Is your website clear, attractive and trustworthy?
Would you be able to explain what, for instance, Slack is, in a short sentence so your colleague (or grandma) knows what it is for? Does Slack explain it well on their website? Let’s take a look.
Having a business usually means creating a website about it, especially when you’re in a “Software as a Service” (SaaS) model. Your page should grab users’ attention, explain the main purpose and seem trustworthy.
Of course, your own page would almost always seem to meet these requirements FOR YOU, but would it for other visitors?
How about Slack then.
We’ve analyzed 3 websites offering communication tool for teams: commonly known Slack and as alternatives: Happeo and Bitrix24. Every page was tested by 50 people. We supposed that Slack, as a market leader will win in every aspect. And guess what? We couldn’t be more wrong!
We have compiled the results below in 3 categories:
- likeability of the page,
- trust
- offer understanding
doing a 5-seconds exposure and after a 45-seconds exposure.
After the first, 5-seconds display, testers were asked to tell how much they agree with three statements about liking the page, trusting it and understanding the offer. Then they all browsed freely through the analyzed website and answered the same 3-question form.
Now let’s see the results from both the 5- and 45-second tests for every website.
Generally, all parameters (like, trust and understand) are higher after longer browsing time. What does it mean? It’s normal, but the bigger are the differences, the more room for some improvements.
Slack did a really bad job at explaining during first look, it gest the highest score after long display time though— so there’s definitely a place for improvement. Slack website is also the ugliest one (above the fold, after 5-second display) and importantly — visitors don’t trust it at the very beginning.
Let’s see how it looks like (above the fold):
There’s no social proof (companies who’re using this tool), there's no testimonial or anything that usually works for gaining the trust- and reduce the Bounce Rate. Why? I don’t know, seriously. Maybe they are popular enough and spread through WOM (Word of the mouth) rather than google search — but still, they’re probably bouncing lots of visitors because of that.
The image of wooden balls doesn’t give a clue what this website sells (remember that fresh visitors don’t know that Slack is a tool!).
Let’s see how the category winner (like & trust) looks like:
Social proof above the fold (BMW, WWF) definitely put trust to a higher level. Also — there’s a little screenshot of the tool itself so visitors know it’s a software (not a quality assurance process for factories).
update: Shortly after we made the reports, Slack released a new Landing Page which is using some image explainer of what the tool is (blow).
We can also see people's ideas of what’s the page about and compare these answers with the indicator or find out why do people have problems with understanding. For example, Slack’s slogan was “Slack replaces email inside your company” and many people thought it to be some other email service, not an instant messaging app.
We also did some online eye-tracking analysis and from the eye-tracking data, it was clear, that all pages had proper information architecture (although Happeo had a little too attention-grabbing image that draws users’ attention away from slogan).
You can see the whole reports below:
Now you can see how important it can be to get users’ feedback and not to trust just your hunch.
Bill Gates once said:
“We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve”,
We’ve used a tool called RE/Feedback to get all those insights.
So whether you want to reduce the bounce rate, A/B test your layouts (i.e. new layout vs an old one) or just find out what people think, RE/Feedback is the right tool for you.
Now, what does the report contain?
Our research is made based on a few steps. The first one is a 5/6-second test with eye-tracking to get at users’ very first impressions of the page.
Then, they receive a follow-up survey including questions about:
- how they liked the page -liking the page increase chance to trust it and to stay there longer,
- would they trust it -trust is the first step to increase conversions,
- what it was about -if a page communicates your offer well to visitors it’s more likely to increase engagement and reduce bounce rate.
This way we can see what stands out to them, what do they recall, what were the most attention-grabbing elements (so order of noticing these elements) and if they get your message right.
In the next step, we ask testers to browse the website freely for 30–45 seconds and then give them the same questions (for comparison purposes).
They are also welcome to leave any additional comments about the page.
Having all this data we make a summary and statistics, but also we write down conclusions based on that and our recommendations.
What is the eye-tracking part for?
Thanks to the eye-tracking test we can find out which part of your website testers are looking at. We measure the average time that people were looking at certain elements, how many of them have seen these elements and how fast these elements were noticed. Then we calculate this data into the Attention Score of each element. This way we check if users pay attention to the most important elements like slogan or CTA and if something distracts them (so we analyze information architecture).
Not getting users’ feedback may be dangerous for your business.
It’s crucial to know whether they like and trust your page and if they understand your offer from the very beginning. Not knowing if there’s any issue may seriously harm your traffic, which means harm your conversion rate.
RE/Feedback is a great tool to understand the real reasons why people stay or bounce when they visit your website. So stop being guided by gut feelings, start being guided by real data. And remember:
“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
~Ken Blanchard
