How to get free feedback for websites from real users

I loved the pizza I always made, until a friend explained how pathetic it tasted. When we create something, it’s very likely that we’ll have emotional connect with that product. We won’t see issues that others are seeing. Same thing applies to our websites. We need expert opinions about how good or bad is something about the site we’ve created. Feedback is the hottest thing in e-business!

Get free feedback

Social networking is not limited to making friends and connecting with colleagues anymore. Networking has gone far beyond Facebook and Linked in. Nowadays, whatever you do, you have peers available online. Whether you are a photographer, designer or even a cook, there are networks available with specific interest. People put up their work online, get feedback on it, improvise and meanwhile, review others’ works.

Same way, there are free online hangouts available where you can get feedback on your website from other website owners. You can get expert opinion on your website’s information architecture, design aesthetics, usability etc. from people with same interest. Just like you and your friend testing each other’s pizzas.

Why is it important to get feedback?

Do we need to ask why? Never mind. As I said, when we create a website, we need unbiased opinion about how user-friendly it is. A fresh set of eyes doesn’t have any hang up with our product like we do.

When we create online surveys and have our customers answering them, we might not get answers beyond yes/no. We need experts who are making same stuff as we do. A customer might not be able to tell us whether we need to change the call-to-action or we need a product video to make things simple.

How it works

Give and take, simple. There are websites where we can sign up for free and have other website owners come and review our website. Unlike customer surveys, here we can ask professional questions like “How easy is the value proposition”, or “How simple is the checkout process”.

It’s free, but we have to earn it. We can get these valuable feedbacks only when we are giving same quality feedbacks to others. Also, while reviewing other sites, we can get great ideas for our own!

Feedbacks for Websites

There are many websites where site owners can review and get reviewed. There are two sites, which I loved andare treat to use. They work almost as I mentioned above, so I won’t get in to how. Rather I’ll highlight features.

Feedbackroulette

I was looking for paid services when I didn’t know about these kinds of sites. Feedbackroulette was the first one to amaze me.

Very easy to get started

Just sign up, submit your site and start reviewing other sites while you get them.

Earn points

Based on the reviews you provide, you get points and reputation. The better the reputation is, more are the chances that your site will be circulated more asking other people to review.

Review more & get more
Reviewing more sites increases chances of your website being circulated more and earn more feedbacks.

Paid plan available
With plans starting from $81 to $649, the only good thing you get in paid plans is that you can get premium feedback points that get you more reviews. I’ll recommend having more reviewers in-house to earn more FPs (feedback points)

1. 1. Concept feedback

Post reviews to get started

Here, it’s not that easy to start getting reviews. You have to review other sites, and then only you can get them back.

Great reviewing system

As compared to feedbackroulette, feedback system here is more organized and more friendly to use. You can rate features as “Minor problem”, “serious problem” etc. so sites owners can prioritize their optimization as well.

You can even highlight problems by showing annotations on a screenshots.

Paid reviews by experts

If you want to get the website reviewed by a qualified expert, you can pay $99 and hire one. You can even hire more. $99 per expert is not a bad price for the quality of reviews it provides.

So, this was a small feature review for two great free websites for getting free reviews on your website/application design. If you can’t afford time for these give and take systems, you can even use paid usability testing tools like usertesting, silverback, verifyapp etc. Using tools like feedbackroulette and conceptfeedback are great free feedback tools while getting new ideas by reviewing others.

Ultimately feedbacks for websites from users are very essential for boosting user experience and conversion rate.