opportunity__cost

Has Groupon's ship sailed? Well, with its IPO pending, the group-buying leader has seen traffic decline nearly 50% since its peak in the second week of June.

That's according to new Hitwise data based on Web-based traffic, but excluding mobile and app-specific traffic.

"Regardless ... the drop-off in Groupon traffic this summer has been significant," according to Bill Tancer, GM of global research at Hitwise.

During the same time period, rival Living Social saw a 27% increase in visits to its site.

In the past few years, there has been massive growth in new and exciting cheap or free web site usability testing tools, so here’s my list of 24 tools you may need to use from time to time.

Gone are the days of using expensive recruitment firms, labs and massive amounts of time to create, deploy and report on usability tests.

By using these usability testing tools and others like them, you have for the first time a complete set of tools designed to tackle almost any usability research job.

From recruiting real users (with tools such as Ethnio) to conducting live one on one remote moderated tests (UserVue) to analyzing results of usability changes using A/B testing (Google Website Optimizer), there is a plethora of useful and usable tools to conduct usability testing.

Great and the most detailed review of usability testing tools. Craig saves you a plenty of time instead of evaluating these tools yourself.

On the other note, I've run an experiment on using Amazon Mechanical Turk for conducting UX tests. As I thought, it didn't real work out. About 80% of "robots" went the easy way and just clicked on the first selection available. And although they claimed to spend from 4 to 15 minutes on test (each), the control response points averaged less than 3 minutes for a test.

Few interesting facts. They did click on the first available option while running through the navigation-path test, however, they provided a very mixed responses for a final survey screen (one question with five answers pre-set). It looks like they felt like it'll be a good indicator of them bringing some value back.

The other thing, those ones whom I rejected from the final run because of too little of time spent or abandoning the survey (but claiming a completion), the good portion of them actually reached out to me by email fighting back. I guess they spent at least as much effort as was required for completing a survey just to bitch on me. :)

Take care.

At the end of Customer Discovery you should have identified a customer problem worth solving and started building your solution (MVP). During Customer Validation, you’ll test your finished MVP by selling it to earlyvangelists and in the process start developing a repeatable and scalable sales process.

One more great post by Ash Maurya on Customer Validation. Give it a look.

Google Website Optimizer, a powerful tool that allows website owners to split traffic and test the effectiveness and conversion rates for an array of variables, has traditionally required a lot of back-and-forth between any given site and the Website Optimizer interface.

Google releases an API and is allowing site owners to conduct multivariate and A/B testing from their own platform. I'm not sure how well does it compare to Mixpanel or similar products, but I'm planning to find some time for it.