At Kangadillo we hold to an important philosophy. Always be testing your website. Test it on multiple devices. Test it on multiple operating systems. And for sure be testing with your users.
User testing comes in many different forms. If you’re a small business with an equally small budget you might just get your mom to sit down in front of a computer and watch as she tries to find her way around. When she starts cursing you might have found a pain point that needs to be addressed.
A major corporation with a budget and a mind to improve might hire a firm that would use a number of different tests with many users to determine pain points and send you back a report with recommendations.
The City of Plano wants to know what people think of their website and how they can make it more user friendly, so they used Survey Monkey to create a form and tweeted a request.
We want to know what you think of our website and how we can make it more user-friendly: https://t.co/4lSZmeqNoP pic.twitter.com/js77cPYHep
— City of Plano (@cityofplanotx) April 21, 2016
They ask questions like:
- Did you find what you needed?
- Please tell us how easy it is to find information on the site
- How do you think we could make the information you are looking for easier to find?
And the all important generic “Please add any comments you have for improving the website. We welcome suggestions on specific areas for improvement, features you would like to see added to the site, and examples of your favorite sites and why you like them.”
It would be interesting to know what kind of responses the City of Plano receives from their survey, and how useful they are, but kudos to them for testing. It’s the only way to improve.
International Rose Test Garden 004 by Ernie Tyler Follow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.