I got triggered by the "Army" part of this service. It reminded me of ancient warfare strategy described in the 6th century BC by Sun Tzu in "The Art of War", a Chinese military treatise. In his last chapter he describes "The Use of Spies/The Use of Intelligence", focusing on the importance of using good information sources. Although I already joined the marines in my early twenties, I decided to join the Feedback Army!
"Take That Hill!"
Here is what I did:
- Placed two orders at feedbackarmy.com, for USD 10 each
- Per order I submitted two questions for this site. I just submitted the following questions, as suggested by Feedback Army in the Usability Test form:
1. What does this site do?
2. What aspect of the site confused you?
and in the second order:
3. What would improve this site?
4. How does it work?
For each order/review 10 unknown and remote web site visitors replied within just a couple of hours. All reviews are reported back to you either online or in a RSS reader, you'll get both links in the order placement confirmation. So for USD 20 we got two online reports, one counting about 1,300 words, one with 700 words.
From the answers it was clear that the reviews are done by real life people. Only one of the reviews was pretty useless, 19 out of 20 reviews were short and accurate. Each review states the browser and operating system used in its footer, if a reviewer reports a browser related issue, you'll be able to identify it fast.
Conclusion
We already implemented a few quick wins based on the reviews we got by making small changes to the color scheme on a few pages. Some of the suggested 'improvements' will be neglected, like the one suggesting not to use a white background for this site (?). Although the replies we got did convince us of the fact that we are getting the message across for this site, we might add a "Take the Tour"-section as a direct result of the reviews we got through Feedback Army.
USD 20 is not a lot of money to get prompt feedback on your site's usability and I'd recommend you to give Feedback Army a try. Feedback Army's service is not rocket science, but it's bullet proof.
What do you recommend for Usability Testing on your site? Please leave your comment...
Why wait? 
