For small business owners, the benefits of using a service like UserTesting can be invaluable. A majority of small businesses today are doing online commerce. Naturally, the success of their business depends on the effectiveness of their online presence or in plain English, their websites! Small businesses often create their websites with budget web developers or through web designing software by themselves. Consequently, these websites do not always manage to provide the best user experience to buyers.
Enter UserTesting, a low cost service that will test your website and provide detailed feedback of a user’s experience. Even Evan Williams, the Co-founder of Twitter, is buzzing about it! (Flashback alert: remember when Priscilla met Mr. Williams?)
Many softwares out there provide the same service, but UserTesting uses human testers, who are far more perceptive than any program. With UserTesting, small business owners can even specify the particular area that they want tested such as the checkout process. Additionally, it is possible to specify the demography of users, i.e. age group, gender, or location of the business’ target customers.
Once UserTesting gets a test request specifying all criteria, the company assigns the matching “users” to test the business website using certain guidelines. The testing is also videotaped live to give the business owner a better understanding of the site’s performance. All this comes at a low cost of $39, discounted to $29 for first-time users. For the price, you will get one “user”, fitting your chosen demography (e.g. female, early 30s, schoolteacher, located in Ohio), testing your website. The reports are accessible within a short 5 hours!
The reports come in the form of flash videos of the user talking through their experience as they browse through your website. (You can even watch a sample video!) These videos can be downloaded, stored and even uploaded for future reference. For non-technical business owners, this can be invaluable feedback.
UserTesting claims that their testers are not experts but rather regular users. That may not always satisfy a small business owner who would prefer actual customers to test the website. However, UserTesting is flexible on that aspect as well, charging $29 per report, a $10 discount for not using its own testers (UserTesting pays its testers $10).
The results of UserTesting can be a real eye opener for small business owners. It can expose unexpected weaknesses and drawbacks in the website that will never occur to developers or designers. These factors often go unnoticed but continue to affect sales unless business owners run UserTesting on their sites.
Want to know more about UserTesting and other similar products? October 17 understands that usability and a great browsing experience is of the utmost importance for potential customers. We’d love to hear your comments or if you have any questions, please feel free to drop us a line!
