I bet your business already has a customer support service and you think you get the best customer feedback from there…..but do you?

Do your software analytical tools point out significant user traffic to your website, but reflect low customer/purchase conversation rates?

Also, do you have no idea why this is occurring?

People not always do what they say. Your company needs an additional quantitive and qualitative process in order to really understand user behaviour, especially if you’re product is software and you’re in the tech industry.

Today’s subject is in relation to collecting customer feedback in a timely, qualitative & continuous manner. In IT speak this is also referred to as usability testing.

You can see this 4 min video for the shorter version of the article. To get more details, feel free to continue reading.

The industry has provided usability testing for many years, but the growth of cloud based services has taken the offering to the next level. No more limited sample groups in a controlled lab environment. Now one access potential users all around the world at affordable prices.

What is usability testing?

When concerning software, usability testing can be defined as real users, customers or staff using a software application. The purpose is to see how they use the software. This can be captured via video (with or without audio) where they might encounter problems on continual basis. From there improvements or recommendations can be incorporated back into the software development process.

Majority of the planet have access to affordable mobile phones. Not everyone uses them in the same way. How does one keep abreast of these ever changing consumer habits?

The other challenge, which has been personally noticeable to me has been software development by assumption. By assumption I mean traditional software development methods have promoted robotic thinking of design, development and testing within a controlled project team. Very little outside interaction with users during the development process. The business identifies an idea upfront, then hands it to IT and then sometimes involves some user testing just prior to launch. The increased uptake of the agile development process globally has demanded more continuous user feedback during the development process. Without it your software and brand image is exposed to considerable risk.

How does one address these challenges?

There are cloud businesses that provide an array of services to test your website, mobile application or software design prototypes with real life users. In regards to prototyping; the specific user testers understand that the software is in the early stages of development, but they can provide feedback on where certain features should or shouldn’t be placed as an example. By doing this early in the development cycle, it drastically lowers your development costs.

At a simplistic level these companies will seek out the target users of your software from their user community. These communities can consist of one million potential users. Great thing is these companies will screen them on your behalf.

Some of these businesses provide the ability to select the users on:

The service output includes a video of a user navigating and using your software. In playback mode you can also hear audio commentary and honest feedback about features regarding your software. It is raw and not sanitised. This is the part I love the most!

Other services include the use of heat-map analytics demonstrating where users spend majority of their time using your software. While observing where they spend their time, it also provides excellent feedback on features they do not use also.

Some service providers offer specific qualitative feedback of your software, while others offer screen recordings of customers coming to your website over a month. This provides the ability to select a random sample of user videos for analysis. Doing so on a daily, weekly or monthly basis within your business allows you to prioritise where development efforts obtain best return on investment.

Some of the user businesses specialise only in computer game testing. Makes sense considering the significant growth of online gaming in the past couple of years.

Some offer free website assessments or trial periods so you can get a feel of how the service is provided.

Not only that, these type of services can provide videos from your competitor’s public facing software. But, your competitors also have the capability to see your public facing software. Everyone is held accountable.

Traditionally these types of services were only available to high end businesses with large software budgets. With the advent of the internet and global scale on offer, more starts-up and entrepreneurial style businesses can access the new cloud based services at affordable prices. We now have an inclusive global market. Very positive indeed!

These services are usually utilized by web developers. Latest trends show product, sales and marketing managers starting to become larger consumers of this technology also.

Important thing to note, these type of services help you reduce your risk exposure in the market place.

Is your brand exposed because you don’t have a real time view into what your customers are thinking?

More importantly are your competitors adopting these types of services, while you are using traditional methods?

If you want to take advantage or review some of companies that offer usability services, please find a list below:

I would love to hear your opinions, questions or subjects you wish for me to cover.

Please post your feedback to me via the discussion boards below or visit my website at www.mikehamilton.com.au.