Thursday, October 19, 2017
Going Guerrilla: How to Fit UX Research into Any Timeframe
As more and more companies realise the value of UX research, “guerrilla” methods have become a popular way to squeeze research into limited budgets and short timelines. Those of us working in agile sprints often have even less dedicated time for research.
When I say guerrilla research, I don’t mean go bananas or conduct jungle warfare research. Guerrilla research is really just a way to say that you’ve taken a regular UX research method and altered it to reduce time and cost.
To do so, you often end up reducing scope and/or rigour. The key to successful guerrilla research is to strike the right balance to hit time and budget goals, but still be rigorous enough to gather valuable feedback.
Read on for a framework for reducing any research method and an overview of the best time to use guerrilla tactics.
Crafting your guerilla plan
You can “guerrilla-ise” any UX research method, and there’s almost never one single correct way to do so. That said, qualitative techniques like usability tests and interviews lend themselves especially well to guerrilla-isation.
The easiest way I’ve found to plan guerrilla research is to start by determining how you’d do the research if you had desired time and budget. Then work backwards to find the elements you can toggle to make it work for the situation. The first place I look to cut is scope of the research question.
Let’s say your team is working on a new healthcare application and wants to assess the usability of the entire onboarding process. That’s an excellent goal, but pretty broad. Perhaps you could focus your study just on the first few steps of the signup process, but not the follow-up tutorial, or vice versa.
Once you’ve narrowed down your key research goals, you can start looking at what sorts of methods will answer your questions. The process for choosing a research method is the same, regardless of whether you’re trying to go guerrilla or not. For a great summary of choosing a method, take a look at Christian Rohrer’s excellent summary on NNG’s blog or this UX planet article.
Besides narrowing the scope of your research goal, think about the details that make up a study. This includes questions such as:
- What do you need to build or demonstrate?
- How many sessions or participants do you need?
- How will you recruit them?
- What’s the context of the studies?
Then you can take a look at all those elements, identify where your biggest time and money costs are, and prioritise elements to shift.
Reducing scope
Let’s say, for example, that you determine the ideal way to test the onboarding flow of your new app is to conduct 10 one-hour usability sessions of the fully functional prototype. The tests will take place in a lab and you’ll have a participant-recruitment firm find participants that represent your main persona.
There are many ways you could shift to reduce time and costs in this example.
You could:
- Run test sessions remotely instead of in a lab
- Reduce the number of sessions overall
- Run unmoderated studies
- Build a simpler wireframe or paper prototype
- Recruit participants on social media
- Intercept people in a public location
- Or a combination of these methods
To decide what to alter, look at what will have the biggest impact on time, budget, and validity of your results.
For example, if working with a recruiting firm will be time consuming and expensive, you’ll want to look for alternative ways to recruit. Intercepting people in public is what many of us envision when we think of guerrilla research. You could do that, or you could also find participants on social media or live-intercept them from a site or web app.
You may even decide to combine multiple guerilla-ising techniques, such as conducting fewer sessions and doing so remotely, or showing a simple prototype to people who you intercept.
Just remember, you don’t want to reduce time and effort so much that you bias your results. For instance, if you’re doing shorter sessions or recruiting informally, you may want to keep the same overall number of sessions so you have a reasonable sample size.
Best uses for guerrilla research
So, when is the best scenario to use guerrilla tactics in your research?
- You have a general consumer-facing product which requires no previous experience or specialty knowledge OR you can easily recruit your target participants
- You want to gather general first-impressions and see if people understand your product’s value
- You want to see if people can perform very specific tasks without prior knowledge
- You can get some value out of the sessions and the alternative is no research at all
And when should you avoid guerrilla methods?
- When you’ll be researching sensitive topics such as health, money, sex, or relationships
- When you need participants to have very specific domain knowledge
- When the context in which someone will use your product will greatly impact their usage and you can’t talk to people in context
- When you have the time or budget to do more rigorous research!
Guerrilla research is a great way to fit investigation into any timeframe or budget. One of its real beauties is that you can conduct multiple, iterative rounds of research to ensure you’re building the right things and doing so well.
If you have the luxury of conducting more rigorous research, take advantage, but know that guerrilla research is always a better option than no research at all.
In my next article, I’ll take a look at the pros and cons of some common guerrilla techniques. Stay tuned!
The post Going Guerrilla: How to Fit UX Research into Any Timeframe appeared first on UX Mastery.
by Amanda Stockwell via UX Mastery
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
7 Tips To Help You Use Google Keep Effectively - #infographic
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by Web Desk via Digital Information World
Git and WordPress: How to Auto-Update Posts with Pull Requests
At Bitfalls.com, we also use WordPress for now, and use the same peer review approach for content as we do at SitePoint.
We decided to build a tool which automatically pulls content from merged pull requests into articles, giving us the ability to fix typos and update posts from Github, and see the changes reflected on the live site. This tutorial will walk you through the creation of this tool, so you can start using it for your own WordPress site, or build your own version.
The Plan
The first part is identifying the problem and the situation surrounding it.
- we use WPGlobus for multi-language support, which means content gets saved like this:
{:en}English content{:}{:hr}Croatian content{:}. - authors submit PRs via Github, the PRs are peer reviewed and merged, and then (currently) manually imported into WP's Posts UI through the browser.
- every post has the same folder layout:
author_folder/post_folder/language/final.md - this is slow and error prone, and sometimes mistakes slip by. It also makes updating posts tedious.
The solution is the following:
- add a hook processor which will detect pushes to the master branch (i.e. merges from PRs)
- the processor should look for a meta file in the commit which would contain information on where to save the updated content
- the processor automatically converts the MD content to HTML, merges the languages in the WPGlobus format, and saves them into the database
Bootstrapping
If you'd like to follow along (highly recommended), please boot up a good virtual machine environment, install the newest version of WordPress on it, and add the WPGlobus plugin. Alternatively, you can use a prepared WordPress box like VVV. Additionally, make sure your environment has ngrok installed - we'll use that to pipe Github hook triggers to our local machine, so we can test locally instead of having to deploy.
Hooks
For this experiment, let's create a new repository. I'll call mine autopush.
In the settings of this repository, we need to add a new hook. Since we're talking about a temporary Ngrok URL, let's first spin that up. In my case, entering the following on the host machine does the trick:
ngrok http homestead.app:80
I was given the link http://ift.tt/2zz4fK0, so that's what goes into the webhook, with an arbitrary suffix like githook. We only need push events. The json data type is cleaner, so that's selected as a preference, and the final webhook setup looks something like this:
Let's test this now.
git clone http://ift.tt/2zkEvQA
cd autopush
touch README.md
echo "This is a README file" >> README.md
git add -A
git commit -am "We're pushing for the first time"
git push origin master
The ngrok log screen should display something like this:
POST /githook/ 404 Not Found
This is fine. We haven't made the /githook endpoint yet.
Processing Webhooks
We'll read this new data into WordPress with custom logic. Due to the spaghetti-code nature of WP itself, it's easier to circumvent it entirely with a small custom application. First, we'll create the githook folder in the WordPress project's root, and an index.php file inside it. This makes the /githook/ path accessible, and the hook will no longer return 404, but 200 OK.
According to the docs, the payload will have a commits field with a modified field in each commit. Since we're only looking to update posts, not schedule them or delete them - those steps are still manual, for safety - we'll only be paying attention to that one. Let's see if we can catch it on a test push.
First, we'll save our request data to a text file, for debugging purposes. We can do this by modifying our githook/index.php file:
<?php
file_put_contents('test.txt', file_get_contents('php://input'));
Then we'll create a new branch, add a file, and push it online.
git checkout -b test-branch
touch testfile.md
git add testfile.md
git commit -am "Added test file"
git push origin test-branch
Sure enough, our test.json file is filled with the payload now. This is the payload I got. You can see that we have only one commit, and that commit's modified field is empty, while the added field has testfile.md. We can also see this happened on refs/heads/test-branch, ergo, we're not interested in it. But what happens if we make a PR out of this branch and merge it?
Continue reading %Git and WordPress: How to Auto-Update Posts with Pull Requests%
by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint
Leave Your Competitors in the Dust with 280+ Pre-Built Websites
This article was sponsored by Be Themes. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
Are you a freelancer? Then your pay often depends on finding clients who can provide you with a steady stream of work. The competition can be fierce, however. Moreover, clients can be picky about who they feel can be trusted to deliver a quality product.
Worrying about how other designers get lucrative assignments is a waste of time. It’s what you are doing to capture some of those assignments that counts, and it’s not as difficult as you might think.
These three strategies can help you. They can put you on the path to getting more clients who are eager to pay you handsomely for your work.
1. Build or Update Your Own Creative Website
Freelance web designers need to have their own websites to publicize their skills. Being able to present clients with a gallery or portfolio of your work is key to getting more work. Yet having a portfolio, even an awesome one, isn’t necessarily enough.
You need to have your website’s visitors blown away by the user experience you’re able to provide. You want those prospective clients to see the features they would like to see in theirs. These include page load speed, SEO, navigation, and well-structured content.
Now they know who can do it for them!
2. Getting More Clients in Less Time
The strategy? It’s easier than you think. A problem you may face is that a range of clients represents a wide variety of industry niches. These also come with a variation of website types added into the mix.
In addition, these clients can have vastly different website requirements. It’s incumbent on you to be nimble enough to find an appropriate template or theme quickly. You should be able to deliver a product in hours, instead of days or weeks.
Do that, and you’re already a step or two ahead of the competition. Do it consistently, and before you know it, the competition will be the least of your concerns.
Be Theme gives you the flexibility you need to completely satisfy any client’s needs, and do so quickly. Be Theme’s pre-built websites address every single industry sector and business niche. It’s not all that difficult to create a beautiful website for a client the same day you get the go-ahead.
These pre-built website examples demonstrate why this is possible.
Showcase
This is an excellent example for a creative client with a product or service to sell. You might even consider it as a starting point for your own creative website.
Continue reading %Leave Your Competitors in the Dust with 280+ Pre-Built Websites%
by SitePoint Team via SitePoint
6 Typography Secrets That Will Make Your Hero Images Explosive - #infographic
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by Web Desk via Digital Information World
Earning Money Online - #infographic
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by Web Desk via Digital Information World