Favourite UX research tools from the UX Mastery community

From eye tracking to card sorting, surveys to usability tests, designers have a huge set of UX research tools and methods to understand user behaviour and attitudes. The research method you select depends first and foremost on the type of input you need to answer your research questions. If you need help with this, we highly recommend the Nielsen-Norman Groups famed article When to use which research methods.

Finding the most useful method is the first challenge, but how do we choose the right UX research tools for the job?

Luckily, there’s an abundance of tools—whichever method you use. We’ve already got the 100+ Awesome Tools for UX Designers, but we still wanted to hear what people are currently using, and why. So, we asked you, the UX Mastery community, for your favourites, and this is what you came up with.

A quick caveat; this is by no means an exhaustive list, and is missing few key methods – contextual enquiry, user interviews, collaborative design, territory mapping, analytics review, competitor analysis. Have we missed your favourite tool? Let us know in the forums.

Without further ado, here’s a roundup of the UX Mastery community’s current favourite UX research tools.

For usability tests

Usabilityhub is a clear favourite for remote usability tests, impression tests and split testing designs. Jacqui Dow has one word of caution: “UsabilityHub is great for running quick tests and getting almost instant feedback, only downside is often the demographic is a bit skewed.”

Luke has a few more suggestions: “UserTesting.com is handy for recruiting remote participants and getting video recordings of them completing specific tasks or UI flows. I know whatusersdo.com is fantastic too.”

Usabilla gets the thumbs up for usability testing from Brad Watson.

For card sorting

The people’s favourites from Optimal Workshop include Treejack and OptimalSort.

A trusty technique for information architecture, digital tools make card sorting even more convenient. For Brad Watson and Luke Chambers, the go-to is Optimal Workshop’s OptimalSort.

For online tree tests

For testing and validating information architecture, Gillian Halba says you can’t go wrong with Optimal Suite’s Treejack. “I love the Optimal Suite, especially Treejack. It’s great when you have a few options to test as you can get a steer on which works best and what titles users seem to be responding to.”

For sketching and prototyping

As an essential part of the UX design process, it’s no surprise that we have a few favourites for sketching and prototyping.

R Meyer is an Axure fan for wireframing and prototyping: “If you use it to wireframe, you can take those wireframes and add functionality as you iterate – adding interactions, fidelity, and anything else, as needed. No need to recreate anything. I also love the ability for multiple designers to work on the same project at the same time, and the sharing service where you can provide links to your boss and other stakeholders.”

Marvel turns your simple sketches into clickable prototypes.

For testing hand-sketched clickable prototypes, Luke Chambers says you can’t beat Marvel. “Just take a photo of the sketches and add hotspots and head off to find a test participant.”

Steve Crow recommends Sketch for wireframing and prototyping. He says:

“I think the main advantage is that Sketch is made specifically FOR UX designers. So you have easy access to symbols and interface elements that are specific to that function.”

Honourable mention: good old pen and paper.

For online surveys

An article we published earlier this month had excellent recommendations on how to design a survey. As for tools for the job? Brad Watson says your best bets for online surveys are SurveyMonkey, Typeform and Google Forms.

For heat maps

Got some heat mapping to do? Give MixPanel a try.

For better or worse, it seems that there’s no such thing as too much information when it comes to tracking how customers use your product. Favourites for heat mapping are Neo Nester turns to MixPanel, Gillian Halba prefers Chalkmark and Sarah Hawk recommends VWO. Take your pick!

For A/B testing

If you’re looking for A/B testing tools, dougcollins has a few recommendations, depending on your objective: “unbounce is more geared toward reducing bounce rate with effective landing pages. Zarget is geared towards improving conversion rates. KissMetrics is more generalised.”

Sarah Hawk on the other hand, is a fan of VWO for personalised content, A/B testing and conversion rates.

 

Don’t forget to take a look at our list of 100+ awesome tools for UX Designers for a full catalogue covering every facet of UX design.

What are your favourite UX research tools? Let us know why in the forums!

 

The post Favourite UX research tools from the UX Mastery community appeared first on UX Mastery.

by Natassja Hoogstad Hay via UX Mastery

This week's JavaScript news, issue 303

This week's JavaScript news — Read this e-mail on the Web JavaScript Weekly Issue 303 — September 29, 2016 React Status: Our New React-Focused Newsletter It’s been in beta for several weeks, but our new React-focused newsletter is going well :-) If React is your thing, definitely check it out. Latest issue here. Cooper Press optimize-js: Optimize JS for Faster Initial Loading A tool that wraps all immediately-invoked functions or likely-to-be-invoked functions in parentheses to speed up most JavaScript parsers’ initial parsing times. Nolan Lawson Node.js Debugging with Chrome DevTools in Parallel with Browser JavaScript The latest Chrome Canary lets you debug your browser JavaScript files and Node.js ones in the same DevTools window in parallel. Serg Hospodarets 🔥 Course: Complete Intro to React (feat. Redux & Router) Brian Holt (Netflix) introduces you to React plus surrounding ecosystem including: Redux for state management, React Router for navigation and more! Frontend Masters   Sponsor Chrome Experimenting with Foreign Fetch for Cross-Origin Service Workers All very experimental for now but the idea is to let third-party services deploy their own network request handlers. For example, a Web font service could install a service worker to cache fonts across all tabs. Google Developers Understanding Reactive Programming and RxJS A practical look at using reactive programming with RxJS to build a weather app. Martin Gontovnikas JavaScript Asynchronous Iteration Proposal A look at the proposal currently in the works at TC39 to simplify asynchronous iteration even further. Nicolás Bevacqua Electron: Building Desktop Apps with Web Languages A look at the things you can create using features and tools that Electron inherits from the Chromium browser, Node, and the vast ecosystem of npm modules. 42 minutes. Zeke Sikelianos Leaflet 1.0: A JavaScript Library for Interactive Maps Years of work has culminated in a 1.0 release for this mobile-friendly interactive map generation library. Vladimir Agafonkin g9.js: Generate Automatically Interactive Graphics Draw graphics, then g9 automatically makes them interactive for end users. There’s a great set of code-driven explanations and demos to learn more. bijection Jobs Staff UI Engineer at LendingHome (fintech + San Francisco, CA)LendingHome is seeking a Staff UI Engineer who is ready to create positive experiences for customers, solve complex problems and has a strong background in building best-in-class large-scale SaaS or consumer applications. Lendinghome Get 5+ Engineering Job Offers in 1 WeekWith Hired, companies apply to hire you - get salary and equity offers before you interview from companies like Facebook, Postmates, & Square Hired.com In brief Node v6.7.0, v0.12.16, v0.10.47 and v4.6.0 Released news node Several releases for important security reasons. Node.js Foundation jQuery 3.1.1 Released (A Patch Release, No New Features) news jQuery Foundation Manage State in Your React App with Redux tutorial Write a Redux application from scratch and learn how to reduce boilerplate in your next React project. Stormpath  Sponsor Quick Examples to Help You Work With the DOM tutorial Covers the basics. Juha Lindstedt 3 Useful Babel Presets tutorial Dr. Axel Rauschmayer How to Add or Remove a CSS Class with Vanilla JavaScript tutorial Sitepoint The 4 Stages of Perf Tuning Your Angular2 App tutorial Vinci Rufus JavaScript Promises 102: The 4 Promise Methods tutorial Ire Aderinokun Slackwatch: Monitor Your AWS Service from Slack using Cloudwatch and SNS tutorial Take a note from Bandwidth developer Ed Hintz on how to monitor your AWS service via Slack - it's an easy way to make Slack work for you and your team even more effectively. Bandwidth  Sponsor Building an Angular 2 App with a Java EE Backend video Adam Bien Things You Can Do In ES6 That Can't Be Done In ES5 video 24 minutes. Dan Shappir Thoughts on JavaScript vs C++ After Creating The Same 3D Game in Both opinion Irrlicht3d Why Learning Angular 2 Was Excruciating opinion “like trying to learn a new video game and starting on hard core mode” Liz Bennett Why You Should Avoid document.write, Specifically for Script Injection opinion Damien Jubeau Clipboard.js: Copy to Clipboard Without Flash code Zeno Rocha Choreographer: A Simple Library to Take Care of Complex CSS Animations code Demo here. Christine Cha Bcoin: An Advanced Full Node JS Bitcoin Implementation code Even works in the browser. Purse Marko: Templating Engine and UI Component Library from eBay code eBay navigo: A Simple Vanilla JavaScript Router with Fallback for Older Browsers code Krasimir Tsonev Render React and React Router v4 On-Demand with CDN Caching code Uses Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and CloudFront. Lari Hoppula CurrencyFormatter.js: Easy Formatting of Values in 155 Currencies code Contains 155 currency and 715 locale definitions out of the box. OSREC Financial Taggd: A jQuery Plugin to Add Notes to Images code Add notes and additional information to images, responsively. Tim Severien Curated by Peter Cooper and published by Cooper Press. Stop getting JavaScript Weekly : Change email address : Read this issue on the Web © Cooper Press Ltd. Office 30, Lincoln Way, Louth, LN11 0LS, UK

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Material Design Audio Player with jQuery

A tutorial about creating Material Desing look audio player by using jQuery. jAudio.js as a jQuery plugin is also available.

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How Optional Breaks the Monad Laws and Why It Matters

Java 8 brought us lambdas and streams, both long-awaited-for features. With it came Optional to avoid NullPointerExceptions at the end of stream pipelines that might not return an element. In other languages may-or-may-not-contain-a-value types like Optional are well-behaving monads – but in Java it isn’t. And this matters to everyday developers like us! Introducing java.util.Optional […]

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by Marcello La Rocca via SitePoint

10 Most Valuable Places for Your Keywords

This article is part of an SEO series from WooRank. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

SEO is all about making your page as relevant as possible to a target keyword used in a search engine. Perhaps the most important, and famous, aspect of this is through the use of keywords. However, just throwing a keyword on a page a few times won’t do much to signal that your page is useful and relevant to a user’s search. You need to use your keywords in the right way, in the right places, to show search engines that your website can help a searcher achieve their goal. On the flip side, using keywords in just the right places will help you attract visitors who are looking for what your website is offering.

In this piece we’ll go over 10 most valuable places you should, and shouldn’t, include keywords on your page.

1. URL

The structure and words you use in your URLs are very important. Optimized URLs are vital for search engines and human usability, and play a big part in your SEO. Use keywords in your URL to tell readers how relevant the page is to a keyword and what sort of content they should expect to find on the page.

If you have an ecommerce site, use your category, sub-category and product keywords in the URL. A URL like http://ift.tt/2d9cbYS tells search engines a lot more about the page and what it’s about than something like http://ift.tt/2dxSa0H. Search engines crawling the URL can see immediately that the page will be relevant to searches about men’s brown leather shoes, while the second URL doesn’t provide any such clues.

If your keywords contain multiple words, use hyphens between words and avoid stop words (to, at, with, etc.). Search engines don’t recognize underscores, so they see http://ift.tt/2d9bn6h the same as http://ift.tt/2dxQPXw. This is a problem because humans obviously use spaces when searching, which means a URL containing underscores won’t appear as relevant to a search for "brown leather shoes."

Optimizing your URLs with keywords is also helpful for linking purposes. Research has shown that URLs using keywords makes links using keywords as anchor text more likely, which makes for a more valuable link. In instances where people add links to your site without specifying anchor text, usually by just copying and pasting the URL into the text, the URL itself will become the anchor text. Using your keywords in the URL will ensure that in these cases, your anchor text will include keywords.

2. Title Tag

A page’s title is indicated in the page’s <head>. When implemented correctly, it looks like this:

<title>This is the Title</title>

Title tags serve a lot of purposes: They’re used by browsers for tabs and bookmark descriptions and by social media sites when you share a link. They’re also one of your most important parts of on page SEO. Search engines rely on title tags maybe more than any other element when figuring out the topic of a page, so it’s important to optimize page titles for your target keywords. Use your keywords at the beginning of the title for the best effect. If you want to include multiple keywords, or your location for local SEO, use the pipe character (|), to separate them.

Titles that are too long will be cut off, so keep them less than 60 characters (including spaces), with an ideal length between 50-60 characters. Search engines have developed a talent for determining when someone is trying to manipulate them. Adding too many keywords, or repeating the same keyword over and over again, will make your page look bad and hurt your SEO. This page, for example, stuffed its title tag with several keywords related to watches and appears on the 21st page of Google search results.

3. Meta Description

Meta descriptions aren’t used as a ranking factor by search engines, but you can still use your keyword here to improve your SEO. Search engines combine meta descriptions with title tags and URLs to create a page’s search snippet. Meta descriptions are implemented in the document <head> and look like this:

<meta name="description” content=”A short page description, no more than 160 characters Keywords appear in bold.” />

Think of search snippets as an opportunity to advertise the content on your page. Keywords matching search terms will appear in bold, so use them in your meta description to entice users to click through to your site. Along with keywords, try to use words/phrases like "cheap," “deals” or “free shipping,” to further encourage click through. Search engines use click-through rate (CTR) as a ranking signal, so having an optimized meta description will help your SEO.

Make sure your meta descriptions accurately describe what users will find on the page. A bad meta description won’t directly hurt your ranking, but it could result in a high bounce rate (the percentage of users who leave your site without interacting with any pages beyond the landing page). This is a clue that your page is irrelevant to the keyword.

4. Page Content

Your page content is the backbone of your site, and theoretically the whole reason your page exists in the first place. In the old days, optimizing your content meant loading up the beginning of your page with keywords and synonyms. However, since Google’s Panda update, that sort of keyword-saturated content looks like useless spam and you’ll struggle to get much organic search traffic.

Instead, focus on creating content that covers the topic in-depth and at length. Google likes long content — the average top ten page has right around 2,000 words. Concentrating on covering the topic authoritatively will allow you to use keywords throughout the page. It will also naturally allow you to use latent semantic keywords. Latent semantic keywords are words that are topically associated with other words. It’s one of the ways search engines tell the difference between a page about swimming pools and a page about billiards. They help strengthen your page’s ties to a particular topic, which can improve your search ranking.

Your content also needs to be unique and high quality. Duplicating or spinning content won’t cause a penalty, but it will keep you from ranking in search results. Completely copying content could cause Google to leave you out of search results completely. You also need to proofread your content as spelling, grammar and vocabulary mistakes make your site look bad and cause a high bounce rate.

The good news is that if you are creating high-quality, in-depth content, you’re likely creating evergreen content. Evergreen content stays relevant and ranks for a long period of time (think months or years, instead of days or weeks). It also serves as linkbait to make your off page SEO efforts a little bit easier.

5. Headers and Sub-heads

Like title tags, search engines pay close attention to headers and sub-heads as clues regarding a page’s content, particularly the <h1> tag. The <h1> tag is the most important header on the page and serves as the title for the page’s content, so you absolutely need to include your keyword here. Note, however, that the <h1> header is NOT the same thing as the title tag. Use sub-heads, <h2> through to <h6>, to order and structure your content and use your keywords consistently throughout the page. Your h1 doesn’t need to be exactly the same as your title tag, but it should be pretty close.

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by Greg Snow-Wasserman via SitePoint

WordPress SVG Support: How to Enable SVGs in WordPress

Vector images are becoming increasingly common on the web. SVGs provide a scalable, responsive and fast alternative to standard images with the primary benefit being that they look crisp and sharp across any device and they are typically smaller in file size.

Cross-browser support is also now comprehensive, with all modern browsers supporting SVGs when used with the image tag or in CSS as part of the background property.

If you’re using WordPress, you’re probably familiar with the Media Library and how it works as a central repository for your media assets. The manager which handles uploading of files is initially restricted to a listing of approved file types.

Today’s tutorial will focus on how we can add SVG media support and also improve WordPress’ processing, handling and display of SVGs overall.

Note: If you’re in a rush you can download the complete solution as a WordPress plugin. Just download it and activate and enjoy SVG images on your site!

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by Simon Codrington via SitePoint

Fighting Recruiter Spam with PHP – Proof of Concept

Ever since I moved off of Google services (due to quality, not privacy concerns), I'd been looking for the perfect email service. Having tried several, and having been with FastMail for a while now, I came to the realization that there's no such thing. The biggest concern I have with modern email providers, is the fact that they are all quite bad at spam control.

I don't mean the "Nigerian prince" type of spam, which is mostly blocked successfully (unless you're using FastMail - they can't even recognize those) but stuff that I'm really, really not interested in getting. Case in point, recruiter spam.

In this tutorial, we'll get started with building a custom email processor which can read individual emails, run them through some predefined rules, and act on them. The end result will be very similar to what many providers offer out of the box, but it'll lay the groundwork for more advanced aspects in future posts. Example uses of our app:

• when recruiter-type keywords are detected, reply to the email with a template response and delete it. This is possible to some extent with rules that most email providers offer, but those aren't very detailed, and usually don't support variables.
• when companies keep sending you emails even after you unsubscribe or report them for spam (e.g. Ello), the engine should remember these and in the future purge them automatically. Some providers (e.g. FastMail), won't stop a sender from getting into your inbox even after hundreds of spam reports.

This way, we can keep the provider we're used to, but also do some manual improvements their team just didn't know how to do.

In this post, we'll focus on the first use case.

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by Bruno Skvorc via SitePoint