Why use website testing methods? A successful website is more than just a beautiful design. To be successful, you must ensure your visitors reach their goals. It needs to work and be user-friendly. Your users goals and intentions always need to be in your focus. But how can you ensure that your website meets these criteria?
Let’s talk about 6 simple yet effective website testing and website improvement methods that can guide your way. They work on every website, app and online-shop. They support you to optimise your communication and improve your user experience significantly.
The 5-Seconds-Test
Lightning-fast to new insights – Introducing the 5-Seconds-Test.
The first impression is made in less than a second (like that Picture🙈). That’s not only true for your personal look, but maybe even more for your Website or Online-Shop. Thus, use the 5-seconds-test to improve the very first impression you make.
The problem
If your first impression isn’t crafted perfectly. If people can’t make it out in the very first seconds. If they do not find what they need, people will immediately leave. And – even worse – Google measures this and will rank your site down.
What is the 5-seconds-test
The “5 Seconds Test” is a usability testing method to evaluate the effectiveness and clarity of a website or any user interface design. This quick assessment technique involves showing somebody your website, app or online shop for just five seconds, and then asking them questions about what they remember or what impression they got from the page.
Key benefits of the 5-seconds-test
The method is particularly powerful for identifying the key elements of your messaging that stand out to users at first glance. Did the person get exactly what you want to be acknowledged in the very first seconds of their visit? If yes, perfect! If no, continue to edit your website to make it even more clear. Using the 5-seconds-tests results will help you to get your first impression razor sharp!
How the 5-Seconds-Test works
1️⃣ Show your homepage to someone for only five seconds.
2️⃣ Ask them what they remember and what impression they got.
3️⃣ Analyze the answers.
4️⃣ Improve your first impression.
5️⃣ (Repeat, if needed).
My recommendation: Start with this method right away. Grab your smartphone or notebook, show your websites or online-shops home page to somebody for 5 seconds, and ask what the person what he or she thinks the offer was about. Take those new insights as a guideline to improve your very first impression.
Prototype Testing
You don’t have realized yet your website, app, online-shop or any new innovation in mind? No problem! You can test it anyway! Welcome to prototype testing.
Prototype testing involves evaluating a basic draft of a website or app to collect early feedback. Even before it’s developed. This process can help you identify issues early on, allowing for very basic improvements that enhance the user experience. Or even if an idea or innovation makes sense at all.
To start prototype testing, you can use simply a piece of jotting paper. Pin down your idea. Draft a very simple first approach of your website or of your innovation on one or more slides of paper. Of course, you could also use more professional design tools to build i.e. clickable prototypes of your website, app or idea.
Simulate only the key features and communication elements you plan.
In the next step, gather a group of some few individuals. Make sure they represent your target audience as good as possible. This ensures the feedback you receive is relevant to your intended users.
Ask your participants to perform specific tasks using the prototype. Where do they “click”? Ask them to speak out loud, what they think. These tasks should reflect typical actions users would take on your website, app or shop when interacting with the final version.
Pay close attention to any difficulties or confusion they experience. Take some notes about their behaviour and most important comments.
Analyze your notes. Review the observations and feedbacks. Identify the main patterns of problems. Pinpoint your usability issues. Use all this information to make the most obvious changes and enhancements to your prototype.
If needed, make a new draft and ask some more people about it again.
By refining your idea based on user feedback in such a very early stage of ideation, prototype testing is a very powerful tool to separate the weed from the chuff. And to create more user-friendly products that better meet the needs of your audiences.
This way, you will get a good gut feeling, if your project-to-be-realized works. Without having produced it yet at all! That’s super mega effective.
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Preference Testing
When performing a preference test, different designs or variants are shown to participants. Main goal is to identify the best – aka their preferred – variant.
To get started, create different variants of an element you would like to test. This could be different text variants, headlines, different arguments you use, different design variants, or i.e. different ways to a solution you want to be achieved.
In the next step, gather some participants. They should represent your target audience as good as possible.
This time the participants should not only choose their favourite option, but ideally also answer some more questions regarding the tested variant. Questions could be:
- Which of the variants is easier to understand?
- How do you feel when seeing the design?
- What do like about the element?
- What do you NOT like about the element?
- Is there anything you do not understand or find confusing?
By refining the variant based on these users feedbacks, preference testing helps create a more user-friendly website, app or online-shop that better meets the needs of your audience.
Bonus tip: Combine preference testing with prototype testing: Don’t produce the variants for the preference test in perfection, but simply make a draft of the different variants on plain paper. And show these to your participants. It will be much faster and more than enough to find the one variant you should produce.
And besides. Let’s talk about Preference Testing vs. A/B-Testing: As you might have already thought, Preference Testing has quite some similarities with A/B-Testing. Indeed, it can be a quite good alternative to A/B-Testing. Especially for those of you, having not enough traffic. So, if you ever wanted to start into A/B-Testing but did not have enough traffic: Here is your chance. Go with Preference Testing!
And in case of any questions, just let me know! 🙂
The First Click Test
Let’s find out where exactly people start to interact. And optimize your interface so that your users expectations meet with your offers.
Use the first-click test as a method to optimise effectiveness of your website or applications customer journey and layout. It focuses on where users click first when trying to achieve a goal. By observing your participants, you can determine, if they find the optimal path to complete their tasks efficiently – or not. And improve the path based upon these observations.
Before you start the test, identify those common actions that users should complete on your website, shop or app. For example: Purchasing a product, or a step earlier finding that product. Signing up for a newsletter. Sending that form. And so on. You can use either a live website or – again – simply prototype those steps needed onto a piece of paper.
Again, in this test you need a group of some participants who are representative of your target audience. In-person testing or remote testings (via Zoom/MS Teams or tools like Miro) are both possible.
Check and analyze the results:
- Where clicked the participants first?
- How long did it take them?
- Were they able to successfully complete the task?
- Where did they struggle? Where did they fail? Why?
This data helps identify if users are intuitively finding the right path to complete tasks or if there are design issues causing confusion.
First-click tests provide immediate feedback on how users interact with a design. This allows for rapid iteration and improvements, which is crucial in fast-paced marketing environments and can help you and your organization effectively.
Session Recordings
Last but not least let’s talk about Session Recordings. They capture and replay the interactions of users on a website, shop or app. These recordings provide a video-like playback of user sessions.
They show exactly how users navigate through the interface, where they click, how they scroll, and how they interact with different elements. Basically a screen-recording (video) of someone viewing a website.
Session recordings offer an excellent and deep quality data view of user behaviour that goes beyond classic quantity data analytics tools (like Google Analytics et al). By watching actual user interactions, you can understand how users engage with your site or app in real-time, revealing behaviours that might be missed by theoretical and quantity data alone.
By observing where users encounter difficulties, such as where they get stuck or frustrated, you pinpoint usability issues that need to be addressed on your website or app. This helps in optimizing the user experience and improving overall satisfaction – which leads to more engagement and traffic!
Overall, recordings allow you to see the paths users take through your shop, site or app. This helps to understand common user journeys, identifying drop-off points, and discovering areas where users might be getting lost or confused.
Bonus tip: In my experience, it is literally very often for the start enough to have and watch just a few sessions. I must confess: Not few sessions are very short, because in many cases people directly, early, stop and quit. But the good thing: Exactly this behaviour you can understand with session replay. Work exactly on these parts of your website, app or shop: Where those people fail. Improve these. And soon, you’ll see new visitors who don’t fail THERE anymore. They will move on to – well – your pages next problem… Which you can solve next! 🙂 And when this type of optimization work – often over some few iterations – is done, you’ll see visitors that – finally – reach goals! Congratulations, you have built a first page that has reached “product market fit”! 🙂
Session Replay Tool Recommendations
Here are two tools I use for session replay recordings since years already.
Hotjar – has an interface that is a bit more professional with better filtering options. That is why I prefer it for my more professional projects where clients are willing to pay a bit more.
Mouseflow – the big advantage is that there is a free plan with some few session recordings per month. But – as I told above – to have some very few sessions for the beginning can be enough to start very good. The tools interface has recently brought me some caveats for more professional projects, where advanced filtering techniques were needed. But still despite that it works good!
Besides these both, of course, there are hundreds if not even thousands more tools out there. If you have hot recommendations, which tool I should check out, leave me a comment below 🙂
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Testing
The strength of a “minimum viable product” (MVP) is to get a website, app or any functionality live as quickly and easily as possible. It focuses only on the most core features and messages. Sometimes MVPs can be even faster than paper prototype testing.
What is an MVP?
Is it NBAs most valuable player? Yes, also this. But here we talk about the so-called “Minimum Viable Product”: It is the most simple and fastest shippable version of of a website, app or online-shop (and the thing is even broader: It can also be any other product you can imagine). It is kind-of like the above mentioned prototype testing. But the difference is: A prototype test is not really live. The MVP test is really live and provides you with real-word data and feedback.
The idea of an MVP originates from Eric Ries’ book “Lean Startup”, where he gives his definition: “The version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”
Benefits of an MVP
The following benefits come with the fast development of an MVP:
- Fast shipping of your idea. BEFORE you invest those vast amounts of money for high-end-production.
- Thus, relatively low cost.
- And thus, very low risk in first steps of production.
- Acquire very quick first user feedback and validation.
- Additionally, you can use those early validations, to get investor buy-ins.
- This all will help you to build the stuff that your users and clients really appreciate.
Sometimes it’s even simpler to build a fast version of your idea i.e. as a simple website or landingpage, than building and testing a paper prototype (see above).
The steps needed to build and publish an MVP
Follow these steps – which originate also from Eric Ries’ Lean Startup theory:
LEARN
- Get clarity of your companies main goals (for sure only, if you didn’t have had that yet). And your online goals. That means, add, how your website/app/shop relates to your companies goals.
- Define your ideal customer (“ICP” – ideal customer profile) and find test participants that represent your ICP. Ask them to test your MVP.
- Pin down very briefly your core idea, the core functions and your core messages to reach your goals.
BUILD
- Produce the MVP as fast as possible.
- Launch it into the public!
MEASURE
- It is a good idea to directly from start implement some first and most important analytics tracking points. Define, which questions you need to get answered. Make sure that you are able to be able to observe if it is successful.
REPEAT, REPEAT, REPEAT …
- Now that your MVP has gone live. It’s time to obtain the fruits of our measurement. Learn from it. Observe how users use your new MVP.
- Go to some participants, show them your MVP and ask them about their opinions.
- Then you can see and analyze, how users behave while using or visiting your MVP.
- With those new learnings, sharpen again and again your goals and ICP definitions (see above).
An example: Build simple websites or landingpages with i.e. WordPress
In my personal experience and several cases, we have built simple MVPs of websites or landingpages using WordPress and the theme package “DIVI” with which also this website is built. WordPress can be set up within minutes. To add DIVI takes just some more minutes. Then, literally after some few minutes, we are ready to start building a landingpage or a website consisting of some core pages. Also it’s very easy to add simple web analytics tools and session recording tools like Mouseflow or Hotjar. Then publish it. And try to get first feedback from real users. It’s really not much slower than pinning down your ideas on plain paper. But – being publicly and worldwide available – much more powerful!
next steps, after you’ve launched your first MVP
- After the system is ready as MVP, you can directly start analyzing and learning about your users behaviour and opinions.This allows you to confirm the benefits of ideas as quickly as possible. Test your ideas with real users as early as possible.
- Continue to build up next versions in small steps. Step by step.
Summary
A website / landingpage MVP can be a very good alternative to paper prototyping. It doesn’t take very much more time. But it offers full functionality of a landingpage or website.
Last but not least: How to Combine it all for even more success
Transform your website into a user-friendly and goal converting powerhouse with the methods mentioned in this article. Implement these testing strategies to see the differences – and you will see your website, app or shop improving accordingly.
But don’t stop here. Think bigger. Of course, the improvement of your website, shop or app should not be lead primarily and only by some cool, but random methods only. On the long run, a systematic approach for well-planned and well-executed continuous improvement will make the difference. Thus, if you want to know more about how to win the improvement and innovation game on the long run also, I’ve written another blogpost on this:
Read on here:
» Continuous Improvement – A proven 5-Step-Process
And if you need more information on these testing methods or would like a professional review of a professional data expert on your website, app or online-shop: Just leave me a message.