

Idea: Mechanical Turk for page usability testing? - tkiley

My company provides a very unique service -- one that is difficult to explain properly in a few words.<p>As I've worked on designing our web site (particularly the homepage), it occurred to me that it would be nice to be able to do some simple testing with something like the mechanical turk: submit a web page to the service, which would flash it in front of a tester for 5-10 seconds, and then have the tester answer questions about their comprehension of the site's purpose and benefits, and perhaps their own objections or responses. (More in-depth testing processes wouldn't be difficult, but that's the first one that comes to mind for me)<p>I'm working in a pretty unique environment right now -- the market is somewhat small and difficult to target, but ridiculously high-margin (we're looking at creating $500+ profit per user within 1 week of sign-up, essentially.).<p>With low traffic, it's hard to get solid numbers out of page variation testing, and in a wholly new market, I don't even know if most visitors understand our service, so I see the value in turk-ish testing for myself, but I'm not sure if it would have a broad appeal. Would any of you find mechanical turk-based usability testing valuable?
======
randallsquared
"Would any of you find mechanical turk-based usability testing valuable?"

Quite valuable, yes. :) Perhaps the people that create forum traffic to
jumpstart new sites could expand into this easily. I can't remember the names
of any of them at the moment...

