Is your graphic design helping or hurting your business?
Here’s another fantastic tool for increasing your website’s conversion rate: It’s called UserTesting.com. If you haven’t used it before, you should—it’s great. It tells you why people leave your website (and loads of other interesting things).
UserTesting.com provides you with a video recording of how visitors are interacting with your website. This is done by capturing the browsing session of an anonymous usability tester and recording their spoken commentary. The video and a written summary of the tester’s views can be with you within hours. It takes less than ten minutes to commission a test…and all for just $19.
Anyway, last week, we recommended UserTesting.com to one of our new clients. This morning we reviewed the feedback, which you may find interesting:
Our client asked the following question to five usability testers: “What would have caused you to leave this website?”
Here are three of the responses:
“The site seemed kind of amateurish. There was a feeling that the company did not take the website seriously.”
“In general, I think the home page needs a refresh to make it more attractive – it is now more like a virtual storefront than one from a company as well established as [company name].”
“It was unprofessional and amateur looking and hard to find the correct link to use. Regardless of what size company you may be, a website can make you look as though you are the largest company in the UK…in any industry.”
Comments like this are surprisingly common—we see them regularly.
A success story—how graphic design gave an overnight 7.4% improvement
In response to similar feedback, another of our clients carried out a very simple page re-design. They didn’t change a word of copy, nor did they change which elements were on the page, or their position. In fact, they just redesigned a few of the page elements, to give the page a more consistent design.
Here are the results:
The test results show a 7.4% increase in conversion. If that doesn’t sound like a lot to you, imagine what you’d need to pay a salesperson to increase your business by 7.4% indefinitely!
So, our message for today is, “If your visitors are concerned about the appearance or professionalism of your site, you could get a serious measurable improvement by redesigning it.”
Experience has shown us the far-reaching power that graphic design can have on a business. Until recently, we have only offered our graphic design services to clients of our performance-based consulting program, but, as a result of customer demand, we’re about to start making our design service openly available (subject to availability, of course). So, if you like the appearance of our website, and you’d like our in-house team to do the graphic design—or re-design—of your webpages, contact us now.
On a similar theme, if you’d like us to redesign the logo for one of your products—or for your business—you might like to see our logo portfolio, and our opinionated views on the importance of having a good logo.
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I have to agree with that.
My company did the exact same thing with a dental clinic which had an unprofessional website. The results were immediate. The only thing was, their conversion rate went up by 30%. We are now pushing their sales so high that their capacity is at the limit!
Very interesting statistics. For $19, I guess any improvements of a couple of percent, say 5% would be a great ROI. We have a new site that could potentially leverage this consultation. I’m particularly interested in the video.
Another great revealing tool would be installing a Live Person chat system and you would know how people stumbled over your site and their navigation experience.
I’m curious about how to get on the tester side of usertesting.com?
Hi Kenneth!
You need to check out this page. If you do decide to sign-up, please could you come back and let us know what it’s like from the other side?
Hi guys -
Having used UserTesting.com a great deal, I’ve got a couple of useful tips for getting the best out of them.
1. Make sure you set up the tester’s context. E.g. your dog is soiling your carpet, so you’re in the market for a course about how to train your dog. You’ve just seen the following pay per click ad, thought to yourself “that’s looks interesting” and clicked on the ad. This test starts at the page you land on at this link.
2. Make sure you set up the tester’s expectation. Now that you’re on this page, what would stop you from ordering this course?
I find that by setting expectations & context for your testers, you will get the best out of them. You are also positioning the testers to think negatively about your site, so anything that can hinder progress will pop out.
Cheers!
-Mike
CTO, Founder
Wordtracker.com
Brilliant advice Mike…thanks for your comment!
For any of you out there that don’t know Mike (or Wordtracker)…we’d highly recommend him, and his resources over at The Wordtracker Academy.
We’d also recommend a quick re-read of tip number 7 from our recent article 14 free tools that reveal why people abandon your website before carrying out any user testing.
I’ve used UserTesting.com multiple times with great success, they offer a great service. It’s a great way to get real people that aren’t your friends and family to look at a website for you. Watching the videos is incredibly informative.
We offer a similar service at EasyUsability.com, except that we guarantee that we’ll find usability testers in your exact target market, whether you’re looking for plumbers, or CTO’s. We don’t have video recording yet, but you can define your own questions, and it’s only $15. We also give everyone a free test.
Hi Doug…thanks for letting us know about your company. We’ll check your service out, and let our readers know how it goes.
This sounds like a great way to CRO your website.
Hey, I used CRO in a sentence :)
(I assume it’s analogous to SEO, right?)
Keep up the great work guys!
As always, a great article and a great resource. Thanks for pointing out this service. I just signed up for a few tests of one of my sites and will let you know how it goes.
This pretty much takes away any excuse for avoiding usability testing. Start to finish, it took me less than 15 minutes to get setup. Looks like I can easily run another identical test or variations of the test pretty easily too. Heck, this is easier than split testing. :-)
Have you tried ClickTale yet? It records mouse movement, scroll, and keyboard actions using javascript, then “plays back the recording” of your user’s visit as a “movie” using your site’s code in a frame.
Like I said, it’s somewhat addictive and they give you a generous number of free recordings, without obligation.
Hi Brian…we’re already big fans of ClickTale. Check out this page to hear how we use it (and other similar tools).
I couldn’t agree more with this post. Sometimes even if the website has great content but no visual appeal, it all stops there. Great post.
I definitely think that if you use the right graphic design it will get people to stick around a bit longer, plus it adds to credibility.
I just did a redesign for a client with the goal of reducing bounce rate – after 2 weeks the bounce rate dropped 15%. I absolutely agree design has a big impact.
WOW seems great for only $19, I will go take a look at it now and then pass it on to some of my clients, thanks :)