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Make your Web Application more Usable!
To connect with your customers, the best medium in today’s era is through your website or web applications. A website attracts its users with the look and the feel it has, the comfort in accessing various sections and how fast you can get the required information from them.
Usability testing helps in ensuring whether the website is usable or not, which includes the design, efficiency, and satisfaction in accessing the website. The main intention behind performing a usability test is to help the user in accessing web pages with comfort and ease. The users often show their comfort with the website through their actions on the site. For ensuring the same, there are various tools available in the market. Few of them are discussed in this article.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a web-based software that provides a service that allows you to easily generate heatmaps for your website and web application to measure elements which users focus most on. This helps in optimizing the user experience and user interface. It is a click based user experience tool which uses heat map software to understand what people are doing on your website.
‘Heatmaps’ identify which objects on your website are being clicked on and from which traffic source they were referred from. It lets you know where each visitor clicks on your webpage. Apart from Heatmaps, it also gives ‘Scrollmaps’ which shows how far the page each visitor typically scrolls, and ‘Overlays’ which breaks down the number of clicks on each page element.
The services are offered at a free 30-day trial, with no obligation to take out a paid subscription. However, the plans are starting at $9 per month.
Optimizely
Optimizely is a user-friendly A/B testing platform tool, which allows users to track visits and conversions. A/B testing is an extremely effective type of testing to check the differences between a web page and the prototype design. Optimizely offers several easy-to-use features to help you build your tests including Mobile website testing, Cross-browser testing, Visitor segmentation, Geotargeting and Multivariate testing.
Optimizely provides easy and quick editing of images, text, and colors appearing on your website. It also helps in scheduling multivariate testing and immediately deploys technology changes into customized code. Once a line of code is generated by Optimizely, no more configuration or changes need to be applied. It will also track measurable actions like clicks, conversations that can be defined. You can create personalized experiences and target specific audiences when unveiling new designs to visitors including targeting different URLs, browsers and geography.
The basic plan is absolutely free for 30 days although after which it would be provided on chargeable basis.
Usabilla
How good it would be if your customers help you in improving the design of the website for better usability by providing feedbacks. So, if you would like to gather customer feedback on your website, Usabilla is a great tool to get the visual feedbacks. It offers a customizable feedback button which you can place on your webpage. Visitors can actively select particular elements on a given webpage and provide detailed feedback for improvements or highlight the bugs, if any exists. All this data is summarized and can be viewed with insightful graphs all within the Usabilla dashboard.
Usabilla provides data results as visual reports of heatmaps. It tracks user’s mouse clicks along with other qualitative and quantitative data, which can be downloaded in PDF, CSV, TEXT or XML format.
With the features Usabilla has, it has become one of the most comprehensive user experience packages. Plans start at $49 a month, but every user is entitled to a free 14-day trial. Although this is not at the cheaper end, but with the effective plans ranging from $49-$199 per month, it is known to be worth it, offering a variety of great features for usability testing.
Five Second Test
If you are looking for a cheaper solution, Fivesecondtest, by UsabilityHub is the ultimate in budget usability testing. It is designed to capture a visitor’s first impression on the site. As the name suggests, each test takes five seconds to run. The process is very simple, and consists of three direct steps:
- Upload a screenshot or page mock-up, with a simple question about the design or functionality.
- Each tester has five seconds to look at your page, before answering the question.
- UsabilityHub collates the responses and gives back the result.
The paid PRO plans start from $99 per month. However, budget-conscious entrepreneurs can earn free responses by completing tests for other people.
TryMyUI
TryMyUI is a competitively-priced usability testing tool. It offers users the chance to get their site tested either with anonymous reviewers, or via with their own pool of candidates. It offers a good range of features which includes Video screencaps, Mouse clicks and keystrokes, Voiceover commentary and written feedback, System Usability Scale questionnaire, and Mobile testing. This tool provides standalone and customizable tests.
Pricing is at a modest $35 per test. However, TryMyUI also offers a series of bulk discounts. It also provides the first user test for free.
In the end
There are loads of tools available in the market which can help in performing usability testing on the websites. The list is endless and more or less they all provide the same set of features. We have just discussed the widely used and the most popular tools in the market. At the end, we just need to ensure that usability testing is necessary to ensure that the intended users should be at ease to use the site and should be coming back again and again. The usability of a website can make or break a small business.
Even after using any of the tools for usability testing, the analysis of the result is very important. It is important to understand what your customers are trying to say and what exactly they want. Hence, testing your websites using the appropriate usability testing tool is must before releasing it in live environment.
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