Not only does ZURB have an awesome name, they also have a suite of awesome web apps that can help you quickly gather feedback about your site or designs. I’ve been using a couple of the apps and have to say I’m pretty impressed.
The ZURB Suite (as I’m calling it), so far consists of four apps:
- Notable – screenshots and annotations that quickly allow your design team to provide feedback about designs
- Verify – six different interactive tests that you can send out to the masses to get user feedback for a specific question
- Bounce – the little brother of Notable, no account required to screenshot and annotate
- Clue – the little sister of Verify, no account required to set up a 5 second test and collect mass feedback on what people remember about your page
Because the apps are all web based, you can access them anytime, anywhere – set up a test while you’re on the run, monitor the results from your hotel room, and give your design team feedback from your grandma’s computer.
Let’s take a look at each one in a little more detail.
Notable – provide design feedback on websites
Notable is “the easiest way for teams to provide feedback on websites.” It’s designed to be a collaborative tool that you can use with your designers, developers, clients, etc. to provide detailed feedback about a design through screenshots and annotations. When you scrape a page, it also pulls out all of the content, code, and a bunch of SEO data (metadata, H-tags, alt tags, outgoing links, and most frequent key phrases) so that you can have a look through and comment on optimization, editing, and proofreading.
The ZURB team has made it really easy to capture webpages:
- A Firefox plugin that you add to your bookmarks bar
- Upload a jpg screenshot, mock up, or image
- Type a URL into the web interface
- Mobile sites can be captured using their iPhone app
Once the capture has been added to your account, all you do is drag a rectangle around the area you want to comment on and a little numbered comment box pops up. No more importing the screenshot in Photoshop, adding a little number, making sure that you have enough room around the screenshot to write notes, and so on…
You can then share your screenshot with other people. If you add users to your online workspace, they can comment on your comments. You can also share via public or private URLs, a widget for posting on blogs or forums, or you can export the whole thing to a PDF.
By creating sets and workspaces, you can control who sees what, who comments on what, and keep your projects focused.
Accounts range from $24 to $119/month, with the only difference being the number of users you can add and the amount of storage you get. You also get a 30 day free trial so you can make sure you like. I’m fairly certain you will.
Verify – easily collect user feedback
Many of you will be familiar with feedback apps like the five second test, ChalkMark, Usabilla, and Concept Feedback, and you probably have an account for each of them. Verify combines many of the tests offered by these different apps and gives them to you all in one place.
Verify lets you quickly and easily set up six different types of interactive tests that let you collect user feedback:
- Click test – where do users click on a screenshot?
- A/B test – which version do users prefer?
- Memory test – what do users remember about a page or mock up?
- Label test – ask users what individual elements on a page or screenshot mean to them
- Annotate test – like Notable, users can add notes to any part of the page
- Mood test – does a screenshot make users feel happy, sad, or passive?
It takes less than 3 minutes to set up a test, and then you can fire out the URL for it by Facebook, Twitter, email… however you want! All parts of the test can also be customized with your corporate branding and instructions.
On the reporting side, you can see click maps, aggregated or individual responses, demographics, and the annotations and labels. You can watch the data come in in real time and create PDF reports that are easy to share.
Verify is currently in a private release, but you can request an invite (I got one). Eventually they’ll be switching to paid plans – not sure what that will entail. Possibly a cap on the number of results you can collect, how much storage you get, or how much analysis you can do. The free plan does allow you to create unlimited tests.
Bounce – add notes to any live URL
Bounce is the light version of Notable, letting you enter the URL of page and then add annotations to it. Saving your annotations gives you a URL that others can use to access your comments.
Bounce is free to use, and is a great way to quickly and easily share feedback about a page or design.
Clue – find out what users remember about any live URL
Clue is the light version of Verify, giving you the ZURB version of the five second memory test. You tell them the URL you want to test, and it creates a test that runs for 24 hours.
Test-takers (you can share the URL however you want, and there is also a “take a random test” option for people arriving on the Clue site) get to see your page for 5 seconds, then they get a simple memory test to see what they remember from the page.
You get a URL that you can use to monitor the words and phrases that test-takers remember about your site.
Like Bounce, Clue is free to use, and is a great way to quickly find out what stands out on a particular page.