Feedback Army – Crowdsourcing Usability Testing
Raphael Mudge the founder of Dashnine Media contacted us about his latest venture, Feedbackarmy.com
Usability testing, user reviews and focus groups are recommended to ensure the success of your projects, and will enable the identification of problems and issues early on. Unfortunately usability testing can be expensive, and finding the right user sample, organising user surveys, can be time consuming and over the budget of many smaller startups (and many large companies!).
Feedback Army takes usability testing to the next level, and enables you to submit a website, survey questions, and get up to 50 responses within days – Not weeks.
Feedback Army taps into crowdsourcing through the Amazon Mechanical Turk webservice, which enables it to leverage an on-demand and scalable workforce which is paid per HIT (or task). This is a great way to get access to a huge workforce, which can execute tasks within minutes for a few $$$.
Feedback Army sent us an invitation to try out their service, and within two minutes we had submitted our survey. We checked again a day later, and we had 10 responses waiting full of interesting feedback from users – Not bad!
The service starts at $7 for 10 up to $33 for 50 responses – This is really affordable, and you will find that this is a great way of getting real world feedback at short notice – Ideal for testing anything from offers, landing pages, websites, the possibilities area endless.
One element I would suggest to be added to the service would be an option to segment responses by demographic – answers from 10 random users has value, but feedback from targeted users is ultimately more powerful.
So don’t delay, check out the service at feedbackarmy.com and use it to improve your products, services, and websites.
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Dashnine Media » Feedback Army Review @ Indie Startups:
January 24th, 2009
7:50 pm
[…] Chris at Indie Startups has posted a review of Feedback Army. Check it out here. […]
Bryan Migliorisi:
January 27th, 2009
2:16 am
I just purchased 25 site-reviews from FeedbackArmy for $23 – not a bad deal at first glance.
Then the reviews started to roll in.
Some of them were concise and actually helpful. The rest of them seem like unintelligent people who write shorthand “lolspeak” instead of English (or any other real language for that matter) and do not actually bother investigating into the site. So far, of the 10 reviews I have received to this point, only 3 of them have actually registered for my site, which means that only 3 of them could have actually answered my questions regarding the registration process. Interestingly, the other 7 did in fact comment on the process.
I suppose, like anything else, you get what you pay for and usability testing is no different.
Is this service worth the money? I am not sure – I guess it depends on the questions you ask, and luck of the draw – who will you get to answer your questions? A 15 year old (likely pretending to be older) who cant spell or an adult who is actually going to take their “job” seriously.
If you are a small startup, like me, without funding or any money in general, then yes – this site serves its purpose. If you can afford a real usability testing service then dont waste your time and money with FeedbackArmy.
At this point I am not sure if I would use this service again – but i guess that is better than knowing that I would never use it again.
Martin Lewis:
January 31st, 2009
8:30 am
Interesting input Bryan. Thanks.