CivicActions

Yesterday I met CiviCRM co-founder Dave Greenberg to discuss potential usability improvements to CiviCRM, an open source constituent relationship management system. Dave is heading to Australia for the CiviCRM retreat and wanted to have wireframes in hand. Dave suggested we start by focusing on two specific pages: the Contact Summary and Search Results pages. A newbie CiviCRM user, I hoped my "beginner's mind" would help me understand the "pain points" our clients feel in using the new system. I quickly realized that I'd need to have a better sense of how people typically use CiviCRM in their daily workflow.

Here's a call-out to those who regularly use CiviCRM:

1. What do you use CiviCRM for?
For example: I use CiviCRM for our contributions database, our donors database, and our customer database.

2. What are the most common scenarios in which you use CiviCRM (that specifically involve the Contact Summary or Search Results pages)?
For example: After receiving a few contribution checks, I go to the specific contacts to record their contributions.

3. Describe the click path you use to accomplish your actions.
For example: Home>Search Results page>Contact Summary>Contact: Contributions tab>New Contributions

4. What are your "pain points" on the Contact Summary or Search Results pages? Do you have any specific recommendations as to how to improve them?

For example: I think the "select records" radio buttons should be ABOVE the "print" and "more actions" buttons/drop down.

For example: I think there should be "Edit" buttons in each section of the contact summary page, not only at the top. Perhaps a "pencil" icon next to each collapsable field set that allows you to edit the date just in that section.

Post your comments here!

Recently Ron pointed my attention to Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons From Eye-Tracking Studies. Interestingly, someone from virtual hosting emailed us about the study as well.

I found 6, 10, 19, 20 of particular interest, especially for sites that are already built. These items are largely related to content strategy.

I had a conversation earlier this week with Mindy Herman, and I mentioned that one of our clients had done eyetracking on some visual designs for their site, and she was fascinated by the technology.