Samaritans is a charity in the UK and Ireland specialising in confidential emotional support. It offers its invaluable service 24 hours a day for people who are experiencing feelings of emotional distress, despair or suicidal thoughts, using trained volunteers to respond and lend help to phone calls, emails and letters. Relying entirely on donations and volunteer help, Samaritans’ website is the crucial portal through which the charity operates.
The challenge
Getting the right information to the right people at the right time is critically important for Samaritans. With demand for online provision of services growing, they approached us to conduct an appraisal of their current website to determine whether it was meeting the needs of current donors, volunteers and those needing emotional assistance.
The solution
Using Loop11's usability testing platform, we conducted an online usability appraisal of the current Samaritans website with 149 participants, providing an overall snapshot of how well core strategic tasks were performed by the site’s main audience types.
The key areas we assessed included vitally important and fundamental site tasks for the charity:
- Getting Help
- Making Donations
- Becoming a Volunteer
The study was distributed to both “warm” and “cold” users that came from Samaritans’ wider internal email database. Help tasks and questions were devised linking participants to the actual site to better determine user satisfaction, validate task completion and enable us to form a strategic recommendation for the navigation of the new site design.
Once the evaluation was complete, the real-time reporting capability within Loop11 allowed us to track and evaluate the task completion rates and monitor the navigation path of participants.
The results
The results showed that only half of the participants successfully completed the tasks, helping to pinpoint those areas requiring attention. In particular, the results showed a significant issue with the current site navigation when it came to those in need of finding ways of talking to friends they’re worried about with 66% of participants either failing or abandoning the task of “talking to someone” altogether.
The results also revealed the need to improve the retrieval of the all important real life case studies, which encourage those thinking of seeking help as well as volunteers and donors.