Overview: 

Crowdsourced Usability Testing

A decade ago, comprehensive usability studies cost tens of thousands of dollars and often took months to complete. Today, thanks to developments in crowdsourcing, an informative round of usability testing can be efficiently completed in weeks, by companies of all sizes. We'll show you how.

Few applications are launched without compromise. Dev teams may decide to postpone certain features until the next release; they might neglect regression testing or even usability testing. Given the circumstances, tough choices sometimes have to be made. We'll show you why the emergence of crowdsourcing means that usability testing should never again be one of those lost tasks. Other topics include:

How to Conduct Large-Scale Surveys

Large-scale customer surveys are quickly becoming the most popular way to gather customer feedback on website usability from a large number of people. During their visit to a site, customers are asked whether they’d like to participate in a short survey. Often participants are rewarded by being entered into a drawing of some sort. The advantages of this approach are that participant recruitment is quasi-automatic, and participant compensation is inexpensive. In addition, in some cases thousands of participants are taking part in the survey, so it is easy to ...continue reading...

Deriving Actionable Data

Usability testers will not only direct your attention to pain points but also (directly and indirectly) provide suggestions about fixing the problems they are uncovering. Remember that their suggestions reflect their own ideas about how to use your application, and may not be the right ones for your customers. While statistically significant data is also important, it does not provide any answers about ‘why.’ It can confirm whether or not a task was easy to complete, but if most participants found the task difficult, there will be no information ...continue reading...

Avoiding the Common UX Pitfalls

It is true that any form of usability testing is better than nothing. Therefore a quick internal round of testing seems to be the perfect solution, right? Well not really. People who are internal to the company or who are somehow related to the company (e.g. friends and family of employees) are also quite likely to be biased or lack subjectivity in their thinking. Internal employees can have preconceived ideas because they have been too close to the product for too long. We'll explain how crowdsourcing enables teams to ...continue reading...

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