The Ultimate Website Test Usability Question

Greetings Earthling, it’s time for another glorious installment of “pretty awesome questions you can ask people.”

In this edition, we’ll be turning our gaze to the ULTIMATE usability question you can ask yer peeps.

First… right off the bat, there’s three types of individuals you should always think about recruiting to test your website:

1) The Expert. Hire a UX (usability) expert to deconstruct or “tear down” your website, looking for conversion obstacles based on “best practices,” and his infinite wisdom

2) The Average User. The average user is my favorite type of recruit, because they don’t know about your business at all. You should always keep this visitor type in mind when you’re designing your site.

3) The In Betweener. Between the expert and the LCD is the individual who lives in your world, but doesn’t know much in terms of usability “best practices.” This generally is your target market and someone whose input will likely be invaluable to you.

As with any research, the tools and targets you use only give you a fragment of reality. So it’s probably best to recruit them all, to get different perspectives & inputs.

Now there’s lots of usability questions you can and should ask each of these types of individuals, but in my experience the one that always yields the best insight for all – and why I call it the ultimate usability question is:

What’s great about this question is that it fits all the criteria of a truly awesome questions:

1. It’s simple
2. It doesn’t try to do too much
3. It packs a punch (meaning, you get good insight out of it)

Adding the words “major or minor” is especially key as it takes a little pressure off the survey taker, and so the individual feels free to answer with something large and strategic, or could get down more in the weeds with something a little more actionable & tactical. You could get as feedback website bugs, small issues, big ideas, design, or anything really. And since it’s an open-ended question, you’ll get more useful, unexpected feedback than a simple multiple choice question would provide.

In my experience, having run hundreds if not thousands of these types of studies,  it tends to yield the most interesting, and wide ranging insight.

So there it is. Why don’t you try asking it to your next visitor, or if you’d like, hire me to recruit people to do it for you, starting as low as only $5!