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No matter how great your product, service, or business is, if your website or mobile experience is weak, you’re not making the best first impression. In fact, nearly 2 out of 5 potential customers will abandon a cart based on poor website performance or check out design alone. Improving the average user experience is key to reducing cart abandonment rates and improving conversions for things like mobile affiliate marketing. User testing may be the best way to highlight areas that need improvement.
Set Up Simple Instructions and Scenarios
When you set up a test, make sure you outline what you need a user to accomplish during that test as well as the “why.” For example, if you sell shoes and want to know how a customer chooses a pair of shoes to buy on your site, you could go about this in two ways.
You could just say that you want the tester to find a pair of shoes to buy that would suit their needs, or you could ask them to look for shoes with a specific quality, like leather waterproof boots. The more specific you are, the easier it will be for the tester to complete the test in the way you need them to.
Provide Sample Login Credentials
Not everyone is comfortable logging in to an unfamiliar website during a test- or allowing that much personal data to be recorded. Some user testing platforms provide privacy features. However, a simpler solution and one that will save everyone time is to give elementary login credentials for testers. This way, you can skip the sign-up steps (unless that’s what your testing) and open up the test to a broader variety of testers.
Use Feedback Prompts Post-Test
Once a test is over, it can be helpful to collect comments about a test, or information that may not have been verbalized and recorded during a test of that type. These prompts should be open-ended and not leading. These may also help a tester finalize or work out their final thoughts about a given site or app as well.
Choose Your Testers Carefully
You need to choose people who aren’t related to your company to perform these user tests. Using the site once or twice before is usually fine, but you don’t want to have your user testing pool be made up of people who already have a personal connection to the site or app. These are people who are already too close to the project and who, in most cases, won’t provide a sample of how the average customer would approach your website or product.
Don’t Take on Too Much at Once
If you’re just starting out with testing, it’s likely that you have some idea where your problems are. Do customers have trouble finding a specific type of information? Is your cart abandonment rate high? Do too many people quit halfway through your sign up process? Have you received some complaints about a specific feature?
Whatever that one thing is that seems most important, focus your testing efforts around just that for now, until it’s fixed. Focusing on too many things at once makes the process harder for testers and may result in the feedback of lesser quality. Further, don’t take on too many testers at once. A sample of just five users will turn up about 85% of the issues you need to fix and makes it much easier to set up and complete future tests.