Saturday, October 8, 2011

Top 10 Low Cost Ways to Improve Site Usability


The one factor result in a low conversion rate is site usability. In other words, once the visitors are on your site, are they able to effectively navigate to find what they are looking for and then finally buy the product.
  1. 4Q From iPerceptions: It is a free online survey solution that allows you to find out why visitors are at your website, and whether or not they are completing their tasks. It easily integrates with any website, requires only a few lines of code and best of all.
  2. UserTesting.com: UserTesting.com uses the Web 2.0 crowd sourcing model to dramatically drop the price of usability testing. Lets website owners easily get pre-screened users to rapidly do usability testing of their websites.
  3. Google Website Optimizer: This is one tool that lets you test and learn different variations of banner ads, promotions, design and immediately understand which version is driving the best results. On top of that, this is fully integrated with Google Analytics and it is completely free.
  4. Ethnio: You can recruit research participants from your website and perform a moderated focus group session with real visitors from your site. It works using basic JavaScript and DHTML so integration is fairly quick and easy on your website. When a user chooses to participate, a notification is sent to the person who will moderate the session. The moderator can then telephone the participant and then conduct a moderated session or a focus group session.
  5. Crazy Egg: Crazy Egg lets you create tests to figure out what people are doing on your website. Enter the URL of the page you want to track, enter how long the test will run and CrazyEgg provides one line of javascript that can be applied on your site. The results – you can see all sorts of heapmaps and overlays to figure out what people are clicking on and more importantly, not clicking on your website.
  6. Concept Feedbacks: Receive quick, actionable feedback from a professional community by uploading a concept. Each reviewer has a reputation score so you can pick the best feedback.
  7. Chalkmark: You can use Chalkmark to get powerful insights from real people to tweak navigation and layout. As the results roll in, heat maps for each task are dynamically generated. Clusters of clicks are combined to give percentage read outs.
  8. Loop11: Loop11 is a web-based user-experience tool, allowing companies to conduct remote, unmoderated usability testing on any kind of digital interface. It is a good complement to lab-based user testing enabling you to quantify usability metrics with several participants.
  9. Feedback Army: Start a usability test for your website in 2 minutes. This is as cheap as it can get! If quantity is your thing then you can’t go wrong with this site.
  10. Five Second Test: Five second test helps you easily identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces. People use five second test to locate calls to action, optimize landing pages, and run A/B tests. This is a free service and can help you identify opportunities with your ad or other image units.
For more details about E-Commerce Consulting, Website development and maintenance please feel free to contact Prevaj Consultants at prevaj@prevajconsultants.com or call +91-8144760745.