Testing Web Sites for Efficiency, Satisfaction, and Conversion
by Adele Sommers
Looking for innovative, no-cost ways to assess your audience's ability and desire to engage with your Web site? This article provides tips for gauging your audience's responses, beginning with usability testing using simple paper mockups of your site.
Once your site has gone live, you can then monitor your visitors' actual conversion rates and demographic characteristics using several free, powerful Web services, some of which let you watch in real time what your visitors are doing!
Conduct Usability Tests Early with Paper Prototypes
In the design phase of a development life cycle, conducting usability tests of new product designs or Web site interfaces is an ideal way to reveal any difficulties with the planned features, format, or organization. The purpose is to determine whether the interface will be effortless to interpret -- and whether any tasks you expect your customers to do will be intuitive, efficient, and simple to perform.
The ideal time to catch usability issues is cheaply and early -- before you have invested extensive time and resources in a polished design or finished product.
Note that usability tests are meant to find weaknesses in the interface design, not in the testers' capabilities.
The Nielsen Norman Group's 32-minute “Paper Prototyping: A How-To Video,” explains in detail how you can use paper and cardboard to create and test mockups of Web sites, devices, software, kiosks, machines, and other interfaces, as follows:
1) You would start by creating paper prototypes of the interface for the Web site, software system, device, machine, gadget, or whatever you're designing, using inexpensive materials such as cardboard, paper, sticky notes, pens, markers, scissors, and tape.
2) Meanwhile, you would recruit representative users to be the testers who know little or nothing about the system -- as few as five to ten people can provide highly useful feedback. Depending on who your target audience is, recruitment could be very informal. For example, colleagues, friends, or relatives could represent your customer base. Obtain their permission to record the sessions, and/or be prepared to have observers watching the process and taking notes on the testers' reactions.
3) Before you begin the testing, pre-script a series of typical tasks, such as locating specific information or features, or purchasing something on a Web site.
 4) When you begin the actual testing, work with each tester individually. Explain that the tests are aimed at how simple the system is to use -- not how "smart" the testers are. Ask each person to think out loud while he or she attempts to complete the tasks as you talk through the script. Testers would point to or verbalize the steps they would take rather than using physical buttons or a mouse.
As you proceed with the testing in this low-fidelity mode, you can collect a wealth of information -- and then make improvements and continue the testing. Later in the development cycle, you'd repeat the testing with high-fidelity interfaces to verify the ease of use.
After your Web site is operational, or while it's in an online testing mode, you can monitor your visitors' actions using three powerful tools, as explained below.
ClickTale: A Service that Records Movies of Visitor Interactions
If you would like to conduct usability or conversion tests on your Web site, you can use the free ClickTale service to monitor the actions visitors are taking while they visit pages of your site. (This approach differs from traditional Web analytics, which focuses on how visitors move from page to page.) The data that ClickTale collects appears in the following forms:
 Recorded videos that show the sequence of keystrokes, clicks, mouse movements, and scrolls that your visitors make during their browsing sessions, just as if you were looking over their shoulders.
- Color-coded "heatmaps" that display where visitors are focusing and how far down they scroll.
- "Link analytics" that depict each visitor's interactions, including hover time and hesitation time in each spot.
- "Form analytics" that reveal where people might be having problems with completing online entries that cause them to abandon the site.
Woopra: A Tool for Monitoring Traffic in Real Time
Unlike services that collect data on site visits but don't display the statistics until a later time, Woopra (beta) offers a real-time view of the navigational path visitors are taking as they move around your site or blog.
After setting up this free service, I watched visitors moving through my site, as shown in the image below -- one of several types of summary and drill-down views. The screen below shows the actions, platform, browser, and location of each visitor.
 Woopra is split into two services -- a desktop client program and Web server application. By dividing up the functionality, Woopra claims to decrease the load on network resources while harnessing the power of desktop processing to display charts, graphics, and analyses.
Woopra also has a live chat feature to allow instant communication between a Webmaster and any active site visitor, without the visitor having to install any type of software. I tested this feature and found it to be quite functional, as shown in the image at left. The visitor's chat alert opens in a lower corner of the Web page.
Quantcast: A Way to Capture Visitor Demographic Data
Have you ever wondered what the gender, age, and educational backgrounds of your site visitors consist of? Having this information can help you target your site messages more specifically, or sell advertising space to others with more precision. You can quantify and track demographic trends using the free Quantcast service.
 Quantcast lets you monitor your aggregated visitor data at various levels of detail, as shown in the view at right.
Quantcast's service provides a detailed breakdown of your site's visitor statistics and summarizes the predominate trends for your site, such as more visits by one gender or the other, by a particular age group, by a certain income or educational level, and so on.
The service also indicates which other Web sites your audience is likely to visit, and what commercial services your visitors tend to choose, based on their demographic profiles. This information can help you determine whether your site is really attracting the audience you intended!
In conclusion, these techniques for usability and conversion testing can help you initially design and then refine your Web site for maximum efficiency, satisfaction, and conversion. By monitoring your visitors' interactions and demographics, you can ensure that what you offer, and how you offer it, inspires your audiences to act.
Copyright 2008 Adele Sommers
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Once upon a time, measuring people's success with using Web sites (and other systems) primarily focused on usability testing, the discipline that systematically observes and measures of ease of use. 
