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Cheap, Simple, Must-Do Usability Testing
Posted by Scott on 17th November, 2008 | 9 commentsI’ve never done formal usability testing. You know, hiring a group of testers, giving them coffee and muffins and asking them to perform certain tasks on your website so that you can gain insight on how people actually use your site. Formal testing is expensive and is limited to a small set of test subjects.
Enter ClickTale. ClickTale is a javascript snippet that sits on your page and records user sessions anonymously: and by record, I really mean record, as a movie: mouse movements, scrolling, clicks, text entered into form and search boxes, for each of your site’s users. It stores a video of each user’s session (and strings together multiple visits) which you can play back.
Plus, it’s FREE for personal use (records 400 visits, or a lot more in their pay packages).
The first thing I noticed: wow, people are really using our sites! It’s one thing to see a bunch of numbers showing that we have 100,000+ uniques/day across our sites, but to actually see a person clicking around, clicking on links that I created, scrolling, it’s really cool. More importantly though, after watching a lot of these sessions, I was able to determine several problems with one of our sites, where people were trying to click on text that wasn’t hyperlinked, and people were getting confused on a page - both instances were fixed.
Highly recommended.
Popularity: 29%
Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 8:27 am and is filed under Web Business. If you like this post why not subscribe to my full text RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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This looks really interesting! Thanks for the review and recommendation.
[…] to Scott, he made me aware of an awesome little piece of software to help do some usability testing on your […]
Read about this somewhere else too, sounds great.
I think you probably need a fair bit of traffic to draw any real conclusions from it.
Will give it a shot.
Would be great if it could be free for more visitors
Wow! This looks a fab piece of sofware.
What sprang immediately to mind is that can it pick up PPC such as Adsense? Would be great to know what ads were being clicked on. Thanks for finding and sharing this one.
Unfortuantely it doesn’t seem to pick up the adsense units but I agree that would be cool. The adsense units display as empty boxes.
I have a few blogs and would love to advertise for you on my site send me a 125 x 125 banner and i will put it on right away, maybe you can put a link of mine on yours please thank you…
Though the observer gets the opportunity to watch the body language of the users as well as hear any spoken comments in formal usability testing, the movie recording using ClickTale seems a useful way to analyze the user experience. By the way, did you notice that different users faced different problems or that the users consistently face the same problems?
The usability testing is very important for any user based web app or service. Will check this service out, sounds awesome