What happens when you ask visitors for their feedback. Things get brutal!
We did a landing page optimization for PITCHPROCESS, and while it’s never going to end. We decided to get a step further, beyond mouse / click tracking. And here’s what we found out.
Ok, before you read any further, if you’d like to track back a bit and read where we started this year… read the below post:
Now, that you’re back… let’s get to the latest experiment we did.
We have Hotjar installed on our site to see where people are clicking, the heatmap is useful and the mouse movement tracking is amazing!
You can actually see how people are interacting with the page. Here’s the heatmap snapshot for a desktop view from our last test.
Scroll down to see what happens afterwards…
And while we did have some hunches about the user experience, we need to “see it to believe it”.
When you grow to love your product, you close ears and eyes, for love is blind…
Well, we had our eyes open, but didn’t have our ears open. So we signed up with UserInput.IO to see what other’s would actually say. And because its a bit embarrassing, we’ll not show the full thing here :)
(Tip: use coupon code: twitter10 for 10% off your order)
Well, after you sign up. You can choose from a set of most popular questions (which are pretty good as they’ve doing this for some time!). We went for the mid package of 25 responses for $79. And chose 7 questions to help us understand first impressions. Here’s a preview… you get to sort by questions and by reviewer (the sorting needs some ux improving btw). Anyways…
So, we immediately took action on the feedback we got and redid the site home (landing) page. We still have some things to address, which we’ll do. One of them is building trust (difficult when you’re starting from scratch).
Apparently, having a phone number on your site builds the trust factor, or does it. Anyways, read https://conversionxl.com/phone-number-website/ for more information. We decided to include ours, and from what I hear from some friends, people hardly ever call the number (no, don’t do it for fun — that’s my personal number!).
Ok, so here’s the AFTER UserInput.IO…
The page is much shorter, we’ve actually hidden some stuff. It’s still on the page, and will only appear if you click or hover over elements.
Conclusion
One of the most important lessons, is that when you launch a product, before you gain traction, don’t just focus on user/visitor interaction, focus instead on user/visitor feedback (data vs insight). I guess we got the best feedback when we asked (asking the right questions is important).
What I would like to see, is a combination of Hotjar+Userinput. Where the user interaction is being recorded, and they’re answering the questions on the side. This way, you can see whether the person actually spent time on the page.
Some of the feedback from UserInput was terrible in the sense, it was as if they were just filling up a form to crank out some cash from the service. I could guess which person that was, because of the interaction time they spent on the site, which Hotjar provided — some were like 5 seconds.
But when you’re paying for a service to have your site reviewed, you’d expect to have those reviewers spend time on the site and provide critical feedback.
Having said that, some reviewers were definitely great, and objective. Fortunately, UserInput does have the ability to review the best reviewer and worst reviewer, which I presume builds the quality and bars those who do crappy jobs.
Next, we’ll share our findings from a social media experiment that is going on. We need enough data to see if its working. Stay tuned!
