7 Cool Tools cont.
Last week, I covered the first 3 of my cool tools, Unbounce, KissInsights and Flowtown. Now, here’s the rest of them; Usertesting.com, Survey Monkey, Visual Website Optimizer and Clicktale.
Usertesting.com
Usertesting.com makes it easy to conduct usability tests without having to invest massive budgets in doing so.
For €39 (or $29 if it’s your first test) you can hire an individual to carry out tasks on your website and receive feedback in the form of a 15-18 minute screencast video of them doing so. The tasks you ask him (or them, as it’s recommended that you ask 3 or 4 individuals to carry out the same tasks to get more balanced feedback) to complete is up to you, and you can choose from various demographics when picking your testers to get an accurate representation of your website visitors.
Why would you want to do this? Well, undoubtedly you’ll learn about how your users are interacting with your website, and more often than not they tend to do things that you weren’t expecting. Identifying problems that your users are having is key to your website’s evolution, and a service such as that offered by usertesting.com will allow the feedback to come from the horse’s mouth, rather than from any number of internal departments squabbling over what they ‘think’ is best for a casino’s users.
I recently asked the usertesting.com team to run a test on the Sporting Index website. As Sporting Index offer a rather niche service themselves, I wanted to see how easy it was for a user who was unfamiliar with their offering (sports spread betting) to learn more about them. So first, I dictated that the individuals who were to test the site had previous sports betting experience. I then tasked them with finding out what sports spread betting was, asked them to sign up for a free account and wondered whether they could place a bet on the upcoming England match. One of the videos returned by the testers is shown below or click here for a larger version. The written detail of the task is also shown here.
