Oasen.nl

Oasen.nl tells you an interactive story about how top-quality drinking water is created.
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

10 Terrific Workplace Incentives - #infographic

More and more companies are discovering that holding on to their best employees takes more than just paying them a living wage and providing them with basic health care. The bare minimum just isn’t good enough anymore. People who care about more than just the “basics" often need something extra to convince them not to explore greener pastures—which is why many companies use enticing bonus "perks" to attract those people and convince them to stay.

Some of the larger companies like Google and Dropbox offer truly exceptional incentives which go beyond free coffee —things like free food and fully stocked game rooms. But employee perks don’t have to be quite so extravagant to attract top talent. Sometimes it only takes a little bit of effort to show that you care about your team’s happiness and well-being. This could mean allowing employees to work remotely and set their own schedules, or it could mean taking a personal interest in their physical fitness and mental health.

Whether you’re looking for some "talent bait" to reel in discerning employees or playing the career field, it never hurts to take a peek at how other businesses deal with this dilemma. This infographic from Company Folders illustrates some of the truly creative job perks that major companies are using to attract and retain employees.

by Guest Author via Digital Information World

The 7 essentials of successful survey design

Surveys are an essential tool in the UX research toolkit. When done well, they deliver incredible insights into how people use your product. They are particularly helpful if you’re looking for feedback from many users, or people across locations. With an array of easy to use digital tools like SurveyMonkey at our fingertips, executing a survey is relatively simple.

But the actual survey design is where it gets complicated. If you’ve ever created a survey, you know it’s not as simple as it seems at first glance. In fact, carefully designing a survey that meets your research objectives can take months.

How do you keep your survey short enough to get responses, but long enough to provide useful insights? Are you sure your question wording is clear and unambiguous?  What question formats do you use to get meaningful answers? How do you strike the right balance between open-ended and closed responses?

In my experience in consulting and teaching survey design, these are common problems for people new to survey design. To keep you on the right path, here are my seven top strategies to design an effective survey.

Think before you write: Research objectives, attributes, then questions

If the first step in your survey project is to start writing questions, you’re off to a bad start. The first step in the questionnaire design process is to review your research objectives from the planning stage and then think about the attributes you want to measure in the survey.

Attributes are characteristics of whatever it is you’re trying to understand – whether that’s customer, employee or user experience – or whatever. When you’ve identified the attributes of interest, then you can start writing survey questions that generate data to measure those attributes.

For example, let’s say you are a hotel manager and you want to know how well your hotel is doing. Your research objectives may be to understand your guests’ views about their hotel experiences and to understand why drives them to be loyal or not. 

The attributes of a hotel stay are: making the reservation, checking in upon arrival; room characteristics such as bed comfort, climate control, noise, working condition of items in the room, cleanliness, amenities; general hotel appearance, fitness center, business center, restaurant, catering services, checking out, and billing.  

You can see that even for a simple hotel stay, the list of attributes gets quite long. Now we’re in a position to think about how to pose questions to our audience to capture data that measure their experiences.  

Get out of your comfort zone: Go to the source

The worst kinds of surveys are like mushrooms – created in isolation by one person, and not brought into the light for contributions from others. Most people designing surveys for the first time will go beyond the ‘mushroom stage’ and get input from a project team in brainstorming sessions. Great. You’re not a mushroom, but this process still suffers from internal blinders.

Go beyond the ‘mushroom stage’ and get input from your project team in brainstorming sessions.

You think you know the concerns of the group whose views you are researching. But do you? Consider conducting some research, for example, interviews, with your research audience to learn from them their concerns. This is valuable information in itself, and this research will identify attributes to measure on the survey that you may never have considered.

For example, look at my list of hotel stay attributes. Think about your hotel experiences. Anything missing? How about security? The hotel manager may assume they’re creating a secure environment for their guests, but maybe a guest noticed something – people hanging around the entrance or broken window latches.  

The shiny penny syndrome

Think outside the survey box. Make sure you consider whether a survey is, in fact, your best research approach. If you’re researching a small group, then personal interviews may be a better approach. If you’re looking to research further issues raised in the survey results, you may be tempted to do a follow-up survey; whereas, interviews may be the better approach. Some people treat surveys like a shiny penny, and the only tool to be applied in any and all circumstances. It’s not. Get the right tool for the job.

Design a good instrument

A well-designed instrument, or questionnaire, is a bit of an art. You’re engaged in a balancing act. You want enough comprehensive data for your analysis, but you want to limit ‘respondent burden’. A survey that takes too much energy to complete leads to lower response rates. Keep the burden on the respondent as low as possible, yet enough to achieve your research objectives. As you design the survey, always think about the work you’re asking the respondent to do.

Most importantly, the survey instrument should engage the respondent in order to get a full response, an honest response, and ongoing participation. Some basic rules are:

• Keep it short. If you can’t take action on the findings from some question, then why are you asking it?
• Make it relevant. Ideally, all the questions in the survey should be relevant to the invitee. That’s hard to achieve 100%, even using branching logic to tailor questions based on how they answer the current question. But lots of irrelevant questions lead to a non-response.
• Practice Poka-Yoke. That’s a Japanese quality control term for “mistake-proofing”. Design the instrument so respondents are unlikely to make mistakes. For example, a question with a double negative will confuse the respondent, or a poorly presented rating scale could lead the respondent to invert the scale.
• Organise your survey into sections. Topical sections keep the respondent focused on the topic, and make a survey feel shorter. Have a flow across sections that makes sense to the respondent.
• Put yourself in the respondents’ shoes. Beware of common question writing mistakes. A number of common question writing mistakes exist. These mistakes may mean the data submitted by the respondents do not represent their views. The biggest mistake is ambiguity in what the question is asking. Our goal is a common interpretation of every question by every respondent. If different respondents have different interpretations of a question, how can we interpret the data? Imprecise wording, jargon, convoluted phrasing, loaded wording, and double-barreled questions all introduce ambiguity, making the data collected invalid.
• Don’t rely on open-ended questions. Free-form text questions have their place in a survey to get more granular detail, but over-reliance on this question form introduces respondent burden, administrative burden, and analytical burden. Better to use well-designed closed-ended questions – questions that yield a number or a check as the response – since these questions are far easier for the respondent to answer and for you to analyse.

Not all question formats are created equal

The question format you use will determine the type of data generated – nominal, ordinal, interval, or ratio. The data type limits the statistical analysis you can perform.

Types of survey questions and their analysis capabilities.

The data type limits the statistical analysis you can perform. Interval rating questions are most commonly used in surveys, but other question types might generate more useful data for your analysis. Become familiar with all the question formats and consider their analysis potential for your research objectives.

A sheep in wolf’s clothing: An ‘ordinal’ question pretending to be ‘interval’

The most commonly used question type is the interval rating scale question for which we can take averages and do other advanced analysis. The design of interval questions (for example a 1-5 or 1-10 ranking) require a consistent unit of measurement across the points on the scale, i.e. the distance between scale points should all be the same.

Poor choice of anchors – the words that describe the scale – and how the scale is presented can corrupt the interval properties, and make the statistical analysis incorrect. Interval rating scales should also be balanced, that is, we shouldn’t be directing the respondent toward a positive response.

Get the respondent to consider trade-offs

In almost all surveys, we want to learn the relative importance of factors in a respondent’s decision-making. For example, what drove their satisfaction or dissatisfaction? This isn’t news for UX designers, as understanding ‘why’ is a fundamental part of the job.

Rating scale questions for example, are unsuited for this, because the respondent can just say everything is important. Consider using fixed-sum questions or ranking questions to get the respondent to tell you what’s really the most important. Ranking questions ask the respondent to put a set of items in order of importance. Fixed-sum questions may use that same list of items but ask the respondent to apportion 100 points across the items to indicate relative importance.  

Next time you need a better insight into your users or audience, consider using a survey. With the tips you’ll be collecting useful, qualitative data for analysis and design in no time.

The post The 7 essentials of successful survey design appeared first on UX Mastery.

by Fred Van Bennekom via UX Mastery

Web Design Weekly #252

Headlines

Am I a Developer or a Designer?

Sound familiar? James Rauhut from the IBM Design team shares his journey in working between the realm of web development and design, and how the disciplines can complement each other. (medium.freecodecamp.com)

Angular 2 Final Released (angular.io)

​Don’t love your job? You should. Try Hired and find your fit

​You’re on the cutting edge of design. Why work at a job you don’t love? Try Hired today and have 4,000+ top companies apply for the chance to interview you. Offers come with upfront salary & equity, plus get personalized career support from our Talent Advocates. (hired.com)

Articles

A Nerd’s Guide to Color on the Web

A detailed post that delves into some of the technical details about color on the web. (css-tricks.com)

First impressions of React

Seeing the talented Remy Sharp take React for a spin for the first time and share his learning experience gives us an entertaining read for React newbies and gurus. (remysharp.com)

What, Exactly, Makes Something A Progressive Web App?

Whilst there may be many shades of gray on this topic, this post helps set out some requirements and provides a baseline for what a Progressive Web App is. (infrequently.org)

nth-child vs nth-of-type

Do you ever get confused when to use nth-child or nth-of-type? If so, this post is for you. (bitsofco.de)

JavaScript Arrow Functions Introduction

Wes Bos explains the three main benefits that arrow functions have and dives into each one in detail to help us take full advantage of them. (wesbos.com)

JavaScript Continues To Eat The World

If you are keen to dive in and learn JavaScript hopefully this post tips you over the edge. JavaScript is here to stay and is becoming a part of so much. (medium.com)

Airbnb perf audit (docs.google.com)

Tools / Resources

Speed Monitor

This handy script captures the users performance using performance.timing. It then sends it to a NodeJS server, storing it in MongoDB and sends reports to Slack and a couple of other chat tools. (github.com)

The 100% correct way to validate email addresses

You may not find the answer that David Gilbertson proposes that mind boggling but he does sell it in an entertaining manner. (hackernoon.com)

A Guide to Browser Scroll Animations

Brian Rinaldi looks at multiple options for implementing scroll animations within your site. He explores building them from scratch and using existing libraries. (developer.telerik.com)

Inspiration

The Evolution of the Help Scout Brand (helpscout.net)

Intro of the show Stranger Things in CSS (codepen.io)

Jobs

Communication Designer at Base

Base is seeking a Communication Designer to help lead the company’s marketing and branding efforts and help build a forward thinking world-class brand. If you’re passionate about coming up with innovative designs, fresh ideas, solving problems and collaborating with a fast-paced team this will be the perfect job for you. (getbase.com)

Front End Developer at The Working Party

The Working Party is a group of creative problem-solvers who work on interesting and challenging projects for a range of clients. We value constant learning, aesthetics, interaction and usability. (theworkingparty.com.au)

Need to find passionate developers or designers? Why not advertise in the next newsletter

Last but not least…

The state of the Octoverse 2016 (octoverse.github.com)

The post Web Design Weekly #252 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly

Practical Concurrency on Android With HaMeR

Editorial: A Spotlight on Interesting JavaScript Projects

This is the editorial from my latest JavaScript newsletter, you can subscribe here.

Occasionally while browsing the web I come across some cool project or library that does something I'd never thought about doing (or didn't know could be done) with JavaScript. I suppose it just goes to prove Atwood's Law: "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.".

Recently I came across a project called Conkie. The Linux users among you may be familiar with the software that inspired it, Conky, a widget framework for displaying information from various plugin modules to your desktop. These modules usually display system stats like CPU temperature, HDD usage, and network transfers, but are highly customizable to display pretty much any kind of information you want.

Conky modules are written in the Lua scripting language, which can be a hurdle if you don't know it. The JavaScript version is built on top of Electron. If you're not already familiar with it, Electron is an application framework that combines Node.js with the Chromium browser to allow you to create cross-platform desktop applications.

Conkie's functionality is divided across modules, written in JavaScript, for collecting the data, and themes, which allow you to style the output using HTML and CSS. This means that we web developers have the ability to create and customize widgets using the technologies we know best. The default theme uses Angular (v1.x) and Highcharts to format the output but thanks to Electron you can use any front-end framework or visualization libraries that you want.

Conkie is still a relatively new project (not yet a year old) and still a work-in-progress. The creator, Matt Carter, seems to be working on this pretty much solo and is on the lookout for contributors, so this could be a great opportunity to dip your toe into open-source if you haven't already. As well as help making Conkie work on Mac and Windows systems, Matt is also after some design help, so there is scope to get involved no matter where your skills lie.

As developers, it's easy to get into a rut building similar types of software day in and day out, I think that taking a look at projects such as this can help to inspire your curiosity about what can be done with JavaScript, and maybe even spark new ideas for your next side-project! We'd like to highlight more interesting JavaScript projects, so if you come across something unusual or inspiring, tweet us @SitePointJS with the hashtag #SpotlightOnJS.

Continue reading %Editorial: A Spotlight on Interesting JavaScript Projects%

by Nilson Jacques via SitePoint

pageAccelerator – Solution to Load Web Pages Faster

pageAccelerator is a very light solution to load web pages faster. It's an agnostic library that uses ajax and pushState to deliver a faster navigation experience.

by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed