With our current focus on content & design, I thought it would be a good opportunity to look at the subject of website user testing. Whenever the decision is taken to do significant work on a website the design is always top of the agenda, and there is absolutely no doubt that a professional looking site is essential for any modern business. Though maybe a more balanced approach as suggested in this post may have long term benefit? But, back to this post, what makes a good website design? Usually, in SME website development projects, the key influencers on design tend to be the designers themselves and senior management within the company. Whilst having a site that you are happy to promote is important, whether or not people within the organisation like the site is significantly less important than what customers & potential users of the site think! But outside of asking a few pet customers for comments on the design, what are the options for user testing your site? In our experience there are 3:
Bespoke user testing through focus groups
Perhaps the most accurate way to assess what your target market think of your website would be to undertake testing in a traditional “Focus Group” setting. The process would be:
- Define exactly who are your target users
- Recruit an appropriate number of these
- Get them together in a series of moderated focus groups to feed back on your site
Whilst this may give the most comprehensive and accurate picture, it is also by far the most expensive, and will require 4 and even 5 figure budgets to do properly. In most cases, this level of testing is unnecessary and impractical.
Individual on-line user testing
There are now a number of services out there that will facilitate getting feedback on your site from real users. One we have used recently is www.trymyui.com. The system allows you to put together a series of tasks that you can ask users to perform on your site, or questions about the site, these will then be presented to users who will then record their thoughts as they perform the tasks. What you receive is a video of the screen activity of the tester, overlaid with a voice over of reactions and vocalised thoughts whilst they are performing the tasks. Whilst it is possible to recruit your own testers for this process, and thus get feedback from exactly your target audience, in our experience unless your target audience is fairly tech-savvy, the technicalities of the testing system can lead to issues. This said, the available pool of experienced testers offered by the system is fairly comprehensive, and your testers can be selected by a range of criteria (age, gender, income bracket, country, employment status etc), so whilst you will not be able to focus exactly on your target market (especially if you are in business to business (B2B) markets), it should be possible to get feedback from the right type of people. The big upside of this approach as opposed to the totally bespoke testing is cost, as using this approach, you should be able to get meaningful feedback for significantly less than £1000.
Aggregated user testing
In this final type of testing, rather than getting detailed feedback from individual users, you are looking to get more general, aggregated data on use of your site. www.hotjar.com is a good example of this type of system. To use Hotjar you simply sign up for an account (a free option is available with limited functionality), and add a simple piece of code to your site (similar to the Google analytics tracking code). The system will then gather data as people visit and browse your site. Data that can then be used to give insights into how people use the site. For example:
- Heat-maps – which areas of pages are getting peoples attention
- Visit recordings – More detailed information on how are people moving around and clicking on areas of a page
- Funnels – where are people leaving your site
This list isn’t comprehensive but gives an idea of the sort of data available Whilst on a completely different level to the first two options, aggregated testing is very inexpensive, and can give interesting insight into how people are using your site.