User testing: A game-changer

When I played league soccer, I discovered that if I went jogging during the week, I played better on Saturday. It was a great insight that changed my game. Does that seems obvious? If so, then here is a question: Did you do user testing before you launched the last change to your website?

There are a variety of reasons we don’t do user testing before we make changes to our websites. Some of these reasons are:

• We don’t have time to do user testing.
• We don’t have budget to do user testing.
• We already know what the visitors really want, and provided it.
• Management doesn’t support user testing.

As we process the reasons there are some obvious responses that come to mind:

• If you don’t have time to do it right once, you certainly don’t have time to do it twice.
• Can you really afford not to do testing?
• Have you ever had people surprise you and act in unexpected ways?
• Were you hired to strictly follow orders or were you hired to get the job done?

Just as it was easy for me to make excuses to not exercise between soccer games, it is easy for us to justify not doing user testing. On some level, everyone agrees with the concept of user testing, but we have our individual reasons to skip over it. Some have experienced the epiphany about user testing in the same way I experienced the epiphany about the importance of training between soccer games.

User Testing as a Part of a Landing Page Audit

It starts with a goal. What action do you want visitors to take on your landing page? We find some people stammer when we ask this question. If this is you, don’t worry – you are not alone. But before you can decide if your landing page is effective, you need to know what you want it to accomplish.

Your landing page is scored using an 8-point checklist of top issues that kill conversions. These 8 items have been tested and proven to be key issues that keep landing pages from performing.

Next, we perform eye-tracking tests to understand where the visitor’s eye is drawn when they first land on a page. Do you know that the average visitor makes a judgment about your web page in less than a second after they see it? Understanding where the eye is drawn is critical in understanding what they are judging.

After that, we perform a 5-second test on the landing page. Random users are given a premise before they are shown the page. Then they see the page for 5 seconds. Once the page is removed, they are asked 3 questions about what they saw.

The checklist, eye-tracking and 5-second tests help us evaluate how successfully the landing page accomplishes your goal. This gets summarized in a report with recommendations to improve performance followed by a conference call.

Example

One client wanted people to sign up for their online classes.

GOAL: Enroll for the class

The starting landing page is below. Only 33% of people doing the 5-second test were able to identify the call to action.

We ran eye-tracking on the page and noticed that the teleprompter was a natural focal point. We advised that the client turn the teleprompter into the message, and move the action buttons above the teleprompter with hand-drawn arrows pointing to them. When the client implemented these changes, users’ identification of the call to action rose to 70%.

Without eye-tracking followed by user testing, we could have only guessed at why the page wasn’t resulting in more sign-ups. Was it the cost or the time of the class? The wrong message? Any number of factors could have been at play. User testing helps take the guesswork out of the game and enables small tweaks that yield big results, simply by understanding how people process information on a web page.

Time to Score Some Goals

In the same way it is harder to play an inspiring soccer game without training, it is not possible to maximize the performance of your website without user testing. Fortunately, the accessibility of user testing has never been greater. You can get a Landing Page Audit for $475. It doesn’t take too long, doesn’t cost too much and doesn’t require any contract or commitment. Try it once – measure the results – and we are confident you will never launch a major site update without user testing again.