Tools for usability testing

Whether you’ve just finished building a new site, or you’re making some changes to the way it works, usability testing the site is essential. These tests can help you discover your site’s performance and your customers’ experiences on site.  

There are two main ways that you can test a site. There’s A/B or Multivariate testing or Usability testing. On a very basic level, A/B testing allows you to find out which out of a number of options are most effective, while Usability testing will help you to find out why.

A/B and Multivariate Testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing compares the effectiveness of two versions of your webpage by splitting your traffic in two sending one half to one version and the other to the second version.

By comparing the results from these different groups, commonly through merging with your web analytics platform, you can garner which design or change is more effective.

Multivariate testing can be used to gauge the effectiveness of any number of components on a webpage – it allows various A/B testing to be carried out at the same time. The result of these tests looks at the optimal combination of the elements tested.

There are a number of different tools you can use to do these tests. Here’s just three:

1.    Google Content Experiments

This is free with your Google Analytics package. It lets you test up to five variations of one page. Once you’ve set up which pages you’d like to test, a random sample of your visitors will see the different pages and you can wait to see which page gets the bets reaction.

2.    Optimizely

It’s a popular choice for A/B testing which let’s you set up experiments quite easily and track your results, feeding through your analytics if you need it to. There’s a cost involved but with a number of different pay packages you can probably find one that suits your needs.

3.    Monetate

if you want to access more than just testing capabilities, Monetate is a good choice – as well as A/B testing it offers personalisation, recommendation and analytics.

Usability testing

So if you want to find out not only what a customers’ reaction to a page is but also why they reacted this way – usability testing can help to give you the answer. This type of testing uses real people and records their reactions when performing certain tasks on your site.

You can find out how easy it is to do certain things, how quickly people are able to do them and where they make common mistakes. Once you have carried out a number of these tests you can see what the most common results where and fix any problems you have perceived.

This can be a more expensive form of testing because you are asking people to perform something outside of their normal behaviour and garnering their reactions. The results however, can be invaluable.

Again there are a number of different companies that carry out this kind of testing. Here’s but a few:

1.    UserTesting.com

This is a quick and easy way to get answers. You simply create the test you’d like to give someone and send it to these guys. They pick someone from their panel and video them performing the tasks while explaining where they got stuck or confused.

2.    BunnyFoot

An all-round customer experience company, BunnyFoot offers customer testing, research and insight as well as a consultancy to help you with any problems that become apparent during the testing.

3.    UserFocus

This testing company has a number of testing facilities in the UK which you and your team can travel along to to watch the testing as it happens.