Eye Tracking: Evaluating Landing Page Usability With Surveys

Landing page, splash page, homepage. Call it what you will – there are many names for the first page of a website, that is – the page that is supposed to be the starting point for users. But with the growth of powerful and effective search engines, the landing page is becoming somewhat moot, as users can now reach specific pages within a website directly and without having to begin at the beginning before they navigate their way through a myriad of pages in search of the information they want.

On many websites, web surfers are guided to the page they want through a sequence of prompts that progressively filter out unneeded information. And so these advances in technology and design have changed the way we use websites and the way we approach them when we find them.

Still, a landing page can provide a sort of table of contents for the site, as it’s still the cover page, the face of the site that can set the aesthetic for the rest of the pages within.
But how do you test the usability of a landing page and whether it’s meeting the needs of the audience or the organization, when people aren’t really using it in the first place.

An article published in Indus, a tech newsletter from India, presented some ideas on usability testing for landing pages. Hard data like click tales and heatmaps are helpful, but end-user surveys can be insightful in the reasoning behind some of the more concrete navigation behaviors of a visitor to the website. End-user surveys do have pros and cons, however, some of which Indus has lain out:

• A survey that provides an opportunity to choose test participants keeps answers and information relevant to the site.
• End-user surveys can provide focused usability testing on specific areas of a site, and they also enable meaningful and relevant feedback.
• They can ensure a wide coverage of usability issues, and the more information, the better.

There is a sampling bias, however, in the selection of test participants, and while end-user surveys can provide a good chance to select survey participants, if it’s not done well, it can render the survey unscientific. Subjective answers mean inconsistent quality of responses in the more open-ended questions, as well as subjectivity in designing the test questions in the first place. The major problem is that end-user surveys are not done in real time, and asking a participant to report on their actions while they’re doing them can be distracting and make for altered results anyway.

The Value of End-User Surveys in Testing Landing-Page Usability

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