Idea for Website Testing Service (Usability, Design, Navigation)

[SportsFan438]

So I am looking to start a new website testing service and wanted to get some feedback from my fellow YE's. So the main business would be built around live video recorded website tests, where the tester and customer could interact. I know there are already video recorded web testing sites, but I havent seen any live recorded ones where the user and tester can interact.

I know when I started a website, getting quality feedback was difficult as I had a hard time getting people to test exactly what I wanted them to. I think being able to interact live with the tester would have helped me in not only getting instant feedback, but asking them to test things I may not have thought of before hand.

Obviously this is just a rough draft, but what do you think of the upside and downside?

 

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[brighterside]

What would be the advantage of testing it when its a live video compared to a video thats already shot? Wouldn't having a video shot and having tested at the convenience of tester be more suitable? Just asking the tough questions here.

 

[healthstatus]

I wouldn't want interaction during a review, I think that makes most reviewers less honest. I might want to ask some follow-up questions to a specific reviewer and I haven't found that as part of any of the services I have tried.

 

[SportsFan438]

Good questions. I think the benefit of being able to ask reviewers live would be that you might see something you didnt think of before, or to have them test additional items. I can see where it would make for a less honest review if you have the customer watching and talking with you. UserTesting.com allows you to ask specific users follow up questions. I am trying to see if for those who have started web businesses or have used user testing if there is something missing, a key feature that we could exploit.

 

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[limitup]

I've developed many web apps and I've gone done this road before. My feeling is that interacting/interfering with the user testers during the test is not a good idea at all. One thing I'd suggest you consider is how you're going to get paying clients. It's harder than you might think. User testing is generally NOT something that SMBs do. If you do your research you'll find a handful of other competitors to usertesting.com but honestly none of them seem to be doing anything very exciting in terms of growth or customer acquisition. I passed and ended up moving on to what I thought were greener pastures ...

 

[SportsFan438]

Thanks for the advice

 

[Clayton]

We use usertesting.com at work and I hate it. Instead of getting real people role playing our future users, I feel like I get a bunch of want to be web designers telling me tips that they read in an article once. We get tips on their personal color preference and that I should make some stuff bigger and some stuff smaller, not because they had a hard time finding it, but because they read it somewhere. Solve that problem for me. Combine with those survey people in the mall or something where I get regular people instead of "professional" site reviewers.

 

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[limitup]

The problem with "regular" people is that they make horrible reviewers. Like I said, I've been down this road before. Your Average Joe simply doesn't have the ability to follow simple instructions, give insightful feedback, and/or express themselves in any helpful way. Sad but true.

 

[JoeV]

I own a conversion rate optimization firm so I have a ton of experience with this. Usertesting and similar services are a waste of money. My firm uses other techniques to see how REAL users interact with the site. There is a lot of data we can get and make improvements that actually have an impact on conversion rates.

Paying some random person (who would probably never visit your site) to give you advice on how to improve your site is a horrible way to get data that can help improve your site. So, I would not recommend that and would never use that for my clients.

Eye tracking is in a similar boat. It can provide useful data, but there are much more efficient and cheaper ways to gather more accurate data. Eye tracking is a service that huge companies waste money on because it sounds like they are taking advanced steps to improve their sites.

Any service that is not directly analyzing a website's normal visitors will not be very useful.