Usability testing vs A/B testing
I think A/B testing is overpraised and overvalued. While A/B testing can help you test 2 or more versions of any part of your site, it cannot give you the inspiration on what variations to create and what will lead to wins, small or big.
I optimize websites and especially e-commerce sites since 2005. Have reviewed more than 5000 websites. Got the Analytics and Website Optimizer Certified Partner badge by Google and I think that the quickest and highest ROI method of conversion optimization is usability testing.
According to this Nielsen Norman Group study, investing 10% of your development budget on usability testing, should improve your conversion rate by 83%!
Usability testing allows you to see your website through your users’ eyes and that gives you the inspiration on what to improve, and either apply it right away, or a/b test it, if the traffic and the conversions you have allow for a/b testing. (You need at least 100 conversions per variation in order to have valid results).
I am so certain about usability testing, that when, in 2010 wanted to run remote usability tests on my Greeks’ clients websites, built my own platform and assembled a panel of testers because there was no service that offered or allowed Greek testers. That led to the creation of userfeel.com, which is, as far as I know the only remote usability platform that offers usability testing in more than 40 languages. We have ran tests for small and big companies in French, Chinese, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Russian to name a few and always saw the same thing: Usability testing is the highest ROI method to improve your website.
Even on websites that we think that everything is straight forward, we find dozens of issues that affect the bottom line. Usability testing reveals not only usability issues, but also perception issues, and technical bugs. And these issues are revealed with 5–10 user sessions. No need for more to get great value! Best thing of all, most of the issues are usually easy and cheap to solve! Just a different or extra wording makes all the difference.
How do you persuade your boss to run usability testing? Easy. Run a small scale sample usability test with maybe 1 or 2 participants and create a highlights video out of it. That video should not be more than 1–2 minutes long. Showcasing 3–4 issues is usually enough to get approval for a larger scale usability test.
See an example:
At userfeel.com we offer a free usability testing session so you can check our platform and create that highlights video for your team. In fact, our platform allows you to add the crucial clips to a highlights video and export it to your YouTube account. I’ll be glad to show you how to do that. Go ahead and give it a try!
