Editor’s note: Tema Frank is president of Web Mystery Shoppers International Inc., Edmonton, Alberta.

First, the good news: companies are increasingly recognizing that Web sites are too important to be left strictly in the hands of programmers and also that market research is essential to effective Web site design. The bad news: there is a bewildering array of techniques being touted to assess a company’s Web site effectiveness. How do you know which to use?

This article discusses different approaches to getting feedback on your Web site. In an ideal world, you would use each of the techniques discussed in this article at some point during your Web site’s life cycle. But this isn’t an ideal world, and odds are you don’t have the time or the budget to do them all. So how do you decide?

The type of testing you do should depends on a combination of your organization’s stage in the Web site life cycle and your goals for testing. Realistically, it will also be influenced by cost and time pressures.

This article examines six Web site testing methods:

1. Focus groups (in-person or online)

2. Lab-based usability testing

3. Web-based (pop-up) surveys

4. Metrics/analytics software

5. Unsolicited customer feedback

6. Remote usability testing

Most market researchers are already familiar with focus groups, and so they naturally gravitate to using them to get qualitative feedback on Web sites. Such focus groups typically involve six to 12 people, who may be chosen from your existing customer base or recruited externally. They are brought into a meeting room where they have a group discussion, led by a moderator, about the Web site. If the site does not yet exist, they may be asked what they would like to see in such a site. They may be shown page mock-ups, drawings, or led through an card-sorting exercise which is intended to help the site designers figure ou...