5 Easy Ways to Test Your Website’s Usability

Ever wonder you could be a fly on the wall and see just how your website’s visitors are interacting with your application or content? Join the club! Many of us do but don’t have big budgets for lengthy usability testing. Here are five ways to test your site’s usability easily, affordably and conveniently:

1. Clixpy

Just install some Javascript on your site and let the capturing begin.  This might be the one of the easier ways to figure out if something may be confusing for your users on your website or in your application.  You’d be surprised simple things like hyperlinks that are over-styled or don’t use underlines can be frustrating for some users.  Upon registration you’ll get 10 free capture credits for use across multiple domains.  If you need more than 10 the service is pretty affordable (100 captures for $5, 200 captures for $10, 600 captures for $20, 1000 captures for $30).  You can also try before you buy with their slick demo.

2.  Loop11

More pricey ($350/user testing project, flat fee) but yet more robust since this option allows you to get  analytics with (visual interpretations) on task completion rates.  A user either completes a task successfully, fails it, or abandons it.  Loop11 also allows you to invite specific users and gives you the ability to randomly select visitors to your site, share a link directly, or assemble a panel.

3.  ClickTale

Another option, and one that can be most useful for websites with forms that need to have some sort of conversion metric tied to it (marketing landing pages, application registrations) and/or e-commerce sites.  ClickTale is pretty through when it comes to tracking abandon rates on forms and which fields give a user the most difficulty.  They also have a free pricing option recommended for Bloggers (or those of us on a budget).  They only drawback with the free option is it only allows 400 pageviews per month.

4.  IntuitionHq

A rare combination, simple AND cheap, IntuitionHQ is only five bucks to make your test live and record an unlimited number of responses.  They even encourage you to share your test via Facebook and Twitter.  See for yourself:

5.  When all else fails you can always ask a kid.

Don’t laugh, I’ve tried it before and 8 to 10 years olds tend to know just enough about the Internet (but not too much) to tell you honestly what is what on a web page.  Now I wouldn’t recommend soliciting random kids.  Ask  relatives or friends.  you may be surprised at the results.  Something you may have thought was so easy to do on your site might actually be not so straight forward.

How are you testing your site’s usability?