UsabilityHub – Usability Testing Tool with Real User Responses in 5 Minutes

As a digital marketer, you should always try to improve the conversion ratios of your ads, landing pages and sales pages. To improve the conversion ratio, you have to do A/B testing and usability testing of your web assets.

To start with we design websites on what we think our users would want. The reality could be different.

We would imagine that our users would use our website in a certain way. We imagine that our users will behave like we do. But when you do usability testing, you will realize that your users are different.

You have to design according to how they are and how they use your website. The only way to eliminate guess work and design according to user’s needs is to do usability testing.

Usability testing has come a long way. They used to cost $10,000+ per test and it has been coming down ever since. Usability testing all about hiring some real users, asking them to interact with the website and recording their responses.

A proper usability test involves setting up a screen recording and video recording system and asking a real user to visit your website and do what a user is expected to do on your website or app. You can do such tests towards the end of your website or app deployment.

To learn more about such tests, you should read this book: Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability

You do not always need to do a comprehensive usability test when you are at the early stage of designing your website. Sometimes you just need some quick responses from real users to make certain design related decisions.

UsabilityHub.com helps you do exactly that. You will get results within 5 minutes if you post a test on UsabilityHub.

There are 5 types of tests inside UsabilityHub. My favorite one is the 5 second test.

In this test, a screenshot of your web page is shown to users for 5 seconds. After that you can ask them up to 5 questions about the site they just saw.

I did a 5 second test for my blog and here are the responses I got from real people.

You can mention what you need in the question and the answers will be relevant to that.

When I uploaded a screenshot of my page, the first post on the home page was about how to get free ad credits on AdWords. That’s why most of the answers are related to adwords and advertising. You can check the results of my website on this public URL.

UsabilityHub also provides a keyword cloud from which you can get the most used words with a single glance.

When you sign up for a new account and create your first test, you will get 5 response credits worth $5 for free. You can use these credits to get responses from real people.

UsabilityHub hires real people to do the tests. If you get low quality responses, then you can delete that response and mark it as spam. You will get a replacement credit for free.

If 5 credits are not enough, you can get more credits by buying them for $1 each from UsabilityHub.com. Else you can recruit your own users and by sharing the URL with them.

You can also do A/B testing with UsabilityHub. If you have 2 variants of a web page, you can show variant A to 50 people and Variant B to 50 people. Ask the right questions, and you will know which variant communicates the idea better.

More Usability Tests

Apart from the 5 second test you have navigation test, click test, preference test and question test. You can use navigation test to find out how users progress through different pages. You have to upload screenshots of 3-4 pages from your navigation flow.

If you have 2 logo designs and have trouble deciding which one is better, you can post it on the preference tests.

Testers will tell you which version they prefer and now you can decide based on data from real people than rely on your instincts.

Instincts are good only in the absense of data.

Since UsabilityHub is giving away free accounts with free credits, I recommend that you go ahead and experiment with it. It is a pretty simple and self explanatory tool.

Any questions on usability testing? Leave a comment below.