Conversion101, Part 5: Test your site with real prospects

Web analytics tools are good at giving you a big picture view of where people are bailing out from your website, but they can’t really tell you why. To find this out you need to test your website with real users. User testing allows you to look at your site through the customer’s eyes. It involves sitting down with a typical customer and seeing how they use the website and why it’s not working for them.

But you can’t just sit your cat down in front of your computer and expect amazing results. There are a number of attributes that make up a successful user testing process.

It must be genuine

Getting real people is vital to successful and useful testing. There’s little value in testing the site with grandma if grandma is not a potential customer for your products or services. So when testing, the first stage should be to work out a screener for the type of people you want to use and then only recruit these people. Sounds difficult? Well yes it can be, but the results are usually a real eye opener.

It must be unbiased

Your husband or wife might be your ideal customer (in fact, that might be the very reason you started the business!), but odds are they’re too close to the business to give useful feedback. They have probably seen every version of the website, used every version of the product, and spent so much time on the business that they’re likely to skip over huge errors that will stop a new user in their tracks. And if they really love you, they might not have the heart to tell you they find your site quite hard to use. Look for friends of friends, and people who have had little to no exposure to your site before.

It must be one-on-one

The best way to learn about someone’s experience of an activity is to sit next to them while they’re doing that thing and watch their face. You’ll see little smiles and slight frowns. You’ll hear little sighs and feel them shift around uncomfortably. If they’re having a particularly bad time, you might even smell them sweating. All of this is incredibly useful information that you just can’t get over the phone or an internet connection. Get the participant to articulate their thought processes as clearly as possible. Why did they click ‘back’ just then? What grabbed their attention when the page first appeared?

It must be focused

Work out a couple of distinct tasks you want your customers to accomplish on your site, and then ask your participant to imagine a situation in which they might want to perform those tasks. Don’t tell them the steps, just give them an idea of what aim they should have in mind. You don’t have to stick exactly to a script, but it’s a good idea to tell the participant at the start that sometimes you may just need to pull them back on track a bit so that you can focus on the pathways they take to achieving (or giving up on!) the goals you had in mind.

It must be comfortable

Really take care of your participant, and make the testing environment mirror as closely as possible the circumstances under which they’d be using the site. Offer them tea, coffee, or water. Most of all, assure them that it’s not a test of their abilities, and that it’s perfectly OK for them to make mistakes or misunderstand something on the site. Only when the participant feels completely comfortable can they tell you how they really feel about your site.

You need to test far more than the usability. As described in Part 4, there are many aspects to the site that need to be right. A site can be ‘usable’, but still not convert customers, and understanding this difference is a key factor in the success of your online business.

Conversion 101

• Part 1: Getting the website foundations right
• Part 2: Know who you’re selling to
• Part 3: Drive prospective customers to your site
• Part 4: Optimise your site to increase conversions
• Part 5: Test your site with real prospects
• Part 6: Identify and remove barriers to growth