10 Easy (and not so easy ) Ways to get Direct User Feedback

November 19, 2008 by Peter de Gosztonyi.

by Peter de Gosztonyi

User feedback is gold to the web designer. You get firsthand knowledge on what your user sees and more importantly how they will react to your message. As designers we know what we would like to get and our experience tells us what we would probably get but… the only way to really know is to ask the website visitor.

The best web strategists combine both direct and indirect data to build that “conversion rate” heaven.

Indirect methods include statistics, weblogs, cookies, user tracking, behaviour analysis, but there is danger in relying too much on these “what happens” tools and avoiding the much more difficult “why” tools. With the myriad of free analytic tools now available including Google analytics, log file analyzers, and click through tracking tools, you garner so much data that you can avoid talking directly to your website visitors and actually think that you understand them.

The main problem is that analytics represent historical patterns, and what took place, but not why. It’s like investing in a mutual fund whose past track record looked great, but unless you understand their future direction and strategy, you may not realize the same level of return.

For the same reason where visitors abandon your website can be very informative, and if you use the right tools such as Google Optimizer, you can try different web page architecture to see which one works the best to achieve your goals. The assumption in all of these cases is that you have properly interpreted and implemented a website that considers the target audiences goals and objectives.

This is where direct user feedback becomes essential. You need to know if your message is resonating with your visitors, and with that vital customer information, you can really optimize your website to meet their goals.

Direct user feedback is extremely valuable because it represents a real live visitors opinion of your website. It can answer questions like:

• Why did you come to the site?
• Why did you leave without visiting more of the site?
• What reason did you visit but not follow through?
• What is the first impression of the site? Is it positive or negative?
• Did you feel that you were the target user of the site? Why or Why not?
• Did the site appeal to you?
• Is the website credible?
• Would you complete a transaction on this site?
• Why did you abandon the site?
• What can be done to improve the site?

Many, if not all, of these questions can be answered only through direct customer feedback.
A well designed visitor feedback program will consider all aspects of the user experience and the interfaces with the organization. This should include the other customer touch points as well since the website can be used to reduce costs and overhead from other areas, while improving the overall customer satisfaction level.

1. Hire a marketing firm to analyze your entire customer contact strategy.

This option is for deep pockets and falls into the business transformation classification. Not a solution for the faint of heart but can transform an organization into a major success. This process would include all of the following customer feedback approaches plus some, as input into the overall strategy. The advantage of this type of approach, is that one addresses the entire business process from an integrated perspective, resulting in being able to capture the complete customer experience.
2. Usability testing

In the web environment usability testing means that different users will evaluate a website virtually page by page, their reactions are recorded and analyzed to produce recommendations for a much cleaner and smoother website. There are different degrees of usability testing and is limited only by one’s time and budget. Generally it can encompass from the search engine to the completion of a transaction. Although effective this approach can be costly and time consuming. This type of testing is best implemented during the testing phase of a website redesign.

3. Mystery Shopper

This approach is less rigourous than usability testing and has its appeal in being able to see what many different visitors think about your website. Generally a firm will provide a typical profile of their users, and a similar mystery shopper profile is selected from a large pool of eager testers. The background and observation techniques will vary considerably from shopper to shopper, but using statistical methodologies, patterns will emerge. Being presented with only the inputs but not an analysis of the data yields very little actionable information. The real value is how the data is interpreted and what recommendations are made that will improve your website. Since it can be done fairly inexpensively, performing a mystery shopper analysis on your existing website and then on your redesigned website will have value in both reducing the design cycle and return on investment.

4. Focus Groups

Focus groups are great if you can take the time and costs to organize them. Valuable input can be had but one has to be wary of the potential biased nature of this format. Testers know why they are there and that there is some form of compensation so they have a tendency to try to please the organizers or do the exact opposite. If you use an experienced and reputable firm then the results should be very useful.

5. Customer Councils

This is an excellent way to get feedback from your direct customers, since they also have a vested interest in making your website efficient. This type of input goes a long way in building lasting relationships and if you have a well defined user group can be very beneficial. What this group does not address are the new visitors and how to appeal to potentially new customers. Also if you do not have a well defined customer segment then it becomes difficult to set this type of group up.

6. User Feedback through analytics

With the introduction of Google analytics, it is a breeze finding out about who visits and where they go, you can set goals and of course measure the ever present bounce rate. If you haven’t tried it out it is worth the effort. Another source of user data is your sites weblogs which also give a plethora of data which takes a PhD to interpret, Lots of data but minimal information on why.

7. User feedback through online surveys and questions

We see these little requests usually at the end of an article - Was this useful?…. I don’t know about you but I never respond usually because it wasn’t useful. Surveys also have a tendency to drift across the screen at the most inopportune times - just out of spite, I kill those pop-ups. The response rate is abysmal. Just compare the number of responses to the number of visitors - not a pretty picture. You also have a tendency to get the complainers.

8. User feedback using personas

Personas are a well established method of identifying a user segment by determining what the goals or objectives are of a group of users, and building a profile of a typical user representing that segment. This approach allows a designer to view a website from that users perspective. Significant insight can be gained and this type of simplistic role playing can identify potential problem areas with minimal cost. Usually one needs three or four personas to represent a significant part of a user base. Usability testing as well as other user feedback mechanisms will round out the tool kit to produce a focused and user friendly website.

9. Third party direct user testing

This is another method to simulate users by having several experienced web evaluators experience the website form a first time visitors perspective. The benefit of this approach is that the evaluators are knowledgeable about best practices, and are experienced in noticing the fine points of the website design. They can also articulate their experience and have a well defined vocabulary that can be understood in the context of what to improve. Very specific actionable recommendations can be provided based on the observations and experience of the evaluators. This is a relatively inexpensive approach and can be very informative. The limitation is that the evaluators are not subject matter experts and may not be able to identify content accuracy or credibility.

10. Ask your friends and clients

Possibly the easiest and most direct way is to solicit feedback from the people you know. The observations may not be consistent and will be very broad, but listening to their observations will reflect what many of your users will experience, and honest feedback is much better than none.
There is nothing worse than thinking you have developed the perfect website and only finding out how wrong you were when your sales plummet - recovery from that is much harder and far more serious than if you had spent a bit of time and money using direct user testing up front.

People go to a website for a reason - it is your job to provide that reason and to persuade them to pick your site over the thousands of other similar websites. That’s why you have hired marketing experts whether in house or from your design company. Websites have to be designed for people, to met their goals and objectives and appeal to their emotional side. For a successful conversion, you must build a relationship even at the lowest transactional level.

©Web-Insight 2008.

Peter de Gosztonyi is a web strategy developer and information architect for Web-Insight. He has developed web strategies for both small and large organizations. He can be contacted at peter@web-insight.ca.

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Website Audit - the fundamentals

September 11, 2008 by Peter de Gosztonyi.

What is a website audit? Many web design companies offer an audit as a means to evaluate your website with the intent to get your redesign business. Not a bad idea but do you really need an audit, after all you probably have a good idea of what is not working so you really want more.

Let’s look at the fundamentals of an audit and then maybe you can decide not only whether you need one but what kind of audit you need.

Fundamental # 1 An audit requires a standard or benchmark

An audit is an evaluation against a known (and preferably best in class) standard. So far there are very few recognized standards for website redesign, unless you consider accessability standards or government Common Look and Feel (CLF2) standards. These however address only the basic technical and accessability requirements for accessing and viewing a website - usually the lowest common denominator for technology and browsers.

We are all familiar with an income tax audit either as a fear factor or having barely survived one. Your tax returns are assessed against the tax act, a well established but flawed (in my opinion of course) standard. A website audit should be performed against a known benchmark and be seen as an opportunity to improve your website, not something to be feared.

Fundamental # 2 Audits should be comprehensive

A website is just part of your organization strategy, so logically one would assume that if you haven’t already done so, you should evaluate your website against your organizational objectives. This is where you need to start the process. Understanding the objectives of the website as they relate to the objectives of your organization  in effect establishes the benchmark for your website audit. Your audit then needs to address three basic components:

• Organizational context
• User goals
• Website  Performance

The first two elements will establish your benchmark. The website performance audit is what is more commonly seen and can be a combination of best practice assessment, against performance standards ( accessibility, usability, CLF2) and performance measures.

In addition the organizational context should also look at the Return on Investment (ROI), resource allocation,

Fundamental # 3 Audits are structured

Having  a well established process to perform your audit is essential. It has to start with the organization, then the user goals and finally the actual website. This approach has been discussed in previous entries in this blog.

Fundamental # 4  Performance must be measured

Lastly your website should be measured against organizational performance metrics so that the success can be monitored. This is the best and most dynamic method of knowing how well your website is in meeting your user’s goals and your organizations ROI objectives.

A lot can be learned from an audit or an assessment, take the opportunity to evaluate your website through the audit process and you will see significant benefits to your users and to your bottom line.

Peter de Gosztonyi is a quality practitioner and has been certified as a Quality Auditor by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and is a senior consultant for Web-Insight an Advanced Internet Training and Consulting company. 

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How to Manage a Website Redesign Project

February 29, 2008 by Peter de Gosztonyi.

Website redesign projects don’t have to be a major undertaking, a well organized project with a skilled project manager will plan and implement the project to a well thought out schedule, with the responsibilities to ensure that the project is on time and on budget. Maintaining a full time website project manager within the organization is not normally cost effective, and their responsibilities may include other responsibilities within the website team, which can result in conflicts of interest. While an outside Project Manager has no such vested interests other than to ensure the project gets done.

Team work is critical, as well as knowing when to bring in the right resources to maximize the value each team member brings to the project. For example Web-Insight has seasoned facilitators that can guide the team to maximum performance while enjoying the project. Look to the outside (your group or organization) for a facilitator, it doesn’t matter if the person has no knowledge of your industry, actually this is better since the person will not have the urge to contribute, a good sign in any professional facilitator.

Look also for an organization such as Web-Insight who can bring considerable experience in web-redesign project management and who will transfer that process and knowledge to your team so that the ongoing maintenance and development will be successful.

Web-Insight’s Process

Every project will be different so the project manager should work with your team to determine the extent of your needs and design a project plan that will work with your timelines and requirements. All projects follow the basic elements below, a good organization can guide you through part or all of this process, or work with your project manager to build a successful redesign project.

1. Develop a basic plan for the project

• Project Charter
• Team members
• Timeline

2. Vision

• Review website strategic plan and establish website objectives
• Perform an environmental assessment
• User segmentation

3. Discovery -

• Assess the current website
  • Website audit
  • First Impression analysis

• First time visitor behaviour analysis
• SWOT (Strength , Weakness, Opportunities, Threats)
• Competitive analysis

4. Action Plan

• Develop an action plan
  • Information architecture
  • Website framework/wireframe
  • Performance measures
• Maintenance plan
• Ongoing improvement plan

The last 2 steps are usually performed by the web implementation team and the web maintenance team using the project plan and specifications from the previous step.

5. Design and Implement

6. Measure and improve

If you are familiar with project management process, you will recognize the basic elements, but adapted to the web environment. These are tried and true methodologies and they work, taking short cuts will be costly unless you are very sure of what you are doing. That is why professionals in facilitation, project management and web design are critical to your web redesign projects success.

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14 INSIGHTS ON HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER CONVERSION RATE

February 25, 2008 by Peter de Gosztonyi.

1. Websites are intended for people – something that seems to get over looked by developers every once in a while. Large development teams can get so immersed in the application that the original purpose seems to get lost. Silos sometimes are formed based on responsibility and communicating across these silos becomes a challenge. Designing for customers means placing oneself in the position of that person and building the website to meet their needs and objectives.

2. The true measure of a successful website is by the number of visitors who convert into customers. First, a quick definition of “customer” since many websites do not have a shopping cart per se, one must define a customer as a visitor who completes a specific action on the website. This action is a goal of the website, which matches the goals or objectives of the visitor. For example, an informational government site may have a goal to provide information, thus downloads, or visits to a specific page, may be the measure of success.

3. The goals of the website must also correspond to the goals of the target customers. For example if you have a product you want to sell, your goal is to move as much product as possible, whereas the customer goal is to use the product that will benefit them. So in order to meet your goal, you must thoroughly understand your customers’ goals.

4. Minimize your Bounce rate. Google defines a bounce when a visitor only accesses one page and then leaves. When your bounce rate is high, it indicates a potential problem with your website. Visitors can “bounce” at virtually all contact points with your website.

- Search engine Bounce
-Your site gets top ranking but people pass it by
- Referral site bounce
- Advertising or linking from many sites gets little action
· Ad Bounce
- You pay for advertising (e.g. Ad Sense) but get minimal return on your investment – few people access your
site based on these ads.
· Home or landing page bounce
- Lots of one page visitors who land and disappear

5. Optimize your usability. Look at the visiting patterns of your website and try to understand why users aren’t converting. This is best done through a combination of visitor behaviour analysis and usability testing of the site with real users. These include:

- Usability bounce
o Visitors leave after several page views
- Shopping cart bounce
o The most dreadful bounce, the number of people who go through the process of ordering but abandon at
the last step.
· Bounce – bounce
o Those people who leave for random reasons and no matter what you do, would probably not convert.
There is no solution to this category of visitors.

6. People leave at these different contact points because the website did not meet their objective. Trying to answer why the visitors objective hasn’t been met has spawned a huge Internet industry (try Googling “Internet Marketing”!). The primary reason is that they either did not find what they wanted, weren’t ready, or were getting information for comparison or other purposes.

7. Use Google’s free Website Optimizer. This multivariate testing tool presents different layouts of the same page to visitors, allowing you to use the one that converts the most visitors. If you can improve your website so that even a small percentage of visitors actually convert to customers, significant benefits can be had with minimal investment. Sometimes repositioning a heading can have remarkable effects.

8. Ask your customers . Getting real customer feedback is a challenge, although well worth the effort if you can do it. There are several methods to do this see our article on 12 Easy (and not so easy) Ways to get Customer Feedback on your Website.

9. Develop goal oriented persona’s. Persona’s are an excellent way of putting yourself into customers’ shoes and can help your designers to visualize how a visitor will use your website. There is a major difference between user segmentation and segmenting users by goals. The first will produce a significant number of segments, whereas the latter should generate maybe 3 or 4 personas with perhaps one or two more sub personas.

10. Plan your website redesign. Planning is key, most of the hard work is done before any code gets written. The first step is to find out what worked and what needs improvement. The second is to identify the strategic drift between your current website and the direction your organization is going.

11. Identify key performance measures. Understand the performance goals for your website in business terms, then get your web statistics to generate meaningful numbers to measure that success. If you use Google’s Analytics, you can establish goals and ROI based on visitor behaviour.

12. Keep on top of website changes. You can no longer update and ignore your website, competition is fierce and you must be tweaking your website, combining different techniques to improve the performance and looking for major shifts in your market space.

13. Know what your competitors are doing. Periodic competitive comparisons are necessary to see how well you differentiate yourself and also whether you are falling behind on website promotion.

14. Understand your website strategy. Your organization has spent lots of money and resources on the website, knowing how it is positioned relative to the overall corporate strategy will create value not only for the organization but also for the customers. Integrating this channel with other customer channels will also make it easier for the customer and generate value for the organization.

 

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Impact of Social Networking on your website redesign

January 24, 2008 by Peter de Gosztonyi.

Website redesign usually means a complete review and reworking of your website. For complex websites this can be a formidable undertaking with many people involved. Getting started is like getting an ocean liner moving, it takes a lot of energy and effort to go from a stand still to full speed, but once it gets going changing direction and stopping it, is not easy at all. So if you find out that you are going in the wrong direction it becomes very costly and time consuming to alter the course. To avoid that one has to carefully plan and understand why and to whom your website is targeted to.

Many of our customers when facing a redesign come to us to ask what about web 2.0? Our response is what do your customers want? This of course is the point where they hesitate and start to hum and haw and refer us to their marketing team. When trying to implement any new feature or flavour of the day application, the bottom line is what do your customers need and expect.

So where do you start? The most obvious place is of course with your customers, now it becomes an issue of user segmentation - or does it? One of the most effective ways of understanding your user requirements is to develop personas for your main target users. Usually only two or three main personas are required, even though there may be many user segments. This is because you can’t design a site for all users and the subgroups each represents, the variables are too many. However if one takes a different approach by looking at the goals or objectives of your users, then a common pattern wll emerge across your user segments.

For example if you are promoting adventure travel, a common user segment would be by age, but you will encounter difficulty when the senior traveler may well want to rough it whereas the youth may want to do a luxury tour, so the more logical approach would be to cater to the adventure traveler and within that group offer different levels of difficulty which would appeal to the different age groups. It is then easy to develop a primary persona with one or two sub personas to accommodate their goals.

Similarly with integrating social networking features within your web redesign, if your users do not fit the profile, then it is not necessary to implement these features unless it fits into your overall corporate strategy. So by understanding the objectives of your users as well as that of potential customers, one can design a website that will appeal to both groups.

Marketing to your target audience will also be impacted by this understanding of what appeals to your users and where they go. You need to be where they are.

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