User Testing Provides Valuable Feedback

This is a guest post by WC, who is still in denial about the whole “You have to have a cool name to be a good blogger” thing. He stubbornly blogs about money and writing over at The Writer’s Coin.

If you’re a blogger—regardless of whether you’re starting out or have been doing this for a long time—do yourself a favor and bookmark Darren Rowse’s series on ProBlogger called 31 Days to Building a Better Blog.

That could be the end of this post and it would still be a fantastic tip. But since I’m here to give Jason’s readers as much value as I can (and because I love hearing myself talk), I’ll say a little bit more about this.

After you’ve bookmarked the series, try to go through every single tip and execute it. Some of you will make it and some of you won’t (I almost did), but your blog will inevitably reap the benefits.

I did this early on and it really helped get me grounded into the basics of blogging and becoming a more advanced user pretty quickly.

I tried to write a whole series on The Writer’s Coin based on each one of his tips, but eventually I got lazy and bailed out after day 13 I think.

Luckily for me, one of the best tips of the whole series was the second one: running a first-time reader audit. That may sound like some complicated accounting term, but it’s actually really simple. You ask someone who has never been on your site to sit down at a computer and explore it for the first time.

You stand/sit behind them with a pad and paper and take as many notes as you can.

What are they clicking on? What are they not clicking on? Are they attracted to pictures? Colors? Is the animated .gif of the ninja fighting the pirate getting a chuckle or not? Are they doing what you had imagined they would do when you were designing your site?

Eventually you’ll realize all your assumptions were wrong. But that’s OK because now you have a chance to fix them! You can ask a question or two, but try not to get in the way too much. Just watch and see what that person does.

I did this with my wife and I learned a ton about how people (or at least one person) reacted to my site. She liked colors and images, and if there was too much text in a row she was kind of bored and skimmed. Bold text helped break it up. And she was even tempted by some Adsense ads (which I told her NOT to click on!).

It was fascinating because I had made so many assumptions based on my own ideas about what a person “might” do on the site instead of real data.

The problem was I couldn’t find anyone else to do this with. At least anyone as convenient as my wife.

Fear not, weary blogger, I have an answer for you! You can get as many first time readers as you want through a company called User Testing.

Here’s how it works: you pay them $19 for every user you want and they’ll record that user on your site for around 15 minutes as they browse your site and talk their way through any questions or tasks you wrote for them.

I’ve seen several of their videos and it is really incredible to sit there and hear as many people as you want give you some pretty deep feedback about your site as they surf it for the first time.

Don’t take my word for it, check out the FAQ and watch one of their sample videos.

Now, if you’re really serious about blogging, you can use this site to get a TON of really helpful data on which to base decisions about how to make your site look and feel. After all, testing is the key to getting this stuff right. You don’t have to get 20 users, three is probably plenty, and the investment will be well worth it.

In case you’re curious, no, I don’t work for this site or have any affiliation with them. I’m just really excited about sharing it because the first-time reader audit I did with my wife was so insightful and so interesting, that I really believe it is a great service for bloggers. Especially since it’s so cheap!

This is a topic that I’m really into, so if anyone tries these guys out, please let me know what your experience was like and how it helped you with your own site. Who knows, maybe we can report back here and do a fun little survey of what the biggest things people noticed about their own site by doing a first-time reader audit.

Photo courtesy of Reinout van Rees

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