User Testing a Website

[ChrisHolgate]

Hello

We're soon going to be embarking on a fairly major site overhaul and while this isn't a particularly SEO related question, I’m keen to integrate user feedback quite heavily in this process and would appreciate your opinion as how best to collect this feedback.

These are the kind of questions that I would like to pose:

1. Is it clear when you visit the site, what it is that they do?
2. What is your first thought about the site when you visit it?
3. On the homepage, where is your eye drawn to immediately?
4. When wishing to purchase a product, would this product page draw you into the sale?
5. Do you get a general feeling of trustworthiness on the site?
6. Using the series of drop downs on the homepage, please choose any product and follow the process through to the checkout. Did you feel that this was engaging throughout?

Rather than yes/no answers I’d like the user to spend a good 5-10 minutes giving their detailed opinions so that we can gain some genuine inspiration on how best to improve the site.

What would be the best method of collecting this data? I was thinking perhaps Amazon Mechanical Turk but the thrust of the work offered there seems to be so diverse that I’m not sure we’d get people in tune with offering the kind of detailed answers that I’d be hoping for.

Thanks for your help.

[DirkC]

I have very good experiences with physically inviting people (who have the same profile as your target audience) to the office & ask them to visit the site to do some basic tasks on the website (like search for a product, buy a product,...etc). Observe what they do in order to complete the task (even better to film it). We had 10 people doing this - and already after the 3rd or 4th person we noticed some fundamental flaws in our redesign (For the test, it's best that people who where involved in the redesign are not present during testing - they can only observe from a distance in order to avoid interference with the test persons).

rgds,

Dirk

[MattAntonino]

Sites like UserTesting.com can be a lot of help for you with this but my personal fave is http://theuserisdrunk.com/  (and http://theuserismymom.com/)

I would steer clear of MTurk for this. If you feel you need volume, get 50 people to do it on Fiverr or something. But the companies who do this full time will provide videos, sometimes heatmapping, etc. and you can get a really clear view of what the user thinks of your site. The users don't have to answer your questions specifically to answer your question.

If you want the eye-tracking type stuff, check out what https://www.looktracker.com/ does.  It's pretty cool though admittedly, haven't used it personally.

[DennisSeymour]

I would use usertesting.com

try out a free version on peek.usertesting.com but it's not customizable.

You can also use survey forms from qualaroo.

Id even pick some on my email list, send them a survey form using survey monkey or something else and give them something in return for the feedback

[ChrisHolgate]

Hi All

Many thanks for your responses.

I love the idea of the website http://theuserismymom.com/ and will probably give it a go for the sake of $100 but am conscious that this wouldn't give a varied spectrum of reviews from a wide demographic.

I guess a combination of user testing with people that we know physically in the office and usertesting.com is the way forward.

Thanks for your help.

[TimHolmes]

One of my favourite test sites is https://usabilityhub.com. You can create numerous tests asking pretty much all the questions you have in your list above.

The big bonus is it is credit free for the community edition, although you can buy bulk credits or subscribe if you wish to, I tend to acrew new credits  the free way by performing the odd test for other users.

It is definately worth a look.