20 Tools to test how your users experience your website

Design is based on a lot of assumptions. It is imperative that you test with your real users or prospective users to understand how they really perceive and use your website. Keeping users in mind at every phase of your web design and development process helps avoid re-designs.

There are several things to consider when measuring the usability of a website. While observing a real user use your site, gives a good idea of how users interact with your site, there are several tools also to measure how your users experience your site. All this qualitative and quantitative assessment of your design helps in improving the overall user experience and validating the assumptions on which the design is conceptualized.

Keeping yourself up-to-date on how your users are using your product is a task to be taken seriously as that is a real reflection of what your work stands for. Yet, it is often ignored by many teams. This article is a compilation of several methods to track user activity, reaction, feedback and behavior.

Observe real users

There is no better way to get a feel for how your site is being used than observe a real user use it. Nerve wrecking it is for sure, but also very insightful. An activity like this does not require a huge number of user profiles to conclude. Research suggests, it only takes 5 users to uncover 75% of UX problems. So, if 5 or more users are getting stuck somewhere or are not able to perceive your message, it means it needs fixing.

A few things to keep in mind:

• While asking users to share their feedback for the site, it is important to ensure that you let them experience the site as they would have used it without being observed. That means, no handholding, pretend that you are not there, just like you would not be when your real users use your site.
• Focus on one task at a time, to understand and measure its impact effectively.

Here is a how Uber does its field research and user testing.