Testing Hacks

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https://startupstash.com/user-testing-tools/⁠

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User testing with Maze Hack

Basically, the hack is you can use maze to test your usability for less than $50

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https://infinum.com/handbook/design/tools/maze⁠

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UserInterviews - tool to simplify user testing

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https://www.userinterviews.com/⁠

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Full Story

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http://fullstory.com⁠

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https://outsprung.com⁠

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Only $10

Get user feedback from a professional

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https://www.userbrain.com/en/pricing/⁠

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$35/test

Bonus Hack

User Testing the Competition

As we discussed, you’re not the first person to design comments. But just because thousands of other people have designed them doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve all designed them perfectly.

I like to think that other people are making horrible UX mistakes so that I don’t have to.

To learn from other people’s mistakes, find a few different implementations of something similar to what you want to do. In our example case, you’re going to find implementations of comments. Facebook’s a good one, obviously, but try to find a few other styles, as well. Maybe find one or two that you personally think are really well designed or that have some features that apply to your product. For example, if you feel like you need a product rating system, look for comment systems that incorporate various types of rating systems.

Now just do some very basic usability testing on them. This is a great time to use a remote usability testing service like UserTesting.com. Watch four or five people performing tasks with four or five different implementations of the feature you’re thinking of implementing.

Obviously, you don’t need the competitors to be actual competitors. For example, you could test commenting on shopping sites, even if you’re adding comments to a social sharing app. You will want to test on the appropriate platform, though. Usability testing a website doesn’t do you much good if you’re designing an iPhone app.

If you honestly can’t find anything that is at all remotely like the thing you think you’re designing, either you’re trying too hard to be innovative or you’re thinking too literally. For example, gathering a user’s personal data requires very similar tactics whether you’re gathering it in order to help him do his taxes or to get his medical records.

Why would you bother learning what other people are doing wrong? Well, the great thing about watching people use other types of software is that you start to see all the things that are really broken and hard to use. That means you can avoid making the same mistakes.

I was working for a company that had a very large catalog of products. One of the biggest complaints from users was that they had a hard time finding the things they were looking for. Instead of trying to solve this problem from scratch, we ran usability tests on several different large catalog shopping sites and had users try to find products from each one.

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We learned that certain kinds of filters and sorting worked better than others for very large catalogs of products. We also learned where users tended to look for those features. In fact, we found dozens of major usability problems with some of the biggest catalog sites on the Web—sites that you’d really think would know better.

When we launched our own version of a catalog, people were able to find products much more easily, mostly because we hadn’t made common mistakes.

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