Collaboration and design modeling sites aren’t anything new. Since websites began, the need to involve the client in the site design and workflow has been a part of the professional design and development process. Solutions for this range from very expensive and robust to free and useless.
IntuitionHQ.com is somewhere in the middle of that. It’s very inexpensive (you don’t pay anything until you invite your client to look the design over) and aims at one goal: usability.
Web Design, of course, has two major goals: appearance and functionality. A site can look really good, but be utterly useless or it can be ugly, but highly functional. Good design aims for the center point between the two. The hardest part of that, most of the time, is the usability side. IntuitionHQ allows you to design something you like and let the client decide on the final aspects of usability.
The app also allows you to invite others to test out the site’s design without going “live” with it, so you can control who’s visiting and using it and what kind of feedback you get in that process.
IntuitionHQ is easy to use as well. You create a virtual host by putting in a site title and the URL (mysite.intuitionhq.com) then it prompts for a username and password. A few other details, such as your desired introduction and thank you messages for your testers/clients for that project. Then you upload a screenshot of your site design.
Then you ad tasks for the testers to do and select sections of the site those tasks apply to. So “click on the newsletter signup button” prompts them to (hopefully) find your newsletter signup button and click it on the first try. This sort of usability testing, without having to include actual functionality, makes the life of the graphic designer much easier.
The idea here, remember, is to test usability, not functionality. Once you have your test ready for action, you pay the $5 and go live with it. At this point, you invite clients (or anyone else) to come check it out. IntuitionHQ lets you send tweets, Facebook alerts, emails, etc. to do this.
Each task will have its results collected and you’re presented with a graphical representation and the numbers to correspond. So if you have 10 testers and 9 of them were able to find that newsletter signup button right off the bat, it will tell you that.
Overall, a very useful, affordable, and functional site. For most web development houses that deal with small business and clients, this is the majority of their needs for keeping the client involved in the process. Definitely worth a look.
