Website testing is pushed by SEO practitioners and web designers very heavily, but there is a very serious reason why testing should be viewed as a reiterative process rather than an end of term set of examinations. The most important aspects of any testing focuses on the user experience and seeks to pinpoint issues with user interaction with the website – what problems exist, how to optimize user enjoyment and utility and encourage return visits and propagation through online media i.e. viral adoption.
How users find your site is c ore feature of SEO efforts, however once you have attracted traffic, you must ensure that you cater for their needs once they are on the site. In practice, you have two sets of visitors: in an SEO context, you will have the automated webcrawlers and robots indexing and archiving your site for use in returning results to search engine users, and secondly, the real people themselves who visit your site, no matter how they got there.
Much of SEO concentrates on the first set of visitors, but it is wasted effort to gain the traffic and then find human users are switching off en masse because they can’t navigate your site or use a key feature.
This is why human testing is so important.
The Google Approach
Let’s take a look at Google and how they approach human testing because optimizing your website will primarily focus on being congruent with Google’s attitude to users – emulate Google and their approach and it is likely you will optimize your impact with their search engine and resources.
Google has a clean website, following a minimalist approach which provides users with a clear set of tools and easily used applications.
For the most powerful website in the world, and for one of the most powerful resources available on the planet, Google certainly has a no-frills approach. This is a good example of tackling website usability from the users’ perspective and not from a design viewpoint. Google could certainly jazz up their site, but they keep it simple because users gain maximum utility by doing so. Google is an example of a website with a very high degree of functionality, but they maintain a clean and uncluttered presentation – users are not overloaded with tools and apps screaming for user attention.
How does Google know what users want?
Every piece of the website, and every tool and utility, is tested by teams of human users and they listen to what their test subjects are telling them. If a test is run with ten subjects but five of them report problems with using the site feature, Google listens to them more than it pays attention to the designers or programmers. Google’s approach is to distinguish usefulness from usability; this turns features into user benefits because while a tool may have a great application, unless the user can make easy use of it, the tool is without real value.
The frequency of testing has increased as Google has gotten bigger and started packing more features and utilities. Testing in 2000 involved running a series of monthly tests with ad hoc site-wide testing, but today testing is conducted on a weekly and in some instances, daily basis with site-wide testing on a scheduled monthly rotation.
How many test users are required to get meaningful results?
Google tests with a varying range of numbers, but a typical user group will be eight people. This reflects the testing approach of many large companies and web professionals. The actual number of users you need to test a site is not that great and tests can be carried out with even two or three subjects, with optimal results peaking with between five and ten users. This is good news for businesses without Google’s massive budget and resources, but even better is that there are companies who will administer tests remotely. Test companies provide access to anonymous test subjects who will test drive your website for a minimal cost, typically you can run basic usability tests with real human users for as little as $25.
Uncovering the Big Problems and Real User Behavior
The immediate benefit from human user testing is the early identification of the “Big Problems”; typically, these are issues which the design team overlooks because they are so close to the site they do not see the wood for the trees. Familiarity with a website also leads people to overlook and ignore the peculiarities of a site which may prove to be a deal-breaker for a new visitor.
Such issues are usually detected almost immediately, but what about the smaller, niggling issues?
Google rolled out their spellcheck tool with a link above it advising users, “If you can’t find what you’re looking for…” and experienced a large number of users clicking the link to tell Google they weren’t getting correct results. This is a great way to find out what live users are thinking about a tool or utility on your website, but with Google they also looked at how the traffic was behaving on the site when using this tool. They were able to see that users were getting a wrong result but instead of clicking the complain link, the users were hitting the back browser and then hitting the complain link; however Google were missing this until they checked the traffic stats and behavior.
Fortunately, there are numerous web tools available which tell you what is happening with user behavior on your website, and again these solutions are well within the budget of most small businesses and certainly a medium-sized company. The key issue is not the low cost but the importance of monitoring what people are actually doing on your website so you can gain insight into their behavior and adjust your website design to optimize their experience.
Takeaway
Much of SEO work focuses upon gaining search engine rankings, however the ultimate arbiter of website success are the human visitors. How users behave on your site is crucial because if they have an optimal experience they are more likely to buy from you, to recommend your site (organic and viral growth) and to return as a repeat customer.
Human testing is vital to ensure user experience is optimized and that the design team has not overlooked obvious errors which impede site utility. There is a difference between features and benefits; having usefulness is not as important as being usable, but you need human test subjects to uncover the differences between them.
Human testing is like regular testing in that it is a reiterative process and not a single, shoot and scoot exercise. It is important that you assess and implement changes to your website to accommodate the results of your human test subjects. Once you have implemented them, go back and test the site again and make testing a regular part of your maintenance schedule.
