The Power of UX Testing Is Within Your Reach: Four Tools to Help You Run Tests

The Power of UX Testing Is Within Your Reach: Four Tools to Help You Run Tests:
Does the following sound at all familiar?

As a long-time Web marketer, I know lots of important things about what really works on the Web. I have built up this knowledge over many years and through much trial and error. I don’t need to bother with detailed user testing or A/B split testing.

And since prospects don’t know what they don’t know, asking their opinion about what they want in our site redesign isn’t that relevant either when building a high-performance Web-conversion engine.

If the above statement reflects your interactive team’s thinking in any way, fire them now. If that is how YOU think, then go ahead and fire yourself!
Still here? While that is a pretty dramatic story of course, the point is sound. If you THINK you have it all figured out and don’t need to test your assumptions when rebuilding your website, then you are dead wrong.  The results will surprise you.
The problem is that many of us don’t have the budget or time in the schedule to do an in-depth user experience (UX) study or audit—even when we know it can help.  The good news is that there are a number of great, inexpensive tools out there that can help you test your assumptions.  Here is how we used one of them.
My company recently embarked on a Web overhaul project.  We have made a few substantive tweaks over the past 18 months that have transformed the site, but now it was time for the full overhaul.  In preparation for the effort, our top-flight internal UX/design team talked to a few of our new customers. The goal was to understand what they wanted from our site when they were still in the buying cycle. We then looked carefully at our content strategy and messaging to be sure we are thoughtfully engaging with prospects as they come to the site. We even live-tested a few elements using the current site to see how potential changes would work in practice.
Even after all of that, we were left with a number of key decisions that could be classified neatly as “words.” Yep, just that, words. Marketers often can’t imagine the user will know what to do if you don’t tell them in glorious detail, which is often at odd with the carefully constructed UX and design. Now this is an oversimplification of the problem, but I do find this dichotomy to be a very beneficial forcing function. I prefer that our UX team tell me “you have only 20 words.” Perfect, I know I need to make my content fit into 20 words. And given how much time we spend thinking about moving a key message in 140 characters these days, making content brief is getting easier and easier.
Then, after hacking our way through the content process, we found it useful to test a few assumptions using Fivesecondtest, an online tool that allows you to quickly do real-world tests of design mockups. The results painted a very obvious picture on what we should do. And not surprisingly, less words won out!
To help you write less and test more, I’m sharing four resources we have found useful.
Fivesecondtest: It’s a super-simple site. You put in what you are looking to test, input a screen shot of your wire frame or design to be tested, and wait. It includes eye-tracking heatmaps using their Click Test application as well. These heat maps create extremely powerful imagery-particularly when the answer is overwhelmingly opposite of what you thought it would be!
Optimizely: This is one of the easiest A/B page testing tools I have seen. You enter your URL, specify the elements you want to test and then plug that code back into your site to begin the test. And the pricing is well within reach for most marketers. This is generally best for after you have done the design and deployed the site, but still informative as you are considering future changes or trying to optimize a piece of your current site.
NavFlow: From the makers of Fivesecondtest, NavFlow allows you to test your navigation structure to see how visitors will navigate your site. I haven’t used this one yet, but am very interested to try it out. If it can replace the live test of the wireframes (and the coding of the frames to make them clickable) it could prove very valuable.
Loop11: This is another good tool for testing your UX post-live or for testing your current site to understand what should be changed. Loop11 provides an easy interface to get started quickly with a live survey and feedback loop for your site. Pricing comes in annual plans or per project making it easy to get started.
Have any other great UX testing tools you like to use? Add yours to the comments below!
(Photo courtesy of Bigstock: Girl in Science Class)

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