July 4th BBQ – the Real Website Test
Without question, company websites are extremely critical and site performance quite rightly is analyzed every which-way possible. Continuous feedback is important and while web-metrics provide fantastic input, business managers have been known to dismiss reports as too technical. Online surveys are increasingly popular but can demand a lot from the site visitor and focus groups are expensive and used too infrequently.
The one piece of feedback rarely formally gathered is how customers describe a site to a friend. How would your site be described at the July fourth barbeque? With our user hat on, we get a ‘feeling’ for a site; we might call it cluttered, confusing or slow or we might say, it’s good. We do n’t analyze sites; we express ourselves with ungrounded opinions. We might say a site is easy to use; not that the use of tabbed navigation helps site orientation. As professionals, we want customer surveys and focus groups to tell us what to change on a site but our real job is to change the site to improve the gut feeling.
Recently Cisco embarked on an interesting project to collect data on customer ‘gut reactions’ on a range of sites, categorized by demographics and other factors. Which sites are good, which ones are cluttered, which ones clear, which ones not? With a simple 2-minute check, the data can focus where to apply effort and energy and just as critically, where you can ignore and save time.
