I would say on average I receive about 3 or 4 requests per week for free usability advice of one form or another, to which I always respond with Nancy Reagan’s sage advice –
Just say “No.”
Of course, the requests don’t come to me asking specifically for “free usability advice” like some cold-calling salesperson harassing me with a phone call just as I sit down to dinner.
No, these requests are all over the place; everything from an email from a company that has the latest wiz-bang online usability testing application to end all online usability testing applications, to people asking me what the correct way to set up an online bill-pay form is, to the several twitter DMs a week asking me if I can “have a quick look at our website and just let us know what you think of our usability.”
Do you really want to know what I think of your usability?
Great! I’ll tell you exactly what I think of your usability! Just pay me for the several hours of reviewing and testing tasks I do on your website, followed up by the several hours of saving screenshots and documenting findings and creating a PowerPoint that I work on, followed up by the hour or two of analysis of what’s wrong that I ponder, followed-up by the hour or two of research I do for optimizations that could be used to improve your situation including mocking-up examples of what a few good options for improving it look like, followed up by the hour or two I spend with you on a call or online meeting providing you with all my free usability advice.
Get a clue, usability is work, and most people (including you!) get paid for work
So, if you’re one of those sillydopeydumb misguided individuals who’s asking for “free usability advice” because “it’ll only take a minute and gosh, won’t you feel good about helping me out?” get a clue. It’s lots of work to conduct a proper usability review, and last time I checked you (and I) expect to be paid for work.
Those pesky mortgage and utility companies keep insisting on it.
Three ways to get free usability advice
So here are few tips if you are seeking free usability advice. By the way, this advice is totally free so you can thank me later for all the free advice I’m providing you as a service, you’ll return the favor, right?
Pay me for your free usability advice – Okay, technically it’s not free, but this one’s really easy; just go ahead and pay me for the time I spend in providing you with your free usability advice. What? You don’t have any money to give me? Hmmm, just how important did you say usability and user-centric design was to your website again?
Trade something equally valuable – This one is also easy, as I’m going to be spending quite a few hours giving you free usability advice, so why don’t you give me quite a few hours of free business/CPA/Lawyer advice in exchange? I could use quite a few hours of your or your lawyer’s or CPA’s time, it would help me out with my business. That’s a fair trade, right? And by the way, wouldn’t that make you feel good to know you were helping me out?
Pay me with something other than money – Gosh, you have a shoe web site, that’s great! I (well, my wife actually) could use a couple hundred of your free products, or perhaps you could just provide me with a thousand dollar Starbucks gift card (what? – I like coffee!) for all my free usability advice.
Why free usability advice is not a good idea
Let’s get serious for a minute, free usability advice is actually not a good idea. Here’s why:
You get what you pay for – You ever heard that old saying “there’s no such thing as a free lunch?” Well, the same is true for usability. The reality is; it takes effort, time and expertise to provide usability advice. Just having a quick glance, or seeing what usability standards you’re breaking (guess what, there’s no such thing as a complete set of standard global website usability rules that can be applied to all websites because no two websites, or groups of Personas, are exactly the same) takes time and a fair amount of work. Anybody who’s willing to give you advice without understanding the basics of; who’s your Personas, what critical tasks are they trying to accomplish, where in the task flow are potential errors or speed bumps, what can you do about them to optimize them, what accessibility or other issues might you face? Well, you get the idea. Free advice is worth what you paid for it.
It takes time to analyze usability – It actually takes many hours to do a full and complete review of usability on a web site. Just having a quick glance is doing you, your website visitors, and the investors who’ve paid hard-earned money for your business and site, a disservice. You wouldn’t want your tax guy to just have a “quick glance” at your taxes, would you?
Not all usability experts are experts – Here’s a no-brainer, asking any Tom, Dick or Harry for usability advice is not a good idea. Education, training and experience will be required to properly diagnose your website usability issues. The odds are, real usability experts are very busy conducting usability testing and providing advice to their clients, and getting well-paid for their efforts. Be prepared to pay for experience and expertise, if someone’s willing to give it to you for free, are they really experts, and should you really trust them?
What to do if you are asked for free usability advice
So, let’s say you are a usability professional and you’ve just been asked to provide free usability advice. What should you do? Here’s a hint…
I guarantee they’ll change the way you think, and design!
If a picture is worth a thousand words than a useful usability video is probably worth several million more. The following 10 must-see usability videos provide excellent examples of practical approaches to usability testing and usability topics. I guarantee that if you watch and internalize the messages from each of these, you’ll change the way you design for the better.
These usability videos can also be used for:
Demonstrating usability testing concepts
Training or educating on usability methods and best-practices
Providing stimulus to your team members to apply key learnings
Serve as the starting point for discussions of applying usability systematically
I hope you find these valuable and refer back to them from time to time. And if I’m missing your favorite, be sure to add a comment at the bottom letting us know which one you would include.
This is an excellent video because it effectively demonstrates how to conduct a paper prototype usability test, and record it for subsequent analysis and recommendation. Asking users to walk through a task-flow and observing them pointing to items they would click provides actionable and real data. This information can be used to make tremendous improvements to an application, well before coding ever begins.
This is a video of the very well received SXSW 2010 presentation by Dave Stanton in which he demonstrates how his 3 year old daughter provides usability feedback and demonstrations of key usability concepts. You can learn a lot from a 3 year old! This reminds me of Steve Krug’s point that anyone can be a usability tester and you, as the usability practitioner, can conduct usability testing anywhere, with almost anyone, at almost anytime and learn valuable information.
This is a very interesting and well produced short video demonstrating the Tobii eye tracking software and hardware. This brief but very well done video describes how eye-tracking, coupled with the Retrospective Think Aloud method can be used to find, analyze and report usability issues with applications. Although this is technically an advertisement video for Tobii, I find it enjoyable to watch because it’s interesting, describes eye tracking well and has high production values. For anyone in marketing by the way, this video should be considered a best-practice for how to advertise using YouTube videos (without bludgeoning your audience over the head with annoying advertorials).
No, this is not a Star Wars video staring R2D2 and C3PO and yes, as this video demonstrates so simply you can usability test anything with real users and learn lots. In this case we are observing people trying to use a binding machine. Usability is for more than just web sites, it can be used on anything. As with web-based application designers, an industrial designer could observe real people interacting with a prototype device. This could help the engineers conceptualize an amazing number of improvements, based on watching the user interactions, well before production actually begins.
Watch the usability guru and celebrated author of Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy conduct a usability test. Watching this video is exactly the experience a remote usability testing observer experiences when observing remote usability tests. It’s a great way to see a master in action, including the inevitable and highly-annoying (funny) Windows alert message that pops-up right in the middle of his test (at about 10:30 into the video). Even usability gurus have their sessions brutalized by Windows! Makes me smile in a been-there-done-that sort of way.
Where does good design and usability come from? It can be said that it comes from the pleasant interactions you have at the sub-conscious and conscious levels with your environment. This video, from Don Norman, another Godfather of usability, was recorded at his 2003 TED talk. It’s a wonderful primer into the various sub-conscious levels at which we interact with our environment and objects around us, and explores what makes up beauty, fun and emotion.
This is a brilliant little video that uses time-lapse (and cool music) to summarize the process needed to; understand your users needs, research and describe Personas, and create wireframes that simulate the application they will interact with, all of which is essential for good usability. This video is by Todd Zaki Warfel who’s an IA and wireframe expert and has a movie-star-looking twitter avatar.
Jared Spool gave an interesting talk on usability and brands at a Google TechTalks event in 2006. It’s a valuable discussion of how people formulate emotional ties and beliefs or perceptions (positive or negative) with Brands, based on their interactions with many different elements that comprise a brand. And I don’t think he complained about a trip in a plane even once!
Usability optimization is about simplifying tasks and the experience associated with tasks. Psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that in western society we actually are paralyzed and indeed less happy because of too much choice. Watching this should convince you that examining your applications to search for ways to simplify and reduce is exactly the right thing to do to improve usability.
Back in 2006 the BCC TV series Click produced a very interesting TV segment on web site accessibility. Among the key findings mentioned was the fact that according to the Disability Rights Commission 2004 study accessible sites were over 1/3 quicker for non-disabled users. This is a significant statistic considering the importance Google is placing on site speed for organic search rankings. I defy any web site developer who uses spacer.gif on their site to try their site on a reader. I’ll bet you you’ll instantly want to rip the design apart and start again, but this time designing the right way with no spacer.gifs.
Conclusion: 10 must-see usability videos worthy of your time
My bet is if you watch each of these, and input what’s being discussed, it will dramatically change your designs. You’ll probably end up being far more focused on user-centered design, will test much more than before, and will apply best-practices of minimizing and reducing obfuscation in all the work you do from now on. Enjoy!
PS – If I missed your favorite usability video be sure to mention it in the Comments!
5 Steps to an Uber user experience job description
I’ve seen plenty of consulting and full-time positions in the past few years for User Experience experts. However, I’ve never seen two job descriptions for user experience that are the same. And unfortunately I’ve seen plenty of job descriptions that actually include conflicting information, or have confusing descriptions for what user experience practitioners actually do.
UX Job Descriptions drive me nuts
There’s good reason for this.
It’s fashionable for companies to use the term “user experience,” but nobody has a clear, simple and standardized definition of what it actually is.
User Experience is not a common or well understood job, such as Accountants or Bookkeepers, that have well defined and broadly known duties. Worse, many of the Associations that a typical user experience professional may belong to, that hiring managers may refer to for job information, have overlapping or confusing descriptions for the practice.
The reality is UX is a bucket for all types of job duties, everything from information architecture to usability testing to visual design can be defined as “user experience.” But each of those is actually quite different skill sets that may or may not be suitable for a particular UX role.
So if you are interested in hiring a user experience expert, but don’t know exactly how to write the job description, here’s 5 steps that can help you:
#1 – Determine your firm’s user experience goals
Instead of trying to determine what skills (IA, usability testing, research, etc.) the position should have, start by determining what goals this position must accomplish. The goals should directly align to the business’ success metrics, and if possible should be quantifiable based on goals typically tracked by the business.
For example: An eCommerce company that sells products online to new and existing customers might have the following goal:
“The user experience leader’s goal will be to help increase eCommerce sales by 5% annually through optimization of the UX for new web site visitors and existing customers.”
#2 – Define the user experience expert’s place in the firm
Often, job descriptions I’ve seen typically do not specify clearly where in the organization the user experience expert will operate. They fail to communicate where his or her boundaries are.
Yet this is important information because it can help prospective candidates mentally map the position to their prior experiences and skills, to see if they qualify for the position. And more importantly, it can help the hiring manager clearly identify if the prospect has the requisite past experience in this type of function. If there are no boundaries, and the user experience expert has the ability to interact with all divisions that should be made known as well.
For example: A medical devices firm with products for physicians might have the following boundaries:
“The user experience expert will report to the SVP of research and development, and will interact with R&D, manufacturing, operations and product managers to conduct user research, testing and optimization of new and existing devices.â€
#3 – Identify expertise and skill sets the user experience expert should possess
This is a tough one, because many job descriptions I’ve seen conflict in terms of expected expertise and tools used. I’ve seen plenty of “visual design” type expertise descriptions (create visual design guidelines and standards) coupled with a requirement to know and practice coding, like Javascript, AJAX or other programming languages. This seems to me to be at odds with typical practitioners, who may come from a more graphical and design background, or psychology trained background, or a more software development and coding background, but usually not all of them.
If the company’s focus and goals are about improving the UI and visual aspects of the UX, then expertise and skills that map to visual design user experience practitioners should be used. If however the company is more focused on user interaction and functions of applications, then potentially UI or coding skill sets may be necessary.
A hiring manager should carefully research what they think they may need, based on the goals and boundaries, but be open-minded to differences in expertise and skill sets among candidates.
For example: A company seeking user experience improvements of internally and externally focused applications may identify the following skill sets:
“The user experience expert will utilize wireframes, html-mockups and simple prototypes to test and recommend improvements to internally and externally focused applications.”
Many larger sized firms already have user experience groups, but many mid and small sized firms do not. It’s important to indicate whether this role is entrepreneurial, i.e., a single user experience position that must do the work plus manage processes and vendors, or is managerial, thus responsible for managing the work of an already existing user experience team. If the company desires to grow a UX team, then this too should be noted, and experiences at building staff and processes should be mentioned in the job description.
For example: A firm looking for a “sole proprietor” hands-on UX expert without an already existing staff may indicate:
“The user experience candidate will act as the single practitioner for all UX work for the firm, and will perform all activities as well manage 3rd party vendors in conducting UX research and optimization.”
#5 – Explain any development process experience needed
Some firms use Agile or SCRUM methods to develop applications, and if so this must be noted. The methods used for ‘traditional’ user research, such as with contextual inquiry, field research or 1-on-1 usability testing sessions may not work as well in Agile environments where iterations come in weekly batches. Methods of user research used may need more speedy yet less deep methodologies of research, and expertise in conducting same.
For example: A firm that uses Agile methods to develop mobile apps may require:
“The user experience candidate will operate in an Agile development environment and will be expected to deliver UX feedback on a weekly basis.”
Conclusion – How to write a user experience job description
There are plenty of other, more traditional aspects of a job description that should be included for user experience practitioners. These include, but are not limited to any need to interact with other virtual team members spread in geographically diverse areas, any need to interact and deliver analysis to senior executives, and education requirements or specific software usage requirements.
Coupled with the 5 tips above, a user experience job description can be written in such a way that both the hiring manager and the candidates will have a clear understanding of the duties and requirements for the job.
Sources for more user experience job description information:
Hello, I'm Craig Tomlin, and I've been improving web sites with usability & SEO optimization for start-ups, small businesses and Fortune 500 firms since 1996. I'm a Certified Usability Analyst & Member of the Usability Professional's Association.
