Small Business Sunday: Test Your Site With UserTesting.com

One of the most important things to do when you’re designing a website for your business is getting user feedback. Sure, you can always get your friends, family, and significant other to give you their feedback but are they really your target demographic? This is a big mistake that many site-owners make, they build a site for a specific customer and then test it out with completely different people. On top of this, showing anyone you know that likes you (or loves you) is bound to give biased feedback, why would your Mom tell you that your site sucks?

usertesting_site

Enter UserTesting.com. This service allows businesses to see how real people interact with their websites. For only $39 you get a video of someone explaining what they like/didn’t like about your site as well as a written summary of their experience. Most importantly, you get to pick the exact demographics of your tester to make sure that you are getting feedback from your target customer.

This is a service that I just discovered this weekend and I’ll be using it this week to test-out a major brand-relaunch we are doing this month. It can sometimes be just one or two small changes that can make a good site become a great one. Maybe it’s moving one button further up or down, or changing the color from green to orange. Small changes can go a long way towards improving usability and tools like UserTesting.com can help you get very useful feedback.

Since I’ll be trying-out the service myself this week I will make sure to share my feedback with all of you. If any of my readers have tried this service I’d be very interested in hearing your feedback as well. At the end of the day, it’s all about getting feedback from the right people, and using this to build more usable sites.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton