When was the last time you had user testing done on your website?

If you are like most of the companies I have been involved with over the last ten years I am guessing never is the answer.  I was guilty of this when I initially built www.BoldZebras.com. If you are anything like me your website came into the world something like the following.

1. You got a domain name and celebrated that some cyber squatter didn’t have it
2. You used one a tool like Wix or Squarespace to make a decent looking website without writing HTML (does anyone do it by hand anymore?)
3. You spent hours (more like days but I will not tell) creating some words that make your business sound important and embedding images and moving them around pixel by pixel
4. You then showed it to someone who pointed out all of the typos in your master piece
5. You fixed the typos and then showed it to someone else and they told you that you are too wordy (I had to cut about 75% of the content from my first draft)
6. You delete all of your amazing prose and then go live without asking for more opinions

Sound familiar? I bet it does.

Now while steps 4 and 5 was getting feedback from someone else in reality that wasn’t accurate user testing. Why? Because they had context. They knew about you and your company before they saw the site and every time they had any questions or confusion you were there to explain it away before they could show any pain.

Over my twelve years in SharePoint I have been part of plenty of user testing. Quite frankly it is a pain in the butt and getting criticism is no fun. While that is true but what doesn’t kill you makes your website stronger. But if you are a small business owner you don’t have 100 employees from accounting and HR to source some nontechnical feedback from. So what do you do?

Check out this site that Chris Poteet (@ChristPoteetPro on Twitter) shared with me. It is called Peek and it provides a free 5-minute video of a random internet person using your website for the first time.

My Results

I will cut to the chase and be brave. Here is a link to my video so you can see for yourself. Go ahead, I will wait while you watch it.

That is kind of cool. She quickly pointed out that my clever tag line was meaningless without context. And that while I thought a guy walking through the clouds was great symbolism for what Bold Zebras does she just found it yucky. How sad. The good news was that once she dug in I think she kind of got it. Clearly she wasn’t my demographic, I don’t think, but still the fact that it takes someone 30 seconds to figure out what it is we do here is bad. Also, on the services page it was interesting that she loved the background. My fancy web designer friend hated it.

My plan

You have to take all feedback with a grain of salt. Don’t over react because if you ask ten people you are going to get ten different opinions. That is good, from there you can make better, iterative updates. In my case I have already updated the headline on the site to make it clear what it is we do. I will also be changing out the creepy guy in the fog as soon as I figure out with what. Other feedback I had gotten told me he had to go. Nothing Bold about him. Maybe I need to do something Star Trek and go boldly where no man has gone before?

Where to go from here

It is pretty painless to try out the service on your own website so give it a whirl. As of this writing I have gotten zero spam from them but I am guessing that will change. If you do like their service, they do have paid versions. One of the big upsides to their paid service is you can target your demographic instead of having a random tester. I haven’t used their paid service yet but it is in my toolbox for future engagements now. Overall a pretty cool tool.

So go test your website and then leave a comment to tell us about your experience.

Shane