Posted by Paolo | Posted in feedback | Posted on 10-08-2009
WuFoo.com is a great way to get user input with slick, web 2.0 forms. It’s free for up to three forms and 100 entries per month, which means it’s a great option for blogs, small businesses, and community organizations that want to collect a survey, a registration, or contact info. (You can link it up with a PayPal account for in-form payments if you have a premium account.)
The form builder is very intuitive, easy, and fast, but be sure to test whatever you create before you put it out into the world! Also pairing your form with a privacy policy or terms of use statement is a best practice to reassure people that you’re not just harvesting their info. For anyone that’s gotten spammed by unsecured PHP contact form scripts, WuFoo is also worth checking out, as it supports Captcha and you can limit responses to one-per-IP if desired.
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No posts in a month…for shame! I’ve been busy implementing some new e-Commerce solutions, and have found out some interesting things along the way. I finally got around to using Kampyle for feedback lead generation. It puts a little floater on your page which users can click on and leave an emoticon rating or a detailed feedback report, and do it anonymously or with a contact email. Why sit around wondering what works and what doesn’t on your site, and pour through Analytics reports when you can cut to the chase and ask users directly? I’m happy with it so far, and I’m excited about the prospect of people catching bugs and oddities on my sites without just getting frustrated and leaving.
I also noticed that Zappos is using SurveyMonkey for user suveys about its new shopping engine and interface called Zeta. Way to do a beta test! There’s no use in letting the general public try a new version without attempting to get feedback about usability. This is also a great time to check out AlertBox, the definitive usability newsletter and blog. But then, that shouldn’t be confused with a new SaS tool called AlertFox, which runs daily tests for uptime on your site, and can handle iMacros to even test forms and login pages. (If you just need basic uptime monitoring, there’s the free AreMySitesUp and Pingdom.)
If you want to try out different content to generate different feedback, I’ve just begun the plunge into Google’s Website Optimizer, which is free, fast and fairly foolproof. It plugs some javascript into your pages and serves up the alternate content for A/B or multivariate testing. The possibilities are endless. On that note, I’ve also been reading Tim Ash’s excellent book, (worth reading!) called Landing Page Optimization: The Definitive Guide to Testing and Tuning for Conversions.
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