My inbox included the fortnightly reminder that a new Alertbox from usability guru Jakob Nielsen was online. The message also contained a request for case studies about measurable impacts of website design changes for an upcoming study. If you’ve redesigned your church’s site and have some metrics to back it up, send your data, before- and after-screenshots, and a brief explanation of the work to John Berger, metrics@nngroup.com, of the Nielsen/Norman Group. All contributors get a copy of the final study.

Possible metrics can show improvement or deterioration in areas such as:

• Sign-up rate for newsletters
• Conversion rates
• Training time needed to learn a feature or system
• Time on task and other productivity measures
• Percentage of users who abandon a process at a particular step

You can remain anonymous in the final study if you’d like, but where’s the fun in that? The study isn’t limited to church redesigns. In fact, your entry might be the sole church featured. So, if you have some good examples then take the opportunity to contribute to the usability community and get some publicity for your parish.