On Internet Business

Improving your Website

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Social Media

Mashable has recently produced an excellent round-up of the resources available to designers seeking to obtain advice on how to improve designs.

An outside perspective on the design of a new website can make a difference both in pinpointing issues that are more important to users than the designer had realised, or to help validate design areas that the client may not be fully convinced about.

Critique The Site

This is a sweet little tool, allowing for instant feedback about a website’s design by means of a frame to the left of the web page under consideration, where users can leave feedback. There are a couple of downsides: first, reviewers have to log in using a popular web service such as Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, or OpenID before posting a review, and there’s a limit to the amount of people you have access to – it doesn’t have a pool of reviewers to review your site, unlike some of the other options. Plus point, it’s free.

Please Critique Me

Please Critique Me is an interesting approach in that it’s a resource run by web design agency offering free design critiques by one of its design teams, with a panel that includes some notable names. Valuable both for its critiques and the resources available on the site itself.

SitePoint

SitePoint is an online media company with a forum that allows for feedback from its pool of more than 350,000 registered users. On the plus side, it’s active and informed, on the minus side it’s a time consuming and sometimes frustrating way to read feedback and there’s some veering off topic which will probably infuriate the designer seeking responses. Still free though!

Bounce

Bounce is a web app that plugs in your web design’s URL, generating a screenshot of the site which people can then comment on. Minus points, a screenshot is not necessarily a good way to examine deeper website functionality. Plus points, it’s easy, its fun and it’s free, which has to be a plus.

Five Second Test

Five Second Test is more based on functionality – reviewers see a screen capture of the web design and then respond with one of two forms of evaluation: memory test (shows users a web layout for five seconds, then asks them what they remember) or click test (participants are required to click on the most prominent items on the page within five seconds). If you wish to find out if your web design’s crucial design elements are both visible and memorable, this may be a tool for you. It’s free, which is a plus, but the free option gives you only five responses and you’re put at the bottom of the testing queue in terms of priority, so it could take a while. There are paid options from $5 to15 which allow you to have a higher queue placing and to customise the user instructions

Concept Feedback

Concept Feedback is something of a crowdsourcing approach. Each reviewer rates one of four items on your site, those items being: design, purpose, originality and engagement. Reviewers are themselves reviewed, both by being given feedback on their own designs and by rankings. It’s a free service if you choose to review five concepts before you post your own, but premium services ($10-50 per concept) allow you to post the concept before you review others, to have your concept featured on Twitter to generate more reviews and to be guaranteed a minimum number of reviews.

UserTesting.com

This costs $39 but it guarantees remote trials of your site – you receive videos of each visitor as they explore your site, alongside written summaries of any problems they discover. On the plus side, it’s really fast to get feedback, minus points – you do have to pay and you may find you have to convert video feedback to some other kind of recorded information before you can adapt your site. A user’s confused expression may be worth a thousand words, but if you’re working for a client they probably won’t want to sit through videos to discover what people think of the site you’ve built for them.

Usabilla

Usabilla useful for usability testing on live sites. It works by gathering visitor feedback using both annotation and task performance measurements and asks people to complete tasks for which the time taken is recorded. Free for a single web page and offering up to fifty participants for that page, it’s a good system for a small site. There are paid-for features that can be anything from $49 to $950 per annum, which may be cost-effective only for the bigger retail sites.

Feedback Army

For $15, Feedback Army will ‘host’ a focused debate of your design based on 4-6 questions you supply. You get ten reviews with an estimated time lag one to three hours turnaround – a fantastic way of obtaining swift and cheap reviews.

Userfly

Is a funky little system that gives you a screencast of how users interact with the site which may make it a more useful system in analysing why an existing site doesn’t work than in assessing a new site. You plug a line of code into your web page and that’s it. Plus points, it’s a simple system. Minus points, you have to do the analysis yourself. There are premium plans $10-200 per month and get you more captures (results), the ability to use the https protocol and longer storage of your captures.

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