remote website testing: how to assess your website for little or no cost
TRANSCRIPT
ASSESS YOUR WEBSITE
Chad Haefele
Interim Head of User Experience
UNC Chapel Hill
With free usability testing tools
Q: What Is Usability testing?
A: Evaluating something by testing it with users.
(Over and over again)
Prototype Testing
Credit: https://flic.kr/p/8ze3xe, https://flic.kr/p/7Et7po
Optimal
WorkshopOptimalWorkshop.com
• $995/year (after a 50% edu discount)
• Free plan
• Unlimited tests
• 10 users per test
• OptimalSort: 30 card limit
• Treejack: 3 task limit
• Chalkmark: 3 task limit
• Reframer: Entirely free
• We explore such basics as play and add-to-queue button placement, size, and functionality. We tested the switch last year of whether the home page should be DVD or streaming focused.
• We even test things like page load time, and streaming encoding quality, and streaming startup time, to know which of those kinds of optimizations should get the most of available engineering attention.
• We are very proud of our empirical focus, because it makes us humble - we realize that most of the time, we don't know up-front what customers want. The feedback from testing quickly sets us straight, and helps make sure that our efforts are really focused at optimizing the things that make a difference in the customer experience.
Source: http://www.quora.com/What-types-of-things-does-Netflix-A-B-test-aside-from-member-sign-up
• Overall we executed about 500 a/b tests on our web pages in a 20 month period which increased donation conversions by 49% and sign up conversions by 161%.
• By turning the long donation form into 4 smaller steps we increased the conversion rate by more than 5%.
• In the following test we had two photos. The first was a medium shot of the President at the dinner table, but it didn't have much context as nothing was in view/focus. Previous tests showed that large photos with focus on the President increased conversions. The second photo had a wider frame that revealed the First Lady and two dinner guests. We hoped that users would be more likely to convert if they could see just how close they would be sitting to the President of the United States during dinner.By changing the photo on the splash page we lifted conversions by more than 19%.Source: http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-ab-testing/
OptimizelyOptimizely.com
• Pricing is difficult to pin down – used to be
$850/year
• Free plan
• 50,000 visitors per month will see your
test in action
• Can’t do “Multi-page funnel” experiments
• “How to best use the Optimizely free
plan”: http://bit.ly/optimizelyfree
MarvelMarvelApp.com
• Pro level: $15 per month
• Free plan
• Unlimited projects
• Can’t do offline tests
• Can’t remove Marvel branding
Further reading
• Using Optimizely’s free plan: https://marktisans.com/best-
use-optimizely-free-plan-starter/
• A/B Testing with Google Analytics:
• https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1745147?hl=
en
• Overview of usability testing techniques:
http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/methods/
ASSESS YOUR WEBSITE
Chad Haefele
UNC Chapel Hill
With free usability testing tools