You’ve worked hard on your website, but people don’t seem to be sticking around. It happens to us all, and it’s really frustrating. As the creator of a website, it’s difficult to see the reasons why people aren’t coming back objectively. You might think that using a certain font makes the site look like this but a new person visiting might hate it and never read your site again.
Usertesting.com has a feature on their site called Peek which allows you to submit your site to be reviewed by someone who probably has never visited your website before. We submitted our site and soon after received a 4 minute video where someone visited the site and answered the following questions.
- What is your first impression? What is the site for?
- What is the first thing you would like to do on this page? Try to do it, and describe your experience.
- What stood out to you on this website? What was frustrating?
- Final thoughts and suggestions
The video we received was really interesting – all we could tell from the voiceover was that it was a guy reviewing the site who was actually interested in starting a blog. He said that the Facebook pop up that appears when you scroll down was a little annoying, so we’ve adjusted the settings on that. The final suggestions mentioned about creating a tag line to tell people what we’re about when they visit the site and how to get started so we’re looking into that now (suggestions welcome!)
We’ve used Peek in the past with older layouts to see what people thought and had some pretty negative feedback so it’s important to remember when submitting your site that the person reviewing doesn’t know you, isn’t trying to offend you and is just providing their honest opinion. This is just one persons opinion, but it can help you improve your site. If you’re interested in what was said about Bonjour, Blogger!, you can watch the video here (or we’ve uploaded it to YouTube so we can embed it below.)
Peek is probably more useful for those bloggers who are looking to convert readers into buying something rather than a blogger just starting out – newbie bloggers may get more useful information by asking friends, people on Twitter or in a Facebook group aimed towards bloggers for opinions.
