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Website testing, we have all done it right? What do we mean by website testing? Too many online retailers are neglecting this essential practice, instead focusing their efforts on trying to get more targeted traffic to their website. Of course, everyone tests their website in the very beginning. That first live test purchase on the company credit card to ensure everything is working as it should. But what about real testing, what we are talking about is of course usability testing.

When you are involved in the design and building of a website it soon becomes impossible to look upon it objectively. It’s too easy to assume that all of your visitors are finding the navigation, checkout and purchasing processes just as easy as you do. This is however a big mistake, until your site has undergone proper testing you will have very little information about where things are going wrong for your visitors and what might be standing in the way of them buying something or completing a conversion.

Ask yourself what you do when you are browsing a website and you get stuck, the navigation is not doing what you think it should, you can’t find something, or a web form is not playing ball. The usual course of action is to hite the nuke button and leave the site never to return.

Our online chess set retailing business recently embarked on a series of website tests. Prior to this we had spent hours if not days staring at our site, our checkout pages and navigation in an attempt to try and refine the customer experience and make it a easy as possible to buy from our site. The website testing really is the acid test. Having now undergone the testing we can see that before it took place we were essentially fumbling around in the dark. Imagine a new software program tested by the guy who programmed it, is he the best person to test it?

Usability testing can take on a number of forms, in it’s most primitive form it can involve a test subject sat at a P.C using the website with a video camera behind them taping the screen. These days things have moved on. We have software such as Snapz Pro that allows you to record everything that takes place on the screen and also include an audio track. There are also live online solutions that will record the screen activity of your actual live visitors, although last time we checked this was still beyond the budget scope of the average small E-retailer.

More complex forms of testing involve eye direction sensors that actually record where abouts on the screen the user is looking. A large sample frame of testing subjects results in data that looks rather like a weather temperature map, with a hot orange colour for the areas that gained most attention, and cold blues or the areas that gained the least attention. These tests have been used extensively to evaluate the effect of online advertising. Tests like this on major search engines have showed that (not surprisingly) people dedicate most of their attention to the top left hand side of the page, avoiding the sponsored ads on the right and losing their attention further down the page.

Testing for small online retailers on a tight budget

Testing doesn’t need to involve huge cost, gadgets and expensive consultants. You can undertake your own testing quite simply and easily. Download some software that will allow you to capture the session and save it as a movie, ideally with a sound track. You then need some test subjects. It’s prudent to get as many possible test subjects as you can. At least ten to start with, maybe twenty or thirty if you can muster it. The aim of the exercise is to record the web browsing activities of your test subjects and then analyse the video to see where they had difficulties in using the site.

Reverse your goals

In order to create some consistency within your testing group it’s wise to set a goal and ask your test subjects to enter the site from the home page and then try to achieve this goal. We have created scenarios for people to work through with an ultimate goal of them purchasing a product. We provided them with the test credit card details from our payment gateway so that spending real money wasn’t going to be necessary.

The Revelation

The results were, as we thought they would be, very surprising. We were shocked to see some testers getting completely stuck at stages in the checkout and aborting their purchase. As well as the videos we asked the test subjects to provide some verbal feedback on their user experience. The results meant we were put to work making improvements to our site, specifically the checkout process, pretty much straight away.

If you are the webmaster of an e commerce website and you are not testing, you should be. Effective testing and implementation of improvements will increase your conversion rates, which in turn means you will get a lot more bang for your buck when it comes to paid traffic. As the old saying goes…. testing testing, one, two, three!