As a consultant, it’s important for me to be friendly and familiar with several vendors in any category, from advertising to graphic design to people who optimize databases for profile search. Lately I have been interviewing usability testing companies for a variety of clients.
All clients are not in the same place at the same time. Startups need best practices and a cheap solution. A site with 50,000 users is at a different place, and so is a site with 200,000 daily logins. One shop will not fit all of the requirements, timeline and working style of all clients. I’m akin to a general contractor in these situations. I work with dating sites to figure out what they need, then I go out and find the vendors that match their particular requirements.
Things get really interesting when talking with user experience companies. Some take a project, run with it, and deliver the results. Nobody really knows why a certain design was delivered, it’s just “the right way to do it.” This works for some clients, who just want to see the needle move in a positive direction, regardless of how it happens.
Others are more data-driven. Their bookshelves, like mine, are filled with books like Always Be testing, Web Analytics and Call to Action. Multivariate testing, A/B testing and lots of other tests and procedures and metrics are used to optimize the user experience and get visitors to turn into members and members to extend their memberships or go for an up-sell.
Today I read a fascinating article at GigaOM called Hacking Traction: The Dark Side of Marketing Optimization.
Misunderstanding the objective of traction, a number of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have mastered the art of driving millions of people to a site or application regardless of whether the product solves a real problem or not. At best, this approach skews the data used to discover if a product is getting the kind of usage that would indicate there’s a big enough market for it. At worst, it’s spam.
Hackers hack everything, not just code
That things would go down this path should have been obvious. I’m not sure who kicked off this hacking traction phenomenon, but a small group of extremely bright entrepreneurs now use a very sophisticated form of multivariate testing. For example, they simultaneously test an extremely large number of variables on a registration page in order to maximize registration (the copy, size, color, font and placement of data fields; the format and text of buttons; the flow of pages), then do the same thing on the “invite friends†page (the text of the body and subject of the invite email), and so on.
This method takes advantage of latent human behaviors to drive registrations and visits — and in terms of those goals, it’s unbelievably effective. While this knowledge is still relatively well guarded, it is slowly making its way through Silicon Valley.
This is how dating sites seemingly come from nowhere to to top of the charts. There are many tricks to be learned ranging from adding yellow coloring near signup forms to disingenuous interstitial landing pages created by affiliates leading to unrelated dating sites.
Landing page optimization is the next big arena of exploration for dating sites. As GigaOM states, this is a black art. To me, it’s the logical progression of SEO. Landing page optimization firms, like SEO companies, have been around for years, but have you noticed the plethora of SEO firms that have sprouted up recently? It’s like they just learned that Google rank relies heavily on inbound links.
It’s amazing the stuff that passes for a home page these days. Big co’s like Match and eHarmony and OKCupid test things each and every day, but the majority of dating sites have a “set it and forget it” mentality. They are glad their site is up and running they often don’t want to try anything new, in fear of their house of cards coming down at the slightest touch.
Nothing could be farther from reality. A dating site and it’s marketing campaign need constant attention, tweaks and testing. The companies that figure this out can make millions, the rest toil along in relative obscurity. What kind of dating site do you want to be?
User experience/testing/analytics is incredibly rich area of focus and I’m enjoying absorbing as much as possible right now. I’m not a user experience expert, although I make it my business to understand at a fairly deep level what all of my vendors are capable of, what they are good at and most importantly, what they don’t do as well as they should. Maybe in a few months I’ll understand 10% behind the principles of what they do and what works for dating sites.
ClickTale is a company I came across recently. Their service enables you to see where people hover their mouse over your pages. On signup forms and landing pages this is absolutely amazing to see. I’m starting to get comfortable with the service, running it on this blog and looking forward to seeing the results of the analysis. Click their ad in the sidebar to and see for yourself, it’s fascinating and actionable stuff and you can start learning how users navigate your site immediately.
I’m going to start doing some tests here, because I have years of Google Analytics data that I want to comb through and identify trends in search terms and the most (and least) popular areas of the site. I’d like by this autumn for the blog to greet you and configure itself based on your preferences. Personalized content is key and it all begins with knowing what people are doing (or not doing) on your site.
Dating site owners: How important is usability testing to the success of your site? Is it something you live and breath by, or do you rely on intuition, waving rubber chickens over the servers, or something in between? If you regularly run user testing labs, what do you measure and what are you finding?
Something tells me usability testing is going to get a boost once companies like ClickTale figure out how to create services that automate the process and tie into solution providers, which is a missing link right now. Otherwise this knowledge stays up in the expensive seats and most companies are left to their own devices, guesstimating instead of acting on concrete metrics and research. Google has done a lot of the hard work but it’s still far too difficult for most companies to implement understand and act on without expensive consultants (think SEO firms).
Hopefully this will change over time and someday dating site will judged by their effectiveness and efficiency and customer satisfaction instead of who can afford the most junk social networking and questionable affiliate traffic.
