Loop11 is all about evaluating your website’s usability. Set tasks and questions for your users and evaluate their actual experience.

Anyone that has a website that wants to optimise the user’s experience will be VERY interested in this startup. I feel that exorbitantly priced “usability consultants” will not be as enamoured - Loop11 will undoubtedly steal much of their business.

There is big money in optimising a website’s usability these days. This beautiful little app will be featuring on the biggest to the smallest websites in the weeks to come.

Although Loop11 still has some work to do delivering a quicker user experience, this has all the trademarks of a killer app.

The term “website usability” has been around for over a decade since Jakob Nielsen coined the term to describe the way in which users navigate a website and how easy they find it to do key events: subscribing to a newsletter, clicking on an advert, finding the latest post, and so on. Although the term has been around for a while, the interest in this science has only been picking up over the last couple of years.

Believe it or not, some savvy website publishers were getting sick of sites that look like a Maserati but perform like a rusted out Ford Cortina. This is where Loop11 comes in. Using the service (currently in private Beta), publishers can create an interactive survey for users to complete that evaluates their ability to perform tasks like finding your contact page or locating a particular item for sale. Not only can you ask users to perform navigation tasks, you can also ask critical questions where they can rate, comment or scale their opinion… ahhh - feedback heaven!

This type of user testing was previously the domain of “usability consultants” that would drain your pockets and gather up a group of hungry students and ne’er-do-wells to sit in a room with a bunch of PCs and pick apart your pride and joy website. Loop11 does a great job of making user testing accessible for even the smallest website with a clean, user friendly interface and a formidable set of features. Once the evaluation has been authored, you can distribute it by URL, pop-up or farm it out to afore mentioned hungry students and ne’er-do-wells via a selection of online panels.

When I was using Loop11 this afternoon, it was very slow to move through the evaluation - which will be a key success factor for Loop11 to address quickly. As website owners, we’re already asking enough of the participants to spend their valuable time completing the survey without having to get them to wait in paint-drying suspense while each page loads. There lies my only real criticism. Although an evaluation is only as good as the questions that you ask and the tasks that you set, Loop11 does a great job in providing excellent documentation to get you on the right track.

You can participate in a brief survey and check out Loop11 in action by clicking here:

Loop11 is in private beta which is free - no word on pricing as yet.

Although Loop11 will really earn its salt on big, complicated sites, anyone that owns a site and wants to optimise the user experience should definitely be begging Loop11 for an invite to the beta launch.

Loop11 is shaping up to set the benchmark in site usability testing.