Testing your site on mobile devices
So you invested time and money into your website (or a mobile app), and you’re watching your statistics, noting the rise in recent years of mobile devices, and you want to know more than just traffic, you want to know what people are clicking on. Are they clicking on your contact button or the large image on your landing page, or a green button over a red button? Without knowing any coding or really anything about technology, you can run a test, or a series of continual tests for serious metrics on your site or app.
Enter Plunk, the “quick way to test mobile interfaces with a tap of your finger.” Usability testing is critical when it comes to your website, and sometimes designs are gorgeous, but miss the mark when it comes to the action you’re hoping mobile users will take, for example, your goal may truly be for someone to click the giant “contact” button, but they may be clicking on the image of your face that goes to your about page instead. Be sure your site is doing what it is designed to do.
Plunk is a new app from Zurb which allows you to upload an image you want to test, and it will generate a URL to share with your test group, which also offers a Twitter and Facebook share button. The creators recommend you test with two groups, one with strangers, one with people you know. It is also a great tool for the design phase of a website so you can do some A/B testing (i.e. upload two files, one with a blue action button, for example, and one with a green action button, to see which tests better and gets more clicks).
Interactive sample test
Below is a sample test (which may not be live by the time you click it, so forgive us if the best we can offer is a screenshot):
Note it red that it immediately offers a success rate, the number of responses, and the average time a click took. Remember that it appears all tests have public results, so it may be advisable to keep tests limited to files that are not sensitive or private.
There is a free trial of Plunk, and they offer regular plans and pricing as well, which we point out not just so readers are aware, but because “create your own test” takes you to a completely different page with what appears to be a different company name, and a different app, but rest easy knowing that “Verify” and “Plunk” are both Zurb companies, thus you are not actually leaving Plunk, which is what it appears at first glance.
