend to ignore them.

We also know from research that people are annoyed by carousels. So think about those types of carousels where the picture is whipping away every four seconds or five seconds or six seconds. It's really hard to time when somebody is going to be looking at the picture. Sometimes people scroll down and then scroll back up and then the picture zips away. For this reason, I would encourage you not to use them in an automatic way at all. If you have to use a carousel, you would definitely want it to be static.

This is so important that I'm putting it in red and saying, “No auto-rotating carousels, please.” They're very problematic. I would also ask you to think about whether a carousel or slider that is static, that can only be changed manually, is really best. Oftentimes, people don't use them. They don't notice the little dots at the bottom showing that there's more than one image there. And sometimes they miss the little arrows on the sides. You might be better off just rotating the picture on your homepage more frequently than putting it in a carousel or slider. These are critical things to think about on your nonprofit homepage.

Learn More

Get more practical tips to improve your nonprofit homepage by grabbing 3 Free UX Lessons to Drastically Improve Your Nonprofit Website here.

Resources for Trauma-Informed UX Design

Last updated March 2024

Introduction to trauma-informed design - 18-minute video

Trauma-Informed Design

• What is Trauma-Informed Design? (video)

• Inclusive by Design: Use a Trauma-informed Approach (article in UXPA magazine)

• Interview on Trauma-Informed Technology with Lifeline Tasmania along with trauma-expert Carol Scott.

• “Is Your Website Trauma-Informed?” slides

• Repairing the Harm of Digital Design Using a Trauma-informed Approach - see the figures and tables my latest journal article with Lesley-Ann Noel.

• Other trauma-informed design resources from a project from 2017

On Trauma-informed Research

Here is some practical direction to be more trauma-informed in your research:

• Trauma-informed Design and Research Panel - Practical tips and approaches in this video with three researchers discussing being trauma-informed in their research. (video)

• Code for America Qualitative Research Guide - I recommend downloading the entire PDF. It’s great!

• Trauma and resilience informed research principles and practice - Journal article with framework and some practical tips.

Trauma-Informed Organizations

• The Missouri Model - Describes the stages an organization goes through as it becomes more trauma-informed. Find many links to great resources for learning here.

• Campaign for Trauma-Informed Policy and Practice - U.S.-based organization that fosters engagement across sectors and symptoms.

Self Care

• Trauma Stewardship - This book covers so many aspects of self-care and organizational change to support those regularly exposed to the suffering of others.

• The Institute on Trauma and Trauma-informed Care - The University of Buffalo’s School of Social Work has lots of resources for self-care and learning about trauma.

Trauma and ACES

These are great resources for getting a better foundational understanding of trauma:

• SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach - Just reading through this carefully may spark different ways you can apply trauma-informed care principles to your work.

• Trauma-Informed Social Media has a great and detailed introduction to trauma in the first half of the journal article.

• How Childhood Trauma Affects Health Across a Lifetime - Dr. Nadine Burke Harris (video)

• How the ACE Study began - We are fortunate that an error while interviewing by Dr. Vincent Fellitti led to this work.

• CDC ACEs resources - Facts, prevention, and more.

• Learn your ACE score - It’s not a screening tool, nor meant to dishearten anyone, because we can heal from trauma. It doesn’t cover all trauma, but I found it useful to take to learn and self-reflect on childhood.

• Emotion and Cognition Interactions in PTSD - An academic paper reviewing related studies.

• Traumatized by Kati Morton, LMFT - This is a helpful and clear book that explains trauma. The section on generational trauma was particularly valuable.

• My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem

• What is trauma-informed care? A website aimed at healthcare professionals with lots of resources to explore.

Google Group for Trauma-Informed Design and Tech

• Each month we have designers, academics, social workers and other professionals join together to learn and discuss trauma-informed design and technology. Join our Google group so you can get event information and access the group’s resources.

What is Content Strategy?

Once we are clear on goals, audiences, and messages, we're going to start to think about strategy. What is the best way to do this?

Defining Content Strategy

First, let's define content strategy. This definition is from Kristina Halvorson, who authored Content Strategy for the Web (see below.)

Content strategy is the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

You might think, "That isn't that different from some other things I've done." And it's totally possible because it's just communication planning. What's interesting and different about content strategy is that it relates to tech.

The iPhone comes out in 2007, and as the 2000's went on and on, we were all spending a lot more time with websites. Content strategy becomes a whole field itself. Content is different now. It was no longer like a pamphlet that you handed off. It went out into the world, and you didn't have to actually govern it.

We know with websites, apps, and other types of digital tools that we need to maintain them. That word maintain though sounds passive so "govern" is a better word to use.

We need to make sure the digital items are useful. We have the chance to iterate on them and make changes. We can make things better and better.
So there's a governance part of content strategy. This is different than past communication planning.

The Classic Content Strategy Book

If you like reading books like me, this is the classic book on content strategy. I would recommend it. It's the first book I read on the subject. High five to Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach for writing such a useful book.

Here’s a 12-page sample chapter you can check out to try the book before buying it.

Another Definition of Content Strategy

Here's another way to think about content strategy. This is usually the quick way I explain it to people.

Content strategy is getting the right content to the right people in the right way and through the right channel at the right time.

We can talk about the definition very quickly, but it actually takes a lot of time and thought to do that well.

"The right content" is what users want. Not what we think the users want or what the business organization wants. The right people are the users, for in this case, we're talking about websites, but it could be for an app or anything else.

"In the right way." It's in the format users prefer. You might find out from research that your user groups have a preference for video or text or infographics or some other format.

"In the right channel" is where the users actually are, right? We like to try to meet people where they are. That might mean reaching them via an email. Or it might be reaching them on the mobile website, because that's often where they are, and it's at the right time.

“At the right time” is making sure that the content comes in right at the time that the user is looking for it. When might a person need that information? It’s like when we visit a new location and we're keeping an eye out for a sign. Let's say it's the sign of a restaurant. It's really helpful if there's signage along the way. If the restaurant is in a little tricky location, if there's a sign that has an arrow, it helps us. When I turn the corner, I think, “Oh, great! I was just about to look around, and there was an arrow that was there to help me.” That an improved user experience than me wandering around lost.

A Content Strategy Basic Concept

I also want to remind people of this basic thing that often gets lost and forgotten in terms of content:

First, we figure out our messaging (or “story” is) and then we figure out the format. So it's story first, THEN format. So if we all follow this, we would never have to watch a really bad corporate video again. But what happens is people come to you, they certainly come to me and say, oh, we need videos, we need this or we need that. And I think, "Do you? Is that really what you need?”

A better way to approach things is to think about the story, the message you're trying to get out there. THEN think about, "What is the best way to tell this?" Is it through something visual like a video that will have a lot of movement and will be very interesting?

Is it something like a moment in time where a snapshot would be perfect, just a still photo? Is this something that's pretty in-depth? Then a long-form written story would be great. Or maybe an infographic is the best way to communicate. For example, you might have a research paper that nobody in the general public would read. But they might be interested in the research if they got the information in an infographic.

Always keep this in mind - story first, then format.

One WaY To Develop YOUR Content Strategy

One way to start thinking about strategies is to do a communication SWOT analysis. So we know SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Business people apply this model to many different situations. You can apply it to communication, and my co-author and I shared how in our content strategy for businesses book.

You can view and/or download the Communication SWOT PDF here.

On the top left, you will see there are "strengths." Another area is for "weaknesses," and both areas have here are some good questions to ask.

There are always "opportunities." This is because things change often in the landscape of websites and communication. Maybe something new like Clubhouse is the right thing for your target audience, but who knows? It'll depend on all kinds of factors - audience needs, desires, location, and more. Of course, you need to remember what your organization is trying to do too. Clubhouse might not make any sense whatsoever. But it's good for you to be aware of opportunities so that you can jump on one if it seems relevant.

And then there are "threats." This is where we pay attention to what competitors are doing. We do a competitive or comparative analysis. (That's we do if there isn't "competition," but we need to see what's going on in the industry landscape.)

We need to keep an eye on what's going on with audiences. See if their attention span has changed or desires have changed. Maybe what they're seeking has changed. These are things that we need to think about.

Use these groups of questions to help you develop a strategy. Your strategy will then inform tactics and any writing you would do.

Want to learn more? I teach classes on UX topics - you can get a free lesson to learn and try before buying anything at all.