Let’s admit it: getting ideas for A/B and multivariate tests is a hard job! It becomes even harder because of your familiarity with your website or landing page. Since you breathe-and-eat your website every day and know all its intricacies, it becomes incredibly hard to think of improvements. This phenomenon even has a medical name: Blind Spot.
To get ideas on what you can test in your next A/B or multivariate test, we have a A/B testing case study search engine called Ideafox. Also, earlier on this blog I talked about a service called Feedback Army which lets you have feedback from 10 people for $10 (I see the price is $15 now). Feedback Army is great service and we had received lots of relevant feedback from that site (in addition to some actionable ideas for A/B testing). As also noted in original post, the only drawback of this service is that people who give feedback are hired from Mechanical Turk, so feedback length is short and doesn’t go into too much depth (since those people are only paid 50 cents per feedback). Inspite of this, Feedback Army has a great ROI for an investment of $15.
What if you need feedback on your website from a professional?
Enter Concept Feedback, the website to get expert website evaluations and feedback. It is a community of design, usability and conversion lovers who comment and give feedback on your website and landing page. They have experts for three categories of feedback:
Experts have years of experience in their respective fields along with professional degrees in design. So, you can be guaranteed to get top-notch feedback on your website from Concept Feedback. Of course, all this comes at a price. You need to shell out $100 per expert feedback. So if you want feedback from 5 experts, that is going to cost you $500. It’s a little expensive but as you will read below, the quality and amount of feedback that you get from an expert has way more value than $100.
Evaluation of Visual Website Optimizer website on Concept Feedback
To try out the service, I evaluated Concept Feedback to get feedback on Visual Website Optimizer website design. Oh boy, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of feedback on as many five different pages of our site: homepage, signup page, features page, case study page and blog. Here is some of the feedback produced verbatim:
All these comments come with a screenshot of your page so you can see where exactly the expert is referring to when he says “make your headlines sans-serif” (in this case, he was talking about our blog).
What’s more? The expert even quickly created a mockup of what according to him our site should look like. Here is the version he redesigned:
I think this redesign is definitely an improvement over existing design. What do you think?
Conclusion
For getting ideas for A/B and multivariate tests, nothing works better than feedback and evaluation services such as Feedback Army and Concept Feedback. The ‘strategy’ feedback type in Concept Feedback is especially relevant to A/B tests because there you have access to experts who have experience and knowledge in conversion rate optimization.
So, next time you are stuck and can’t think of anything to improve on your site, you know where to get feedback from.
You just spent $5,000 (or more) on a designer doing an overhaul of your website. And you also got a fancy enterprise web analytics package for more than $10,000 per month. Plus you have an army of web analysts in-house who churn out reports night and day to take your online business to the next level. But you know at the back of your mind that there is still something missing that numbers or expert opinion cannot capture.
What is that nagging thought? Yes, that’s right: it is the need for feedback from *real* people. “Usability testing”, as the industry likes to call it. It is a process wherein you observe people browsing your website and get feedback from them on how was their experience. Unlike numbers, real people have feelings. They get frustrated when they can’t find the Buy button. They get annoyed when the contact us link is hidden. They get confused when you present them with plethora of options. The real value of usability testing is unlocked when you start observing patterns in the responses. For example, if 90% of the users found it difficult to find out if your software is free to download then you should better fix that issue. Such insights are not rare when you do usability testing and are potentially worth thousands of dollars.
But usability testing is expensive. Proper usability testing has been limited to big companies who spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on it. And they do this activity because it is worth it. However for a small website owner, spending such a large amount of money isn’t possible.
Enter Feedback Army. Powered by Mechanical Turk, it lets you get feedback from 10 real people for just $10. What you simply do is ask people to visit your website and provide answer to questions related to their visit. I wanted to give it a shot for Visual Website Optimizer, and here is what I asked them to answer (based on their visit):
The responses were very interesting. For example, I always knew back of my mind the text-heaviness of the homepage but the answers from real users confirmed it. Take a look on what they had to say on the homepage:
It’s a bit confusing that in all areas the fonts are around the same size, not emphasizing on a certain more important zone. Simply put, you don’t know where to begin reading it.
When I read the text on the website, it was not really clear to me, still a little abstract. I would like to use more concrete terms. Less text on the page, there is a lot of information on it.
The technical terms are very confusing.
I would suggest reorganizing the information available on the landing page. With all that information at once it’s difficult to glean a simple understanding.
This was obviously a big insight. I now know the homepage needs a redesign to make it less confusing and less technical. (But designing homepage is always a challenge – however the issue here is to identify opportunities for improvement.)
On the flip side, what works on the homepage was also evident in the responses:
I watched the youtube video and that made it more clear.
The demo video in the features page is working well.
Not just only feedback, few responses actually gave direct suggestions for improvement. Take a look here:
I would like to use more concrete terms. Like one slogan: Alter your website and see the impact.
Even after reading the FAQs it is confusing to understand certain terms. Probably explaining them with the help of an example (something related to daily life or for a layman) would certainly improve the message of the website.
You have an excellent retention scheme a + for a marketing tool site. Add the business customers that want to share their success stories on the site, add information on the training aspect, (all BA’s are good in one thing only add a second tool and when it goes wrong it is handy to fall back on). Add some links to some business only social networking sites to improve the target audience and add something related to recent exhibitions attended or planning to attend to increase the customer base.
All in all, here are three million dollar insights (which in hindsight may look obvious)
Though it was a great experience doing usability testing, there were minor hiccups along the way. If you use a service like Feedback Army, my suggestions would be to:
I hope I have convinced you to do at least one usability test. It doesn’t cost much and is definitely worth the money. So, why don’t you try doing a usability test today?
(By the way, while writing this article, it also struck me that such usability testing is an excellent precursor to A/B testing for providing testing ideas. So, integrating Mechanical Turk within Visual Website Optimizer (an A/B split testing tool) to get feedback ahead of a split test can be a great idea. What do you think?)
