The benefits of user testing for your site
- Read time: 4 mins
- Tech level: low
- Key point: a good user testing service can determine the effectiveness and usability of your website.
With so many different user testing services and user testing companies out there, it can be challenging to figure out the best one for your situation. This post will help you match up your problem with the service to fix it.
Why do you need usability testing?
When building or improving a website, especially product related, there are many different things to consider. Sure having a slick and stylish website is one aspect, but the information you want to share with your website visitors must be easy to find and navigate through, so that your customers can engage with you or buy your products.
One of the best ways to make your website more successful is user experience testing. Users want to get on to a site and easily guide themselves to where they want to go without too much trouble.
Users want to access pages, products and checkout quickly and will generally not hang around to figure out if a site isn't user-friendly.
Website usability testing
A good user testing service company will observe real people (who match your target audience) using your websites user interface (UI), identify problems and opportunities, fix issues, and then monitor your sites success.
Basically a user testing company will determine the effectiveness and overall usability of your website. It will expose how difficult it is to use, or how easy it is to navigate and eventually achieve what they set out to do on your website.
You can have the sexiest website in your industry, however if it’s not user-friendly, people will leave immediately and go onto the next site if it doesn't work the way they expected it to.
That's why it's important to choose the right type of user testing service for your website.
Goals you want to achieve with usability testing
- To identify any usability problems
- Determine users satisfaction
- Collect quality data
- Analyse and report findings
- Unlock customer insights
- Increase your revenue
Who uses a user testing service?
- Product managers: To get an idea of what their customers want.
- Marketers: Digital marketers who want to boost their conversion rate, test landing pages, email campaigns and advertising.
- Game developers: To make sure their games are fun, playable and enjoyable.
- Designers: Testing to see if their web design is easy to navigate. Designers want to watch real people using their templates.
- Agencies: To show potential clients that users are unable to use their site, and then suggest how to improve it.
Increase user satisfaction and retention rate
A lot of users who visit sites will almost leave immediately; user experience (UX) testing will help determine why your website is unable to retain new visitors. People might leave your website if it:
- Takes too long to load
- Doesn’t have the information they are after
- Needs a plug-in to use
- Plays music or dialogue when the site loads
Gain a competitive advantage
- Decrease support costs, increase user satisfaction, and save on development and redesign efforts
- UX testing provides quality feedback and helps improve interactive experiences
- Usability testing measures behaviour, not preference
- A poor UX can have damaging effects to your brand. Nowadays a good website experience is expected by users, especially when competitors are one click away.
- Identify problems before launching to avoid costly redesigns down the track.
How does user experience testing work?
There are quite a lot of ways you can test user experience. Here are a few of the popular user experience testing services.
A/B testing
A/B testing sometimes called split testing, is where you create two versions of the same web page and test them simultaneously to determine which page works better for your audience. The purpose of this method is to change one element on a page to alter the visitor’s behaviour. By fine tuning an element you are optimising the user experience.
Multivariate testing
The goal with multivariate testing is to test the effectiveness of limitless combinations and see the best out of all the possible combinations of changeable elements on the web page
In page analysis
This is a free tool on Google that shows you were your customers are clicking when they land on your page. If you know what people are doing on your website, you can ultimately make them do what you want.
One-on-one testing
This is using real people on your website and getting the feedback from them on what works for them and what doesn’t. This also takes on the form of past customers leaving feedback on your website “testimonials”.
Website owners often wonder what visitors think when they experience their site for the first time. A site tester will provide you with honest feedback, expressing their opinions on how easy it is for them to use your website.
Do you want to eliminate bad user experience and improve interactive experience? Of course you do. They are costing companies millions of dollars every year.
Learn more about Usability Testing
Want to know more about creating a user-friendly site? See how we implement user-testing and view case studies from previous projects.
