This series is supported by Ben & Jerry’s Joe, Ben & Jerry’s new line-up of Fair Trade and frozen iced coffee drinks. Learn more about it here.
For designers, one of the most critical parts of a project is getting critiques and advice on how to improve designs. After all, they create designs that will be used by many other people. Getting an outside perspective helps spot issues and validate design choices.
With the web’s ability to connect us to people from all over the world, getting feedback has never been easier. This list of 10 tools will enable you to share your work and receive reviews of it. You’ll find websites dedicated to offering free design critiques as well as tools you can use to conduct usability testings with real people in order to benchmark your design’s efficacy in the wild.
1. Critique The Site
This handy web tool allows you to gather feedback about a website’s design. The tool works simply by adding a left frame beside the subject web page where users can leave feedback. Reviewers must first log in using a popular web service such as Twitter, Gmail, Facebook, or OpenID before being able to post a review of the site.
This tool makes it convenient to share a site for critiquing and gathering feedback, relying on the social web’s unrestrained penchant for talking about things. This tool is, however, limited to the amount of people you have access to as it doesn’t have a base of reviewers at hand to review your site.
2. Please Critique Me
Please Critique Me, a web resource by web design agency OnWired, offers free design critiques by one of its design critics. Members of the panel include recognizable names such as Chris Spooner, Grace Smith (who also writes for Mashable), Sarah Parmenter, and more.
The website is not only great for getting your designs critiqued by professionals, but is also a way to learn about effective design principles by reading archived critiques.
3. Reviews and Critiques – SitePoint
SitePoint, a premier online media company that publishes articles and e-books aimed at web designers and developers, has a forum specifically for getting design feedback from their huge 350,000+ registered users. In the Website Reviews forum, where designers can request feedback on their web design, there are over 5,000 threads and 95,000 posts, indicating the large activity and regular availability of the community to help their fellow designers out by providing feedback.
4. Bounce
Bounce is a simple web application that gives web designers a platform for soliciting ideas and feedback about their website. It is intuitive to use — plug in your web design’s URL and it generates a screenshot of the site which people can make comments on.
If you have a social network of designers, this can be a fun and easy way of gathering feedback using web services such as Twitter and Facebook.
5. Five Second Test
Five Second Test presents reviewers with a screen capture of a web design that they need to evaluate in five seconds. Evaluation can be done in two ways: Memory test and click test. Memory tests shows users a web layout for five seconds, then asks them what they remember afterwards. Click tests ask participants to click on the most prominent items on the page (also within five seconds). The theory is to see if a web design is effective in making important design elements visible and memorable.
The tool is free, but is limited to only five results and is placed in the lowest priority in the testing queue. Paid options are available and range between $5-15, affording designers the ability to provide custom instructions when their web layout is presented. Paid tests are also given higher priority in the queue.
Registered users who take the tests are awarded karma points that can later be used for upgrading their own tests, thus yielding more results.
6. Concept Feedback
Concept Feedback leverages the crowd for design insights. Each reviewer of your concept will rate your work on four items: Design, purpose, originality and engagement. Reviewers are encouraged to participate and provide high-quality feedback through game mechanics such as achievements and attaining different ranks (such as Elite or Titan).
The service is free, but you will have to review five concepts before you can post your own. Premium services are available at $10-50 per concept, and can include the options to post the concept immediately, have your concept promoted on Twitter, and receive a minimum amount of reviews.
7. UserTesting.com ($39)
UserTesting.com provides you with a cost-effective way to conduct remote trials of your site. You will be able to get feedback about your design by way of a video of a visitor speaking as he or she goes through your site, as well as written summaries of the problems they have encountered.
Steve Krug, usability guru and author of the groundbreaking book, Don’t Make Me Think, says that, “UserTesting.com is perfect for quick-and-dirty usability testing. It’s inexpensive, requires almost no effort, and gets you results incredibly quickly, often in just a few hours.”
8. Usabilla
Usabilla is another platform for conducting usability testing. This is a useful tool for obtaining feedback if you already have a live site up or would like to analyze the performance of a site redesign. Usabilla collects feedback from your visitors via a built-in annotation tool and other features that measure task performance. The tool presents the user with an on-screen activity (such as “Click on the most prominent object on this page”) and records the time it takes to complete the task.
Usabilla is free for one web page and can include up to 50 participants per test. Premium features are between $49 and $950 per year and include the ability to use the tool on more pages and include more participants per test.
9. Feedback Army ($15)
Feedback Army enables you to gather a more focused discussion around the review of your design. When you submit a feedback request, you are able to pose 4-6 questions that you would like answered by reviewers. Questions you can ask may be “What aspect of the site confused you?” or “What would improve this site?”
$15 gets you 10 reviews with an estimated one to three hours turnaround time, which is great for rapid and cost-effective reviews of your work.
10. Userfly
Sometimes, you don’t need to have direct feedback in order to get meaningful information about the success or failures of your designs. With Userfly you can analyze how people are using your website. The free service records a screencast of how your users are interacting with your user interface. With just one line of code plugged into your web pages, you’re good to go.
Premium plans are between $10-200 per month and get you more captures (results), the ability to use the https protocol and longer storage of your captures.
Which tools are you using to get web design feedback? Let us know in the comments.
Series supported by Ben & Jerry’s Joe
This series is supported by Ben & Jerry’s Joe, Ben & Jerry’s new line-up of Fair Trade and frozen iced coffee drinks. Learn more about it here.
More About: Bounce, Concept Feedback, Critique The Site, feedback army, Five Second Test, List, Lists, Please Critique Me, SitePoint, usabilla, userfly, usertesting.com, web design, web design series
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