It is crucial for any business to have feedback. When you are launching a business online your website is the most important tool you have that will generate revenue. You may be in love with the design of your website, but it isn’t always appealing to visitors. Therefore, a review and test of your website by real people is important. There are many real benefits to having external website testing completed including:
1. Developers tend to become “blind” to website issues when they have been working on them for extended periods of time and real visitors will discovery any issues that may have been overlooked by a developer after they have worked with the same website continuously.
2. The pressure is removed from the developer and their team because the people visiting the site will determine the areas that need to be fleshed out or need more work. Some developers add elements to websites and then fail to ensure that they are fully operational before moving on to create and add a new element. Real visitors would discover the elements that are not completed.
3. The bugs can be incorporated into a workflow through a project management system and assigned to team members to be corrected. This helps developers because they don’t end up working on the same elements all the time and failing to identify issues that occur.
4. The developer can relax knowing that every aspect of the website has been reviewed, tested and documented by team members after real people have reviewed the site. It can be nerve-wracking to wonder which elements of the website needs more work when you have worked through all the elements many times and believe that you have identified them all.
5. The website developer can work on other tasks that are more important rather than having to spend too much time with testing. Repeated testing can bog down the progress of the developer and cause the launch of the website to be delayed further into the future. Most people want to have their websites developed and launched as quickly as possible without too hang time.
6. Real visitor testing is often more focused because they don’t have other tasks to complete other than to explore the site and test it. These visitors don’t need to worry about the further areas that would need to be developed as they are only visiting and testing. Their main mission is to visit the website and explore it in the normal way any visitor would. They will see the website with fresh eyes instead of missing elements that need work or correction because they have been reviewing them too often.
7. Testing by real visitors allows another layer of testing in areas that the developer has not yet tested or much greater detail in the areas that have already been fully developed. Real visitors will explore the entire website discover if there are broken links between pages, for example, where they are taken to 404 errors. Broken links are usually an easy fix, but they can cause a higher level of frustration for some visitors who are tired of being referred to an error message. If visitors have a hard time navigating the site, they will usually leave, and this is the type of problem that you want to identify early before your website starts to receive a flood of visitors.
8. Review of a website by real people means that the website will be of a higher quality once you consider and incorporate all the feedback from those visitors. This will ensure a much better website which will tend to generate better results over time than a website that has not been reviewed. The website should be free of glitches because those would be caught by the real visitors as they move through the various pages and elements of the site.
9. The developer can relax knowing that checks have all been carried out by real visitors who are using the website as it is intended to be used. The visitors would be guided to try and carry out a shopping experience, for example, if things were for sale on your website. This would include choosing an item, adding it to a cart, adding in credit card information, purchasing an item and then choosing the method of shipping. All of these processes need to proceed smoothly or a visitor who is attempting to make a purchase will experience a high level of frustration and then end up leaving before they complete the order process.
Real users and visitors will provide the best feedback, not just friends and acquaintances of the developer. These are the visitors that will offer the most genuine feedback because they are not worried about how their comments may affect the website developer. These comments are generally regarding how the visitor sees the website and the experiences that they have as they explore it. The comments are not criticisms, but constructive feedback that helps to improve the website, making it more user-friendly for future visitors. Ease of use is the main aim for most websites, because if the website is clunky and hard to use it won’t retain a visitor on its pages.
There are online services that offer feedback by real people after they have fully examined your website. This will help you to understand how the most important design and user experience elements are viewed by real people. External review should be conducted in addition to your own testing, or you can replace your own testing with the process of an external review.
Website testing is a time-consuming exercise for project managers, developers, web designers and site owners to complete. It is the aim of website testing to discover and correct any bugs that can cause your web site visitors frustration. If your website is not functioning correctly it can create an extremely negative perception of the website and of your company. This is the opposite of what every website owner wants to achieve.
Image by Customer Care
Image by Customer Care
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