We held a small focus group at Judy’s Book on Friday last week. Nothing fancy, just invited a couple of people into our offices to use our deals site and see what they thought of it. In 30 minutes, we learned so much about how our product was perceived, we resolved to run sessions like this every 2-3 weeks. It’s one thing to monitor statistics on a page like click-through, time on page, exit rate etc, but it’s quite another to watch a real live user carry out simple tasks and see where they struggle.

One example, we aggregate deals from top online retailers and you can browse to them by going to a page we call “Deals by Store”. This seemed logical to us, but during our focus group, people were uncertain whether clicking on that link would take them off our site and they were unclear as to why we would have deals from other stores. While the notion between a deal site and an e-commerce site was clear to us, it wasn’t clear to these users.

There were tons of little examples like this, but if there’s one general point I would make it’s that we need to do a better job of making the consequences of actions clear to users. Most people I know are sophisticated web users and proceed with confidence, but the mainstream is not there yet.