Listen to my tale of woe!  It seems there is a gremlin in the works when it comes to getting my favorite time tracking app‘s General Manager, Jan Lukacs on the podcast.  It’s not hard to get him on the phone – he is more than accommodating and will to meet whenever. This gremlin involves my ability to get my recording gear working correctly.

After 45 minutes of conversation and discussion about Paymo and Community and the Eastern Block, and after we said goodbye … I realized that my microphone was not completely turned on.  The podcast was not recorded.

However, I’m not going to accept defeat.  I’m not going out like that.  We talked about some cool stuff and I’ll do whatever it takes to bring to you, dear listeners. Jan graciously will try again in a few months after the new version of Paymo is released.

Below is my 11 minute summary of our conversation.  I’m a bit crest fallen, but I’m not ready to give up!  I highlight:

• Paymo Plus – The not so complex tool to record actions in the background. Perfect for the multi-tasker
• Security at Paymo – A straightforward privacy policy and an Open-Source mindset
• Community Support Fourm – Speaking the user’s language and innovating the user support forum model

The links

My review- Time Tracking App Review – PayMo | A Better User Experience

PayMo Plus – Automatic time tracking for the multi-tasker

PayMo community support forum – help.paymo.biz, it’s the community support forum evolved

BUX Podcast #42: Newman’s (almost) conversation with Jan Lukacs of Paymo is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Where it all begins

Where to find UX type  jobs on the Internet?

Browsing through monster.com, indeed.com, simply hired, dice.com, is old-school. You might as well be getting newspapers delivered to the house.  Why would you go to the trouble of aggregating all of those feeds when there are folks out there doing it for you? Let me show you some…

UX Design Jobs – User Experience Job Board

You may not need to look much farther than this site. It aggregates jobs from all of the usual suspects – plus a few creative entries like boxesandarrows.com, jobs.smashingMagazine.com, jobs.37 signals.com, craigslist from San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, Austin… you get the idea.  They have basically done all the legwork for you.  We could stop here but will continue

http://uxjobs.org/

Here is a simply hired widget website. They have set up persistent searches of the simply hired database for usability and user experience jobs in and around eight major metropolitan areas of the US ( New York, Chicago, Indianapolis, Boston, Austin, San Diego, Seattle and San Francisco)

UX Mag Job Board

UX mag has a listing of jobs for user experience designers, user experience architects, user interface designer, interaction designer, UX strategist.

Onward Search

Onward search is a recruiter for technology talent.  I found them via this incredible infographic – A guide to UX Careers.  They list UX jobs on their site, but you apply by joining the site and submitting a resume.  I guess that’s how a recruiter works.  I don’t think it costs to submit your resume, so jump right in.  What could it hurt? Vitamin Talent is another example of a ‘digital creatives’ recruiter.

Usability Professonals’ Association Job Board

The local chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association.  The local and main branch of this association have job boards, plus events and trainings.

Speaking of all these search sites,  what exactly should you search for…

User Experience job titles

User Experience Designer – 12.4 million in Google. 1834  in Dice.  858 in LinkedIn.  146,213 in Simply Hired

User Experience Researcher – 3.6 million in Google. 118 in Dice. 82 in LinkedIn. 53,428 in SimplyHired.

Information architect – 15.3 million in Google.  4206 in Dice. 1841 in LinkedIn. 48,217 in SimplyHired

Usability Analyst – 3 million in Google. 416 in Dice. 114 in LinkedIn. 4,635 in SimplyHired

My take on this: Tons of jobs for User Experience Designer and Information Architect.  Usability Analyst isn’t so popular as a term.  Terms  and titles do matter when you are searching … but Skills are the foundation.  Titles change. Skills stick with you…

Just ask Patrick Neeman

User Experience Skill Set

You’re going to need skills in your new job. Chances are that you have skills that are strong and those that need improvement. But which are the ones that employers are looking for?

A List Apart, Zeldman and Co, conducts a survey each year, the survey for people who make websites.  In section 10, they have a good listing of typical web builder job skills.  Here they are with the most popular first:

• markup ( HTML, XHTML, XML)
• CSS coding
• page layout, interface design
• image editing and production
• front end programming ( JavaScript)
• information architecture, wire framing, site mapping
• usability testing / knowledge
• graphic design
• back-end development ( PHP, Ruby on rails, ASP)
• project management
• writing, editing
• findability / search engine optimization / search engine marketing
• accessibility testing / knowledge

Let’s take a look at a few job descriptions and parse them for skills you need.

Up and to the right. See it's easy. This a graph of the number of bullet points and amount of success.

UX Job Descriptions

Usability Analyst
: TEKsystems, technology staffing and services firm. Erie, PA 1 year contract position to work on a mobile app interface design

Skills, Responsibilities and Specifications:

• JavaScript
• HTML
• User interface design

I picked a good one here – completely random.  They list three skills – JavaScript, HTML, and user interface design. UI design seems like more than a skill. That’s an entire competency.

Qualifications:

• certified usability analyst credential

One interesting note is they are asking for the certified usability analyst credential – more on that later.

User Experience Researcher
: e-commerce company,Quidsi. Jersey City, NJ

Skills, Responsibilities and Specifications:

• user research techniques
• such as card sorting
• cognitive walk-throughs.
• user centered design practices
• contextual inquiry
• persona development
• heuristic evaluation
• competitive analysis
• interface design ( there is again!)
• rapid prototyping and participatory design
• plus usability testing
• Tech Smith Morae
• agile software development practices.

Qualifications

• a bachelors degree,
• but they would prefer a Masters degree in human factors, human computer interaction, usability engineering, cognitive psychology or a related field.
•  5+ years experience with user experience research and design in a “mature software development organization”  – ( tough luck, freelancers!)

• understanding of UI/UX best practices
• application of information architecture, color palettes, typography, iconography
• graphic design ( Photoshop or fireworks)
• storyboarding in wireframes/mockups
• search engine optimization
• cross browser testing
• XHTML, CSS, J. query

• bachelor’s degree
• portfolio of professional work
• 2+ years experience

Information architect/ Digital Storytelling
: NetApp – Raleigh, NC – innovative storage and data management solutions

Skills, Responsibilities and specifications:

• Develop information architecture, content component structure, and interactive design
• lead the creation of user interface design concepts, wireframes, and interactive requirements
• Understanding of Transmedia Storytelling a plus.
• understanding of Content Management Systems – experience using SDL Tridion a plus
• Strong analytical skills and experience to incorporate testing results and data into UX designs

Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s degree in Interaction Design, Information Architecture or similar field related to Human-Computer Interaction.
• 5 years of experience designing information architecture for large-scale corporate websites is required

Show me what UX training looks like.

User Experience Job Training

Okay – you know where to look, you know the job titles to look for, the skills you will need and the job description verbiage.  Is your degree enough or do you need to train up?  Don’t worry, Uncle Newman is here to help.

University degrees in

• Interaction Design: HOW Interactive list of programs
• Information Architecture: American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) listing of IA programs
• Human-Computer Interaction: Human Factors (Eric Schaffer’s Usability consultants) listing of HCI programs
• Usability engineering: Link to a WiseGeek article on “how to become a Usability Engineer” – no real degree programs yet
• cognitive psychology: Top 16 schools according to US News and World Report (the school report people)

Certification and Associations

• CUA and CUX Certification from Human Factors International
• Google Analytics Certified Partner :  GOOGLE does it.
• IXDA: Interaction Design Association
• ASIS&T: American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T)

Skills training

• Lynda.com: The mother of all online video training libraries.  “Lynda, you had me at Fireworks and color palettes”
• Treehouse: It’s not creepy, it’s a fun place to learn from the design and developer perspective.
• P2PU.org: Peer to Peer University. Mozilla Foundation’s learning branch. It’s awesome. I love it and all it stands for!
• Udacity: Sebastian Thrun and friends start a university and a revolution. A full Computer Science curriculum
• Codcademy.com: Online tutorials in JavaScript and web building.  From beginner to expert one click at a time.
• CodeAcademy.org: Less Conf Buddy, Neal Sales’ school for web builders in Chicago. Immersive and Effective
•  The Analysis Exchange – Web Analytics Education and Certification : A mentor and learner model for learning.

Yesah! You get it, girl!

Information overload never felt so good. Welcome to the information age!  I do hope that this little journey into the web of UX jobs has been valuable to you.  Please let me know:

• How you approach a job search?
• What type of degrees / certifications you have or want?
• Where you go to learn new skills?
• Where you go for community with other web builders and UX folks?

Fresh Graduates Meet UX Jobs is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

I was agreeable enough with it because it seemed like a really elegant solution to the problem. As long as I didn’t have to implement it. Then I went ahead and forgot the whole thing. That is, until about a week ago when I got a message on the BUX Facebook page from a woman named Danielle. Now, I’ll be honest. I figured, even before I read it, that it was spam. It’s not like I’m dealing with spam on Facebook all the time but it was just something about her picture…

This one.

That’s Danielle. By the looks of things, she’s taking a break from dance class, or modeling, maybe, I dunno. Something that requires a uniform and a Christian Side Hug with at least two other women (count the hands). But in her message she wanted to tell me about her website, walkme.com.

It’s gotta be fake right? You have to admit, your bullshit detector went off just a little bit there. What are the odds that (a) there’s a kickass new UX tool that (b) a smoking hot blonde wants to tell me about it (c) on the Internet (d) unsolicited?

It reminds me of something that Admiral Ackbar once said.

It also helps that she had sent along a nice, if formal, message about WalkMe. This gave me the confidence to believe that she was legit and that it wasn’t actually a trap.

Instead, WalkMe turned out to be a really sweet tool very similar to what I had originally described to my client above. Let’s take a closer look.

The Basics of WalkMe

In a nutshell, WalkMe offers a step-by-step walk-thru of your website using dope looking tooltips. (I’m hoping they use that phrase in their marketing in the future. You almost never see “dope looking” on a poster.)

See? Dope looking tool tips.

It’s a perfect way to walk visitors through an app, or a client through a project. I can envision this being used in conjunction with a tool like InVision by designers to help sell their ideas to their clients.

Here’s their 49 second video on how this whole banana splits.

 Putting WalkMe Through Its Paces

 The Sign Up

This was very easy. An email address, password, and phone number and you’re in. Boom. Now I have a free plan.

Let’s party.

Setting Up a Walk-Thru

This is where it immediately got interesting. After you sign up, you’re immediately presented with this box:

What they just did there was in a really savvy way, tell me that I have to install a Firefox extension.

Suck it Chrome!

I’ve been a Firefox user forever. Since before Chrome was a glint in Papa Google’s eye. And I still use it now on my Mac even though it eats resources like nobody’s business. I mean, Firebug bitch! What?

As you can tell, I’m totally down with the idea of using a Firefox extension. But YMMV depending on if you use Firefox or need to install it first.

Once you restart Firefox to complete the extension installation, it’s now evident that there’s a WalkMe icon on my browser.

Clicking it opens a panel on the side of the browser which asks me to login to my WalkMe account. After that, I’m taken to a screen where I can create my walk-thru.

You can see in the above image that they use their own tool to demo how the plugin works.

I breezed thru their walk-thru and got to making my own. I decided to use this site as the demo. If you look in the lower right hand corner of your browser window – if you haven’t seen it already – there’s a blue triangle you can click to take the walk-thru I created.

I had a few simple goals in this walk-thru.

1. Create multiple tips on one page.
2. Have one of the tips go to another page.

There’s a lot to like in setting up the walk-thru. For one thing, you have a lot of options.

Each of these options allows you to customize how people interact with the walk-thru. You can make it so that a tool tip is displayed for a predetermined length of time. You can make it so that users have to click a “next” button or that they have to click an element on the website.

Once you’ve chosen how a user should advance to the next step you can choose whether it advances to a tip on the same page or to a separate page.

These options are also available on the bubble itself when creating it.

When I was finished creating my walk-thru, I clicked the “Publish” button and their tool gave me code to put just before the closing head tag of my website.

And that, as they say, is that.

Thoughts

What Works

Overall, the whole deal is pretty elegant. When you factor in that at least at this level, it’s all free? It’s hard to find too much of a problem.

I really like the Firefox extension. After the customary adjustment period of learning the tool, the whole operation was really easy and quick. It’s plain to see that once you know how the system works, creating walk-thrus would be a quick and easy task.

They also have stats! Obviously, since I just created one, there aren’t any decent stats to speak of but here’s a quick shot of what the stats look like:

Oh, and a special mention goes out to their support team. Just look at their site… it drips with their desire to talk to us. I feel like this tool is really straight forward. It’s an obvious thing. Yet they offer live demos. LIVE DEMOS!

Upon signing up I got two emails from them: a welcome email and an email from Dan Miller, my new account manager. It seems funny to think that I’d need an account manager for this kind of app, but I appreciate their attention to customer service. They didn’t just give me a phone number, they gave me an account rep for the free plan.

That’s pretty remarkable.

What Needs Work

The non-linear nature of the extension – you can navigate back and forth between items very easily – takes a little getting used to. At first it can feel like you’re having to tweak things across multiple screens and that can be a bit confusing. But once you get the hang of what the icons mean and what affects what, it all becomes clear and gets much easier. It’s got a 5-10 minute learning curve. Also, if you’re not a Firefox user, this will seem like a bigger hurdle because you’ll first need to install that web browser. It’s something I recommend, but I can see how if you have to install Firefox just for WalkMe, you’d find that annoying.

I also ran into an issue (which I kept in my walk-thru, so you can go thru it and see what I’m talking about) where it’s a little inelegant how I go from one page to the next.

The first problem is that I put the tip on a submenu item in the main menu. Ours is a javascript menu. There’s this weird thing that happens that sometimes you have to mouseover the menu before the tip will show and once the menu item disappears, the tip is gone forever. So if the user didn’t realize that they were supposed to click on the menu item (which, guaranteed will happen the first time), they’re screwed.

This strikes me as the only real problem that I encountered.

I would also argue that I’d like to have more options for how I alert users that I have a walk-thru. Putting a big blue triangle in the corner of the browser doesn’t feel like my preferred solution.

Pricing

WalkMe prices things based on the number of walk-thrus you need.

This didn’t make intuitive sense to me. I mean, don’t I just need one?

It all comes down to how they count walk-thrus. Each page that has a walk-thru on it counts as a separate one. In the example that’s on the website, there are two pages in the walk-thru for a total of two walk-thrus.

This matters because the free plan gives me 3 walk-thrus. Or, more intuitively, you get a walk-thru for 3 pages.

From there, the price goes up depending on your needs.

The one weird element of their pricing is that their Silver plan is listed as “great for e-commerce and simple sites” but it doesn’t seem to include SSL support. Also, with only 5 pages to use its utility seems of limited value. It seems clear that they’re steering users towards the Gold plan at $97/mo.

Now I’m starting to wonder who the target market is. I’m in all day long for $10/mo. if I can make a walk-thru how I’d like to. But these restrictions and pricing feel really limiting. Maybe I’m misunderstanding how they count walk-thrus but at $97/mo. we’re in the ClickTalk, SEOmoz, Raven Tools pricing territory. And for that cash the tool remains branded. Not ideal.

To me, it’s too much at $97/mo. And at the Platinum level, isn’t there a point where you hire a developer and have them build you something custom so that you don’t have to fork out $3,900 annually just for a walk-thru? I mean, what can be that intricate that a guy can’t program that for you for a one time fee of less than $4,000? But again, maybe I dunno what I’m talking about. YMMV.

Final Thoughts

I really like this tool. It’s easy to use. It looks good. With the exception of that one menu issue, it works well too. I’m suspect about the pricing, but if you’re in the market for an easy to use app for creating a walk-thru for your website and can afford it, WalkMe could be just what you’re looking for.

UX Tool Review: WalkMe.com is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

On today’s podcast we talk over this week’s posts:

•  5 Easy Ways to Recruit Website User Testers
• Design Smackdown: Prepare to be Judged

We also talk about the following websites:

• Ethn.io
• Usertesting.com
• Mechanical Turk
• TryMyUI

Newman goes through his main points about criticism:

• Criticism is a skill
• Criticism is an important part of design
• Criticism should be taught and practiced

Then we get into talking about some…

Cool Tech!

We are runaway impressed with the “Kickstarter Watch”. It’s called the Pebble and it’s a bad ass e-ink smart watch. But don’t take our word for it, check the link for a great demo video.

Then we run through two great ways to implement javascript tooltip tours on your website. There’s the really elegant WalkMe and the jQuery framework called Joyride. Which one do you need? Depends on your level of coding skill and whether you want a free or pay option. But really, you can’t go wrong with either one.

And just because you know you want to see this, it’s…

Animals getting drunk!

The Intoxicating Marula Trees of South Africa (original narration by Randall) – YouTube – Sorry no embedding code

BUX Podcast #41:Recruiting User Testers and Judging Design Critics is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

How would you judge this site?

It got me thinking about who the experts were and how they structured their critique.

The Reviewers

~ Brian Massey (Conversion Rate Optimizer – CRO), Conversion Sciences

~ Naomi Niles (UX/UI/CRO Designer), ShiftFWD

~ Demian Farnworth (Copywriter), The Copybot

~ Adam Kreitman (Marketer), Words That Click

~Sofia Woods (Web Design), Shortie Designs

~ Angela Jones (Designer, graphic artist), Design By Ange.la

~ Robin Cannon(Web Designer), Shiny Toy Robots

~ Tyler Kelley, Conversion Coach

~ David Hartstein (storyteller and measurement guy), Wired Impact

~ Erynn Brook (‘Professional Creative and Muse Healer’, Designer, Entrepreneur ), Urban Avalon

~ Joseph Putnam (Writer, Marketer), 5 North Marketing

~ Sanj Sahayam (Designer), Unique Imprints

~ Sherice Jacob (Designer, Copywriter), iElectrify

It’s an impressive bunch of designers, copywriters and marketers. But a new term – CRO or conversion rate optimization designer – intrigues me. Persuasion and conversion becomes the foremost goal in designing and building. If you are designing a business website, at some point you will act as a conversion rate optimization designer.

What they said

Most agree – The big problem with the PRWeb page was: an unclear message, missing value proposition and weak call to action. If you don’t know what PR Web does, the homepage will not help you much.  It’s actually a very good article and I hope you get the chance to go and read it.

However I’m more interested in…

How they critique

This type of expert review is a cornerstone of design methodology. Designers are asked to review and defend work all the time – It could be their work, from a teammate or someone outside their team. I suppose the critiques are based on their experiences and established design patterns and guidelines. Experience is hard to measure and codify. Designers attempt to codify their experience in manifesto, design patterns, checklists, heuristics, etc.

So I’m assuming that each of these 13 reviewers is judging the PR Web home page against a set of rules. In a way they are like Judge Dredd. I don’t expect them to cite the guidelines they are judging from – but it would be kind of cool.

Dredd, Sly Stallone, is cop, judge, jury and executioner in the SciFi movie from 1995. Famous for shouting "I am the Law!"

Who is the Law?

Unlike the Judge Dredd movie, we don’t have roving packs of all powerful killer cops (mostly).  We abide by the rule of law (mostly).  That means that we judge actions based on an agreed upon set of rules and guides, laws.  These laws are well known to the general public and agreed to (mostly).

Are there well known laws of web design? Are there laws that good designs must follow?

Of course the government has a set of rules – the US Department of Health and Human Services research-based web design and usability guidelines (292 pages)

Sherice, one of the reviewers, has a conversion optimization checklist offered on her site, in exchange for your name and e-mail address. ( I did it. What can I say, she’s cute and smart… and a cat person. Never mind)

User focus, a company in the UK, has a set of 247 Web usability guidelines. This is a good resource and it’s conveniently broken down into several subsections; such as homepage usability, navigation, page layout, etc.

Judge the Judgers

I think it would be fun to sort through the 13 reviews and see if they matched with our rules for homepages.

Ben wrote a home page optimization guideline:Six things your homepage must do to keep from sucking. They are:

• Needs to speak the users language
• Needs to communicate who the customer is
• Needs to communicate the core benefits
• Needs to show passion for the product
• Needs to build trust
• Needs to push user into the sales funnel

Let’s see how the reveiws stack up.

Needs to speak the users language

Farnworth nailed this principle. He says the PRWeb website is “a great example of look at me”.  The number of press releases is a metric for PR Web not their customer. He also highlights that testimonials serve the purpose of speaking the user’s language. His example is: “My press release got picked up by NY Times, WSJ and CNN. My phone is ringing off the hook.”  That testimonial explains the value proposition from the users perspective. It also helps to indicate who the customer is.

Needs to communicate who the customer is

Massey highlights this principle when he talks about appealing to prospective users versus existing users. If the target market is people who are interested in reading random news items, then this page is optimized perfectly. Jones points out that the only person on the page has both their arms cut off ( holding the sign). She is opposed to cutting off limbs for any circumstance.

Needs to communicate the core benefits

Kreitman and Farnworth both highlight the need for the page to answer “What’s in it for me?”.  Woods wants to know what PR Web is pitching.  The number of press releases implicitly explains what they do, but it’s Kreitman who suggests that this is only a clue.  It should be giving them a big fat banana, not just a suggestion. Hartstein notices that the words “press release” – the core service of PR Web – is only seen in small font and tucked away in the design.

Needs to show passion for the product

Putnam determines the primary message is “PR Web just got better!” This shows passion for the product. But it doesn’t show passion for the customer’s benefit. Customers are passionate about what your product can do for them. As Kathy Sierra would say, how your product helps them kick ass.  Farnworth’s proposed testimonial does a great job of delivering this message – “My press release got picked up by NY Times, WSJ and CNN. My phone is ringing off the hook.”

Needs to build trust

Several reviewers mentioned the idea of “social proof“. Kreitman laments the fact that social proof is above the fold and thinks that they should be used for explaining the value proposition or benefits of using PR Web.  Niles mentions social proof of the number of press releases and thinks the messaging could be improved. Jacob offers some suggestions for improved messaging by breaking that large number of them to more creative and targeted numbers that show success stories – rather than an abstract and out of context number.

Needs to push user into the sales funnel

This is the call to action – the thing you want them to do. Massey points out that the ‘read more’ button is nearly invisible. Typically, the visual design is optimized to highlight this call to action. In this case, the low contrast green and shrug worthy ‘read more’ text does not meet the standard of a good call to action. Brooke explains that the page is breaking the “one page, one goal” idea. The goal of the front page is to put people in to the sales funnel.

Blackbeard, the honey badger of pirates, (His beard is ON FIRE and he doesn't give a shit)

Summary

Each element on a front page should have a reason for being there. This is design 101. Whether you’re writing a story, doing a site wireframe, or a visual design each element must pull its own weight in order to have a high-performance design. If we evaluate each element by some type of guide, it gives structure to the review and keeps us from judging based on opinion.

Using a guide allows others to join our critical review and give helpful and constructive feedback (As in a design team or meeting)

In closing and by way of devil’s advocate, I wonder if we are missing something here. The fact is we don’t know why PRWeb built and optimized this page. It seems obvious, but is it? Perhaps they were using a completely different set of guidelines. Each of the reviewers has used established principles but perhaps PR Web has other goals in mind. It’s always important to leave the door open to alternative interpretation.

Design Smackdown: Prepare to be Judged is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

On this site, and out of the mouths of UX professionals everywhere come forth the platitudes about how kick ass it is to actually get out there and talk to your customer.

A young and growing crop of tools has sprung up to make user testing easier. But that still leaves this, ahem, elephant.

At some point, you need actual people to take your well-crafted survey or user test. You need to find your target audience. If you have a physical location where you interact with your customers, that’s one thing. But for the rest of us, what are we to do?

You won’t be surprised to find out that for the most part, money talks. Below, we take a look at several free and pay ways to get users to participate in your user study.

But first, obey the posted fishing rules…

You can’t just go shoving your test in every person’s face. Not only are you likely to make people angry but you’re going to get bad data. See, not everybody is right for your test. You need to narrow it down to your target demographic or your target market. There are two times to do this:

1. Before they take the test
2. As they take the test

The truth is, you’re likely to do a bit of both. If you have the ability to see and screen your potential test takers then you can eliminate bad candidates right off the bat. But you’re also likely to ask some demographic questions in your survey. In this case, you can use branching surveys to automatically reject bad candidates. This prevents them from having to fill out a survey unnecessarily. Or, if your survey doesn’t use branching technology, then you can manually weed out the bad candidates later.

But remember, if you don’t catch a quality tester, throw ‘em back. It’s the most important fishing rule.

Now, with that out of the way…

Pay Options

5. ethn.io

What is Ethn.io?

Ethn.io, as the screenshot above so helpfully indicates, helps with finding the right people for user research. They do this by making it easy for you to put code on your website which asks your users to participate in your study.

How Ethn.io works

The whole process is straight forward. After signing up for their service, you create a screener. This screener is a series of questions designed to find your targeted users. You save the screener and Ethn.io generates a link to put on your website. You drop in the code and the hard work is done.

After that, you can watch the responses roll in. You can even incentivise people to become user testers, as long as you use Amazon gift certificates to do so.

How much Ethn.io costs

Free – 10,000 pageviews/mo & 250 responses
$49/mo. – 100,000 pageviews/mo. & 500 responses
$99/mo. – 500,000 pageviews/mo. & unlimited responses
$199/mo. – 1,000,000 pageviews/mo. & unlimited responses
$299/mo. – more than 1,000,000 pageviews/mo. & unlimited views & not branded by ethn.io

4. usertesting.com

What is UserTesting.com?

UserTesting.com is a whole suite of tools for getting user feedback. In this way, it’s more than Ethn.io. Not only do you choose your users from a pre-screened list based on a variety of demographic factors, but you also create and run your test through the site. It’s important that the test be task-based. This means you’re having users do something on your website. It’s more than just asking them survey questions.

How UserTesting.com works

In a nutshell, there’s a three step process:

1. Select your participants
2. Run your task-based test
3. Get feedback within an hour that

The feedback includes videos of the users going through the site while talking out loud describing their experience.

How much UserTesting.com costs

$39 per user (unless you’re a cheap bastard, and then it’s $29 per user)

By default, usertesting.com charges $39 per user. But, $10 of that is paid to the actual user. You can choose to keep this payment if you think you can attract users without incentives. In this case, you would pay $29 per user. Currently usertesting.com is running a $30 off on all orders over $100 as a first time special.

3. Mechanical Turk

What is Mechanical Turk?

Mechanical Turk is Amazon’s answer to how to get simple jobs that can’t be done by computer accomplished in an inexpensive manner. Part of the uniqueness of the service is that it’s meant to get very quick feedback from users. This is how it can afford to be so cheap. On the other hand, you may find a wide variety in the quality of the responses.

How Mechanical Turk works

First, you create an account (or login with your Amazon account). From there you create your HIT or Human Intelligence Task. In the HIT you list exactly what you need done and how much you’ll pay for its successful completion.

The HIT goes live on Mechanical Turk and you get results in minutes to hours.

They have a whole section on business testing that is all about this kind of work.

How much Mechanical Turk costs

It varies on the task but it’s dirt cheap. Pennies. You set the price but in general, expect to pay anywhere from a penny to a quarter ($0.25) per user.

2. TryMyUI

What is TryMyUI?

TryMyUI is an all-in-one solution similar to UserTesting.com, above. You create a scenario and a series of tasks and then select your users based on a number of demographic criteria such as age, gender, household income, and other factors. You can also specify custom factors if you don’t see it available by default.

How TryMyUI works

This is the good news. They give you your first test free. So don’t take my word for anything here, just jump on over and try it out for yourself.

But just so you have the rundown, the process is really straightforward. It’s so straightforward that I already said it above. All you have to do is create a scenario with some tasks (and they have good sample questions available to use by default) and then pick your users. Then you get to go on break. I think that’s how that works.

How much TryMyUI costs

$35 per user but they offer bulk discounts:

Free Options

1. Begging

We all know what begging is

We’ve all been there. We rushed into creating our user survey and now we need people to fill out it – stat. Oh, and not just anybody. We need business owners between the ages of 24 and 31 who are left handed and come from disadvantaged families. You got anything like that!?

And lets say that your budget is $0 dollars. Now what?

Now you’re at the mercy of people’s good graces. Demographics probably don’t enter into it. You’re just looking for warm bodies to get the thing filled out and hoping you’ll catch some of who you’re looking for. So let’s hope you know how to work your social networks. That means you have to be loud and persistent on your channels to get the word out. Be nice but be consistent. Especially on Twitter, your followers can easily miss your tweets.

If you’ve used a particular tool like Usabilla or Loop11, they’re really good about retweeting your request for filling out your survey, provided you use their product. Be sure you get in touch with people in the UX community on social networks – they may retweet you too to spread your message to a wider audience.

Bringing It On Home

At the end of the day, it costs money to go out and find your target market. Recruitment, like most other things, follows that old adage: you get what you pay for.

With UserTesting.com and TryMyUI, they are providing a full service. They’re getting you a qualified user AND they’re conducting the test and providing feedback. Ethn.io gives you the tools to mine participants from your site’s own users. Mechanial Turk provides a way to do very inexpensive, quick testing. And rounding it up, begging can get you some feedback but the quality is only as good as your ability to reach the target demographic and to get them to actually take your test.

Do you know of other, or better ways to recruit website user testers? If so, tell us below in the comments!

5 Easy Ways to Recruit Website User Testers is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

This is another Friday night party-style podcast…kinda.  It’s Party-style style because we’re drinking PBR and celebrating a long and productive week.  It’s ‘Kinda’ because we got serious stuff to say.  Almost in spite of ourselves, we manage to produce some cogent thoughts about SEO.  Cogent means ‘reasonable’ and we talk in a reasonable way.  Of course, we curse in this one.

It's good for you.

Ben is a recovering SEO person… I want you to know this before you listen to this.  My exp with SEO?  I watched a Lynda.com video course on it and called it good.  Regardless, gaming google is not a good way. Getting close to your users is good.  And, that’s tonight’s topic for discussion.

After this Podcast you should be able to answer:

• What is SEO?
• How did the recent ‘Penguin Update’ affect sites?
• What does Google want?
• What does ‘Nerf’ mean in the context of this penguin update?
• True or False: ‘Penguin is appropriate”
• Why do we rank for “Show me the money”?
• Should you optimize for Google?
• Should you optimize for your users?
• Are we just being naive?
• Is PBR liquid shit?

Listen up! There will NOT be a test on this for the Penguin Update.  If you did want to study up on how Penguin effected small biz – click here (!).

Please don't take this the wrong way. "We're just sayin"

BUX Podcast #40: Thoughts on the Google Penguin Update is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

If you’re curious about numbers 10-6 you can read all about that here. If you have more time, you can check out our podcast on all 10 items. Oh, and weirdly enough, if you have next to no time you can also check out the podcast. Just read the post. We summarized all this jazz – all 10 items in that post.

But for everybody else who just wants the top 5 morsels of usability goodness, well, grab a codpiece and follow me.

5. A UX key: Reduce the Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the canary in the UX coal mine. It will tell you when you’re suffocating your users on your webpage.

Must be one of those Steampunk coal mines.

What does that mean?

It’s easy. The bounce rate tells you the percentage of people that go to a page on the website as the first page and then leave your website without going to another page. It’s essentially a one-and-done situation.

There are some situations where this is acceptable. But for the majority of pages, you want your bounce rate to be as low as possible.

In general, people leave a website when they’re confused. If they’re confused or think they’re in the wrong place, they leave. It stands to reason then that there’s a correlation between user confusion and a page’s bounce rate.

This is why the bounce rate provides the way to improve your website. If you focus on fixing the pages with a high bounce rate, particularly pages that exist within your critical path(s), you’re just about guaranteed to see an improvement in your conversion rate.

4. Iteration vs. Innovation

I can’t help but think about iteration vs. innovation in terms distance. Iteration is an incremental thing. It means making a series of small changes over time, producing many different versions which culminate in a version that has achieved the desired results.

Innovation is something totally different. Its definition carries with it this idea of a visionary leap.

Mr. Innovation

When the first iPhone came out, people lost their minds. It was this crazy innovative product. Or… it was a phone with gestures, a large screen, a computer, and a digital store attached to it. Yes, it’s the total package and how it was put together that made it innovative, but it’s not like the constituent parts were unknown to the rest of humanity. What Apple did was take the raw ingredients of technology that already existed and they repackaged them in a new way that truly was innovative and transformative to how we communicate.

So yes, vision is a part of innovation.

Why does any of this matter? What’s my point?

User testing is fundamentally about iteration. It stands to reason that before you start user testing that you know what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to make your current website better? Or are you trying to make the best website possible?

If the answer is better, then you’re iterating. You clearly need to leverage user testing in your task. But what if your bounce rates are over 50% on several pages, including the front page? Can you iterate that into an effective website? Or do you need to start over? If you said “start over” then you just decided to innovate. To take a leap. The act of starting over is by its nature innovative. The leap between designs is so great that you never would have massaged one into the other.

One is little steps, the other big steps.

Know which one you’re doing and it will improve how you go about making your website more effective.

3. Personas: Know When to Use Them

I’ll admit, I had an axe to grind with personas. I think I was bothered by the fact that most UX people use that word like they’re ass-deep in personas every day in their job.

They are not.

I decided to take a 4,000 word long look at personas and made my case for when and where they’re valuable.

I started out with the proposition that they’re stupid and I hate them. I still think that’s a fair assessment of them but Newman has told me to settle down about the whole thing so I’m trying my best.

The deal with personas is that they’re misapplied a lot of the time. They’re talked about during the web design phase instead of the product development stage. Proper product diversification prevents message fracturing due to improper use of personas. Improper use of personas leads to my biggest problem with them: message fracturing.

I believe you’re trying to let one main signal fly. Breaking that into smaller targeted messages without just cause is risky. Some would argue that personas are that just cause, but I defer to the products. Market the products to the target market.

When personas are applied at the website level rather than the product level, we end up talking to the right market with an inferior product. This sham is visible from 100 miles away. It feels bad, doesn’t work, and isn’t profitable. Don’t do it.

Learn when to use personas and then stay the hell away from them. In the wrong hands, they can wreak havoc on your messaging.

2. Writing Good Questions is Hard

Like everybody else who Googles the phrase “survey tool” and finds that there are a bunch of options, I was excited as hell to see that a bunch of companies have gone to the trouble to make it easy to ask my users questions about my website.

But once I dug into the tools I realized one big problem: I’m a dumbass.

They wanted me to ask all of the questions and frankly, I didn’t know where to start.

What makes a good question?

This is not an easy answer. There are just so many pitfalls. It’s easy to write a leading question or a question that doesn’t give you the feedback you want. So where to start?

Demographics: Right off the bat you need to qualify your audience. If these folks aren’t in your target demo, their answers are going to be of limited value. So ask the demographic questions you need to know. I personally appreciate keeping this section brief. You don’t want survey participants to get worn out just on the opening section.

From there, you have one job:

Test your assumptions: What is it that you’re assuming about your website? Are you assuming that people understand your headlines? Are you assuming that people can navigate your website? Are you assuming that everything is clear and makes sense? Are you assuming that it’s easy to find your contact information?

Think about the website and what it presumes. And then carve off a manageable bit and ask questions about it. Remember, you can’t test for everything at once.

In the post on the Nuts & Bolts of How to Create a User Survey I walked through creating a survey for the online bookkeeping app LessAccounting. I asked myself these questions to get at my assumptions about what people wanted from their product:

1. People use online bookkeeping software because….
2. As a business tool, business owners want…
3. Things people must feel about this website (generically)…
4. Things the app must do…

The website already assumes these things. So once you have an idea of your assumptions, you can write questions to test them.

By testing your assumptions you’re giving yourself actionable data. The data you get back will show the way towards a better iteration.

1. Listening to Others in the Community is Key

We are amazed and delighted at the UX professional community we have found.  Fun, engaging and on the cutting edge of business and design – we feel inspired and energized listening in on the conversation.

We are grateful to be able to talk with Clark Valberg and Ryan Duffy of InVision, Alfonzo de la Nuez of UserZoom, Jim ‘Big Tiger’ Remsik of UXmad, Rafael Mizrahi from Feng-GUI, Dan Brown from EightShapes, Paul and Marc from Usabilla and Rachit Gupta from Inspectlet and all the guys who did our wrap up at LessConf.  And, we are proud for giving their ideas the chance to be heard by a wider audience. We look forward to talking with many more of you in the future.

I read long ago that “Markets are conversations”.  We are very happy to be in conversation with the UX community here at BUX – on the blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, and on Diigo.  It’s an exciting time for designers and innovators and everyone pay attention to our conversation.  We look forward to participating more and sharing more as we continue digging deeper in ux and web usability.

Looking Back, Again: 10 More Key Usability Concepts: Part 2 is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Way back last summer in the August of of 2011 Newman and I decided to learn more about web usability and user testing. We originally said we’d go from August to the middle of December and see what happens.

The middle of December came and what happened was that we summed up what we learned in a series of posts called Looking Back: Part 1 and Part 2.

Rather than call it a day and go learn about something else, we kept on doing it. It’s been about 18 weeks or so since we’ve done another review of all of our posts, so we’re due.

That’s why last Friday we kicked off review week with a preview of this week’s posts. If you have 90 minutes, get yourself over to the podcast and take a listen. It’s good stuff.

If you don’t, you can catch numbers 10-6 here today and 5-1 on Wednesday.

Now, with that foreplay out of the way, let’s get down to the sweet, sweet lovemaking.

10. Personal Analytics

Data is a life and death business

Products like the FitBit and Sleep Cycle iPhone app record your personal habits.  And, They translate those habits into data, visualizations and understanding.  You translate them into changes in your habits and into improvements in your lifestyle.  And, “Hey! Is that what we do with websites and user experience testings? Translate observations into improvements into websites?”  The answer is yes.

People either get the idea of data and analytics or they don’t.  Some are natural Analytics Ninjas.  They understand the connection between measurement and change. It clicks. They get it.  Some need help.  They can be taught. Thank you Anivash and Mr. Ries.  But, for me, it’s very difficult to learn a concept out of context.  And, a design project can be a very abstract thing.  Personal Analytics makes the abstract concepts of data and analysis more concrete, more pertinent and more easy to learn.

Check out the posts: Personal Analytics: You and Your Data | A Better User Experience

9. Time Tracking

It's about time…for some kick ass clocks. And, yes I'm talking about being connected to the cloud.

The beauty of time tracking is the control it gives you over your most precious resource: Time.  By measuring time in a systematic way – as a scientist, as an empowered person, as the captain.  For instance, the clock above made it possible to navigate the oceans in relative safety.  With the feedback I get from a time tracking app, I can experiment with time, play with it, visualize it and ultimately take back some control over it.

We did a review of Havest and Paymo, which was the outcome of a huge survey of 18 different time tracking apps.  If I’d had Paymo running when I wrote that post, it would have told me I spent way too much time on that.  But, I did garner some good understandings of time tracking tools.

The big takeaway: Time tracking is ever more necessary in a fragmented and speedy culture.  These tools are good now and will increase in value as our culture continues to require more productivity from it’s workers.

8. Choose Your UX Tools Wisely

Tool Time!

With all these choices in UX tools,  it’s more important than ever to choose wisely. Recommendations are good.  Asking trusted, respected colleagues is great.  But, what it really comes down to is knowing yourself.  If you can approximate your needs and wants, you can approach the decision with confidence that the tool will fit you.

There is no such thing as ‘The perfect tool’.  No tool is going to do the work for you.  No one tool will be a perfect fit for everyone. Establishing that fit relies on how well you know what you need and what the tool can provide.

It’s a good thing that most tools offer a free plan or trial. Check out my thoughts on the free plan at “No Money User Testing”. The takeaway is to jump in an experiment.  That experimenters spirit will reward you on many levels in the new innovation economy.

7. You Have to Know Why You Want to Test

You don't need a lab coat to be a scientist anymore.

A user experience researcher or designer must be a creative and inquisitive.  It’s no longer enough to know how to solve problems.  Now it’s imperative to understand the problem you are solving – I know, it seems obvious. Understanding the problem is what aligns the entire process of data collection and experiments.  This helps avoiding the mistake of solving the wrong problem and not understanding Why you are solving it.

Having a scientific experimenters spirit or Genchi Genbutsu (roughly translated as “go and see”) is great, if you have it.  If you don’t, look for a heuristic to remind you of all the different facets of a UX problem and help you understand Why you are testing in the first place.  Understanding Why will give you a vision and a direction – for yourself and for your team.

6. How meetings go bad – Roles vs. Expectations

Smile for the camera!

Oh my God. We learned just how terrifying meetings are and how easily they can go south and wreck an entire project.

In particular we looked at six ways you make bad meetings worse. (Yes, you in particular.)

6. You’re not speaking the same language
5. You lack empathy
4. You’re treating your meetings like a political battleground
3. You beat your designer
2. You treat your differences as weaknesses
1. You’re having the wrong conversation

The key takeaway here is that the various participants in the meeting have different levels of commitment to the project. Not everybody has bought in but most everybody is happy to play the ego-trip game.

Of course, if you don’t have any problems with meetings, then you work with a uniquely great group of folks. But for the rest of us, we need to take a hard look at the above list and then make copies to hand out to all the members of your team. It’s a good way to check yourself before you wreck yourself. (Oh no you didn’t!)

Looking Back, Again: 10 More Key Usability Concepts: Part 1 is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Now, another four months removed from that review, it’s time for another review.

It’s just a good thing to do.

We get caught up in the weekly grind here – cranking out articles and podcasts. It’s good to be able to take time to reflect and to be sure that we’ve absorbed the right things from what we’ve been learning and sharing with you in the past several months.

On today’s podcast, we tackle 10 (more) key usability concepts.

They include:

10. Personal Analytics

A great way to get introduced to the world of analytics and measurement. Products like the FitBit and Sleep Cycle iPhone app record your personal habits.  Using them, you will get the feel for how you are spending your time and energy and will come to see the power that data awareness has in allowing you to easily change your behavior.

9. Time Tracking

We spent a lot of time looking at various time tracking tools. It all comes down to what you need in your tool – what you’re trying to track and measure. It could be something as simple as tracking time in on a project or as complex as looking for good analysis tools to increase your productivity.

8. Choose Your UX Tools Wisely

UX tools are the Wild West at the moment. New ones are constantly coming out and current ones are routinely being upgraded. It’s important to choose your tools wisely and to know what you want to get out of them before you get into them.

7. You Have to Know Why You Want to Test

It sounds like an obvious thing to know but you’d be surprised how easy it is to forget. It boils down to a simple concept: don’t ask a question if you don’t know how the answer will improve your site. It’s important to gather good data and you can only do that if you know why it is you’re testing, not just what it is you’re testing.

6. How meetings go bad – Roles vs. Expectations

Bad meetings are the result of personal feelings trumping the professional goals and/or mismanaged expectations. We also talk about point-versus-field with the idea that better meetings can be had when the discussion is focused on addressing the ideas in the field. This makes coming up with a satisfactory point less painful.

5. A UX key: Reduce the Bounce Rate

Looking for what to test on your website? 2 ideas: test the critical path and in particular, pay attention to the bounce rate. The bounce rate is the best indicator as to how confusing a particular page is for your users.

4. Iteration vs. Innovation

The process of iterating is like putting one step in front of the other. It’s a slow-and-steady-wins-the-race way of progressing. Innovation requires a leap in order to come into existence. It’s best summed up by the phrase “you can’t get there from here”. We talk about when you should iterate via user testing versus innovate by starting over.

3. Personas: Know When to Use Them

The problem with personas is that they exist. I kid. The problem with personas is that they are routinely mis-applied. Personas work best at the product development stage, not the website design stage. Misapplying personas results in a fractured message and reduced clarity.

2. Writing Good Questions is Hard

A special gift of the UX specialist is the inquisitive and experimental mind.  They have to know the mind of the user and the business. Not so hard, really.  But the crux is bridging those two things with good questions and instruments.  And, by good, I mean producing valuable and actionable results that are implemented to improve a design or solve a problem.

1. Listening to Others in the Community is Key

Just like before, we are amazed  and delighted at the community with have found surrounding UX professionals.  Fun, engaging and on the cutting edge of business and design – we feel inspired and energized reading blogs and twitter stream.  We are grateful for the opportunity to interview Clark and Ryan, Alfonzo, and ‘Big Tiger’ Remsik.

BUX Podcast #39: 10 (More) Key Usability Concepts is a post by Ben Snyder and Newman Lanier that was originally posted on A Better User Experience, a learning resource for user testing and web usability. If you’ve enjoyed this post, be sure to follow them on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.