Increase your Conversion Rate with User Testing

There are all different kinds of testing on the Internet. But to work, testing doesn't have to be fancy or expensive. In fact, some of the best testing is user testing -- tests you do with one other person.

User testing can take all different forms, and it usually depends on what your goal is. Maybe you really want to test a shopping cart. Maybe you want to understand if your home page is working well (or why everyone "bounces" -- enters there and leaves without looking at another page.) No matter what your goal is, recruit a few users and see how well they do with your site.

So there is the magic word, "recruit." If you aren't planning on doing a lot of testing, you might as well get 5 users and pay each one $100 to come into your office. Put out an ad, or ask customers and friends if they know others who match the target. That way, you can find users who are similar to your customer set. However, unless your site is so technical that people won't understand what the words mean (and we've had sites like that), you can learn from just about anyone. It doesn't have to be inconvenient either: you can do user testing while sitting in an airport, waiting for your plane.

Sometimes it makes sense to show a site to a user and ask them what they think they can achieve with that site. (You will learn something right there, when they tell you that the site is an e-commerce site and you know that it doesn't sell anything.) After they decide what the site can do, let them try to achieve that goal, and see how well they do. Other times, it makes sense to give the user a goal and ask them to achieve it. We like to test both ways.

If you are testing a site before it goes live, be sure to test it while it is "raw" enough for comments to help. We like to do user testing before the designer does their last round of changes, so we can point out that no one knew to scroll far enough to see a button, or that no one could understand the words in the navigation -- those are all easy to change.

User testing is not just about usability. Sure, it's really important that they can find the button, but often, user testing reveals other conversion issues. We hear people tell us whether they trust sites, whether they like pricing, whether they feel that the return policy is a rip-off.

Finally, a note about recording your user tests. First, you should always remind the user that you can't read his mind, and ask him to talk about his thoughts. The words aren't just enough, though (you can capture those on a tape recorder) -- you want to capture the keystrokes too. If you like, you can buy software from TechSmith to record the entire session. However, we've found that having a second laptop, with which the tester takes notes, is very effective.

So go home and ask a friend to be a user, while you watch and record. See what they can achieve. You'll be amazed at what you learn. We always are.