Measuring User Satisfaction

One of the sessions I attended at the Non Profit Technology Conference today focused on the impact of visitor satisfaction to a website.The primary message: the more satisfied a visitor is the more they are likely to engage with your organization. A no brainer? Perhaps, but when you think of engagement as impacting your capacity as an organization in it leading to more donations, volunteers, more people recommending and distributing your information it becomes vital to pay attention to user satisfaction.

So how do you find out if site visitors are satisfied? Satisfaction can't really be measured in straight up website statistics (even with the magic of Google Analytics). The best way to find out how satisfied your users are is to ask them. Asking your users how satisfied with your current website they are, is a particularly great time investment to undertake if you're looking at redesigning or redeveloping your website. Our clients often ask us what kinds of questions they should be asking when they survey their website users, so here's a great framework to use to develop your own survey.

Questions you can ask your users to measure satisfaction:

1. Content. Some sample questions to ask: How does the quality of information you present measure up? How up to date isquality of info, how up to date is it?
2. Functionality. How useful is the website? Does it increase convenience for the site visitor? Is there a sufficient variety of features available on your website?
3. Images. Does the image of the organization presented online match how they think of you offline? Does it match how you want to be perceived?
4. Look and feel. Does the mood of the website match how they perceive your organization?
5. Navigation. How easy is the site to use? How easy was it to find things?

There are many specific questions you can fill into those top level categories to match your organization and your users, but hopefully that's a useful starting framework.