When you have looked at your website so many times either during development of it or after it’s gone live you get so used to looking at it you don’t see the obvious problems.  So getting a fresh pair of eyes to look at it can be quite useful.  However, you generally don’t get an honest opinion.   You ask someone if they like it and they tell you that they do, however, if you mention that you don’t like it then all of a sudden they come up with a load of problems.  I’m sure you’ve noticed this before!

We recently replaced our website and wanted some independent eyes on it.  Some people that weren’t our friends and didn’t care if we didn’t like their opinion. So we first of all tried out 5 second test.  As the site says it’s simple instant feedback on our design.  You get a free option where you provide a screen shot of a page and they get 5 random people to view the page and you can decide if they should locate specific elements within the page or remember specific elements. On a web page it needs to be really clear what the user should do.  If you want them to book an appointment that better be the thing that sticks out on a page or they won’t do it!

So that gives you some feedback on your landing page.  But, what if you wanted feedback on your site, was the site useful, did the user find what they want, why did they come here in the first place.  This is all valuable information but how do you collect it?

One free tool which we used and found to be very good was iperceptions.  This tool allows you to add a piece of code to a web page and when people come to your site they are asked if they want to participate in a survey when they leave the site.  If they agree then they are asked the questions when they leave.  You can set up your own questions such as – Did you find what you wanted, why did you come to the website in the first place etc etc.  And yes, it’s FREE.

There are many other tools out there what have you found useful?