Testing and Improving

I suspect that many small news sites do little testing beyond listening to the management group and hearing the Web teams opinions. Testing takes time and costs money after all.

But there are ways to test site usability without spending any cash.

Steve Krug would say that if you've done no testing you should be doing something, because anything is better than nothing. And he'd also say that there's something of an eighty-twenty rule in usability testing that says the first twenty percent of the testing you do will give you eighty percent of the results. So even if you don't have time to scrutinize the nuances of the site, at the very least grab a few people off the street and get the basic points covered.

Sit your users down in front of a screen with a number of cards of actions you want them to take, or items you want them to find. Watch carefully and make notes, and if you can run a video camera over their shoulder, so you can see what's happening on the screen, that would be useful too.

Be sure to tell your guests to talk aloud about what they are doing as they do it. You need to know what they are thinking when they encounter your page.

Then examine your data. If something really needs to be changed, you will very quickly find it.

How much testing can you afford to do? How much testing can you afford not to do?

To go a little more in depth, but still keeping your costs down, you could use a survey tool like Survey Monkey to survey your audience on a particular issue. Or to dig a little deeper you could try Google Optimizer, which takes time but offers A/B and multivariate testing on pages.

One word of warning. Only gather data if you're going to use it. If you're going to the trouble of finding out what's going on, make sure you act on the results. That doesn't mean you have to change everything every month. Incremental change helps and is manageable.