hedgehoglab

If you are a freelancer or small agency designing websites, usability testing the websites you create is a bit of a challenge due to the planning, time and cost involved in setting the tests up. Setting up a good user testing environment and getting your target audience to give you valuable feedback is a tough task and hence it is overlooked.

We had the same problem when we decided to go live with the website. Given that we are a small and agile company, we were not bothered about getting user feedback before we went live as we always envisioned the site to improve incrementally with rapid iterations.

We considered many options for user testing and most seemed far too much effort given our busy period (with the release of fixx coming near) and our limited budget. Therefore, I set out on finding methods that will allow us to get some user feedback without breaking the bank.

Out of all the things we tried (which included pestering our developer friends constantly for feedback), 3 really stood out for us and returned tons of feedback which we are sifting through. I admit that the quality of these tests cannot be on par with setting up a controlled user testing environment and neither am I preaching that these methods are better (no flame wars Information Architects!), but if you have limited resources, reach and budget, I can assure you that these will return better results than by-passing usability testing.

• Usertesting.com

  I found usertesting.com while browsing through some posts at the Joel on Software forums and man are we impressed! For less than $19 a user, usertesting.com allows you to conduct highly targeted tests. At the end of the test, you will have access to a flash recording of the user's session (with voice) and a transcript of their summarised feedback. I won't go into a sales pitch for them, as their home page does a good job of this but I really like the idea of how usertesting.com has leveraged crowd-sourcing to deliver what is an interesting and useful service. Needless to say, we are very happy with the results and quality of feedback. If anyone knows of other services like usertesting.com, please feel to post in the comments.

• LinkedIn

  A curious one but based on 2 past experiences, I have found LinkedIn to be a good source of feedback based on target audience. Their "Answers" feature allows you to select specific categories under which to post a question. Again, the quality of feedback we had from there has been pretty good. Although I guess this doesn't classify into the scientific mould of "testing", a lot of the audience was our target market. The cost of this exercise? Nil! I presume this could be said of any other "Answers" service but I am only going by what our experience is.

• Friends, colleagues and clients

  If you are lucky enough to be in an industry where your target customers are your friends, then getting feedback from them is zero cost. Likewise, colleagues in similar jobs but other companies are very valuable, except if they were your competitors! Finally, the obvious one, if you are lucky enough to have good relationships with you're existing clients, there is no one better to get user feedback from (I know you are going duh! but I have seen many instances where people never talk to their customers other than to bill them or pitch new work!).

Do you have an interesting methodology to conduct user testing that is not obvious and does not cost a lot? We are always looking to improve our processes, so please let us know.

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