Posts tagged conversion rates

We’ve been talking about usability testing this week – one of the internet marketing activities that most people don’t bother making the effort with. Here are the top 5 excuses we hear for not doing usability testing … and why (just like not having your homework done!) making an excuse only hurts you in the end.

Is that a REAL excuse?

1. We don’t have time
   If you don’t have time for testing, you’ll have to find time to redo parts of your site down the track
2. It costs too much money
   Ditto above … besides, if you videotape your usability tests subjects, i=this internet marketing activity is actually very cheap.
3. We don’t understand what we’re testing
   There are literally hundreds of usability and web marketing gurus to outsource this to nowadays!
4. I don’t know how to do usability testing
   I’ll explain in a single sentence . Grab a few people from your target market, ask them to perform the basic operations you’re expecting users to engage in on your site and give you a running mental commentary, videotape them doing so and watch where they had trouble later on.
5. We don’t have the equipment
   What equipment? All you need is a computer, a desk and two chairs, at a minimum.

You see … there really are no excuses for ignoring the most important beginning internet marketing activity.

In SEO, analytics is the be-all and end-all. If something shows up in the numbers, it’s good … if it doesn’t, then it isn’t . However, you wouldn’t be the first person to realise that it’s smarter to try and test some aspects of your site before you implement them – the way you do that is with focus groups and usability testing. These two activities aren’t the same thing – here we check out the major differences in their web marketing purposes.

Focus groups

These are usually used in the design stage of a website’s development, or during a re-design. A group of users will all sit around a table and give their reactions to a page, or aspect of the site. They are better to have in the initial stages of website creation – they help sort out overall, abstract-type problems that could affect your internet marketing later down the track.

Usability tests

These are much more specific tests, aimed at getting a typical user to try to perform a task on your website. You’ll have to incorporate some usability theory into your website design long before you actually do usability testing. Here are some guidelines for good usability testing:

• Grab a couple of users to test VERY early in the picture
• You can’t test on yourself. It just doesn’t work.
• Remember that tests won’t ‘prove’ anything – they’ll guide you in a better direction. No company in the world has the budget, or the will, to actually ‘prove’ something in the usability arena.

Ideally, you’ll use both of these internet marketing pre-development tactics to ensure your site’s success!