10th October 2014

White paper: Digital Effectiveness for Member Recruitment - findings

Mike Jongbloet
Head of Design and UX

I've blogged before about our research into member organisations and whether they provide an effective journey for prospective members who are looking to join.

What we did

To recap, we looked at five high profile UK membership organisations and applied our audit methodology to systematically test a sample of membership organisations who aren't our clients or prospective clients.

We presented our findings at Harnessing the Web 2014 and now we're about to launch a white paper on Wednesday 15th October which details our findings and best practice examples.

Grab your copy of the Deeson Digital Effectiveness white paper

Have a look here to see our slides and the link to register for a copy of the white paper which gives:

  • Four practical tools you can use to improve user experience
  • Examples of membership sector digital best practice
  • Our five point user experience action plan for membership organisations

Sneak peak of the results

View the presentation and read on to understand the methodology behind our audit.

Our audit methodology

When developing experiences for users, it’s all too easy to let our own personal views and biases influence our decision-making.

For our audit, we used four subjective and objective techniques to get a broad overview of the experience each organisation offered to prospective members.

Social Enquiry tweet

Social response

We contacted each organisation using Twitter to ask for information about joining. We measured their response time, tone of voice and quality of response.

Click Testing screenshot

Click test

We showed real users a screenshot of the organisation’s homepage and asked them two questions:

  1. Where would you click to find information about why you should subscribe? 
  2. Where would you click to subscribe?

We then recorded where on the homepage they clicked to see how the design of the homepage met user needs.

Expert Review chart

Expert review

We ran each site through Deeson's 50-point usability and user experience check. This focuses on how well the site meets established usability guidelines and covers the homepage, navigation, forms and data entry, design and search.

User Testing screenshot

User testing

We asked real users to carry out a number of tasks on the site and talk through their thinking as they did this, which was filmed and audio recorded. This is a powerful way to understand the user experience process and why users sometime do not behave in the way you'd expect.

Highlights from our user testing sessions:

Don't miss out

To read the findings and our suggestions, get a copy of the Deeson Digital Effectiveness white paper by dropping us a line over here.