Improve the Usability of Your Joomla Website
Aug 28 2008 - Tagged in: Joomla Sites
Or come to that, any website.
I just came across a great service that makes perfect use of crowdsourcing on the web. It allows you to get human feedback on your site, quickly and affordably. For the price of a McDonalds meal for your family you can get a video recording of real people trying tasks on your site, and the results will be surprising, I can promise.
The service is called UserTesting.com and you can get a test for as little as $19. I have already tried it a couple of times and found small changes that have already made a big difference on the site I was working on. I got two 15 minute videos the same afternoon that really showed some issues with how well the site did at conversion (and how people simply don't read on the web!)
If you are familiar with user testing, you will know that subsequent small groups of testers are better than one big group all testing at once. Test with 3-4 people, fix the problems, then re-test. This is because a small group will find 80% of issues, but they are often "show-stoppers". Once you deal with them, you need to re-test.
I really recommend checking out usertesting.com. Maybe joomla.org should spend a few thousand there testing Joomla (an excellent use of donation dollars!)
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Viperfish
said:
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... Hi Barry, What an awesome service. I will definitely use this service on my personal sites. It's almost too good a service. I'm not sure that I would like to tell my clients about it. It might open up a can of worms and expose problems that we didn't know existed. Of course, that's the whole idea of the service. But, when we are using an open source application and open source plugins from many sources, there will often be some issues exposed. What would you do? Do you tell your client that you've discovered a potential issue with plugins you recommended and the budget is going to blow out? Or do you invest the hours and fix the previously undiscovered issues for free? |
Compass Design
said:
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... I always advocate transparency. I think service providers (like yourself) should explain the nature of open source. They can get the raw tools at low cost (or even free), and the $ outlay shifts to configuration and implementation. Usability issues would be thing the customer can choose to fix... at some suitable cost. |
fares001
said:
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... ... Hi Barry, What an awesome service. I will definitely use this service on my personal sites. It's almost too good a service. I'm not sure that I would like to tell my clients about it. It might open up a can of worms and expose problems that we didn't know existed. Of course, that's the whole idea of the service. But, when we are using an open source application and open source plugins from many sources, there will often be some issues exposed. What would you do? Do you tell your client that you've discovered a potential issue with plugins you recommended and the budget is going to blow out? Or do you invest the hours and fix the previously undiscovered issues for free? |
free sms
said:
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... wow..great and awesome service as i need to search this kind of service for implementation on my personal websites which are also built on joomla.. |
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