Usability Testing

Basic Usability Testing

The first thing I do before I start paying for traffic is to have a few trusted friends check out my website. I ask them to go through the site and let me know if they have trouble finding links, information, or any trouble doing tasks (finding products, ordering products, etc.). Often they will find something that I missed since often, after spending so much time on a site, I am just too close to it to see potential usability problems. After getting this initial feedback, I then ask my friends and relatives to look over the new site as well. I get a few more morsels of feedback from this and I end up having a fairly good idea if the site has any basic problems I need to correct before opening it up for business.

This is a very basic and cheap form of usability testing. Usability testing, in its basics, is testing if people using the site have any problems with navigation, doing tasks, getting information, etc. This kind of testing can be very expensive if done by a professional "usability lab", but it is pretty easy to do the basic sorts of testing yourself. And if you want some help understanding how to do a more rigorous testing than just having a few friends give you feedback, there is a good book on this Book - Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. This link will take you to its page on Amazon where you can get a free look inside, read reviews on it, etc..

If you have the time and inclination to do the type of usability testing outlined in this book you will be far ahead of the game. But if not, at least have your friends and family look over the site and get their general feedback as well as feedback on how easy they found it was to do specific tasks (find a product, order a product, checkout, etc.)

Live, Real Time Usability Testing

The next step is to do live, real time usability testing. These days this is pretty easy to do, although it can be an expensive learning process. Basically it means paying for traffic through PPC adverting and then analyzing the ROI results through web analytic software (I use Google Analytics).

This is definitely where the rubber meets the road - does your site convert, and if so, enough to make the site profitable? When I start testing a site like this I hope to see 1 - 2% conversion (# sales / # customers). A 1 - 2% conversion rate is a very good start and hopefully shows that I am on the right track. If I don't see this kind of conversion after a week of getting a fair amount of traffic (I shoot for at least 75 - 100 people a day -- you need to run at least a few hundred people through to get a sense of whether your site is converting) I know I have a problem.

Obviously, this can be an expensive test depending on how expensive your important keywords are - so it is important to do your basic usability testing first to shake out the most easily identifiable problems. And you can try to minimize the cost by aggressively working on your PPC advertising to get the traffic at the lowest per click pricing.

But often your important keywords will be pricey. Especially at first -- you often do pay a premium for new keywords you run in Adwords. Their price may not come down for a week or two till you have some history on these keywords and quality scores in for the landing pages you are running the ads to. And if your quality scores on these landing pages don't end up being very good, you can end up always paying a premium for these keywords.

On the other hand, while these keywords cost more, they still may be cost effective at high prices since these very targeted keywords and so may convert at a much greater percentage than very general types of keywords. But if your site isn't converting at first, it may get expensive to pay for these keywords during this test.

I would urge you to keep with it for at least 300 - 500 hundred targeted users or so in order to get a good idea if you site is converting for these particular grouping of keywords. If it is, then you can move on to tweaking your PPC advertising and your site to make the business as profitable as possible. But if it is not converting, then you may need to focus on writing better ads, making sure your keywords are targeted toward your specific market, and also try to create better landing pages. In addition, you may want to delve into the web analytics to find out what the problem is (are they bouncing right off the page, or if they are staying on the page, are they clicking to order a product and getting to the cart page, etc.), as well as possible solutions to these problems.

Next > Using Website Analytics - how to use them to enhance the effectiveness of your site.