Using Humor to Build Better Websites

Comedians, Theater and English majors, under-appreciated creative types – lend me your ears:

Produce a short, creative video to show how your website needs help.

If you’re the funny, clever person in your office who never gets to do anything fun, now is your time.

Put your talents to use and enter the First Fridays Video Challenge and win a free usability test for your office’s website.

All you have to do is create a short video (1-2 minutes) explaining why your website needs some help. If you’ve ever looked at your site and thought:

• “Our design is kind of… ugh”
• “Wow – that’s a confusing paragraph”
• “Yikes! A normal person would NEVER be able to find this page”

then First Fridays can help. All it takes is some creativity from you. You don’t need to be a video whiz to enter – be creative. Use G.I. Joes, cardboard cutouts or do a quick song in Elvish (Klingon is also acceptable).

We’ve tested dozens of Federal websites, and helped them with jargon, poor navigation, scary blocks of text and information organization. We’re really good at this, and we’d love to help you too.

A few quick success stories:

• We helped Weather.gov reduce the amount of scientific lingo on their site. Ron Jones, the Web Manager for the National Weather Service, said that working with First Fridays is “  an eye-opening experience for people to be a participant in this usability testing….  It’ll save us a lot of time, a lot of heartache,and a lot of money.”

• We took a look at USA.gov’s mobile site, and the site’s director Sarah Crane said, “I just can’t tell you enough how awesome the First Fridays team is! Their efforts will help us prioritize improvements to the mobile  site.”

If you’re a winner – our program will take care of everything. We’ll find real volunteers to test your site and locate major user experience problems. Then we’ll make recommendations on how you can fix them and win the respect of bosses and peers worldwide.

Full contest details are at websitetest.challenge.gov. And hurry – the contest ends March 9.