After a week focussed on product development, user experience and design, I’ve been geeking out with a bunch of articles, podcasts and videos this weekend.
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When developing a customer facing site, such as Easyart.com, is it very important to be aware of your users perspective. The recommended way to do this is something known as user testing.
What is user testing
User testing is essentially watching how people use your website/application. Traditionally, this is done by arranging a session for people to come and use your site, where they would be given tasks to complete. The process is recorded and then analysed to see what could be improved.
Mostly due to time and budget constraints, this isn’t always easy to accomplish, but luckily there is now a whole host of affordable services that help us solve this problem.
Choosing a service
When choosing a service for any reason, the important thing is to establish exactly what you need from it. We did some research on user testing and decided that we would need a video of the session along with the audio, and the ability to ask follow-up questions. The service that seemed to be the best fit for us was usertesting.com.
Setting up the test
To kick off the test, we needed a set of tasks. We called this a user journey, and set a list of tasks for the participants of the test to follow, demonstrating the areas we knew we needed to work on.
Getting the feedback
Within the hour, all three of the tests we set-up had been completed and we had access to the videos. Over the next couple of days we watched these videos, listened to the commentaries and read the answers to our follow-up questions, taking notes the whole time.
Almost immediately we identified some key areas that we needed to work on and have already started working on solutions to improve our customers experience on our site.
Going forward
From now on, we plan to run user tests regularly, as we have found it provides a valuable insight into how our site is used and how it can be improved.
User testing will make your site better and usertesting.com is a great tool for helping you achieve this.
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This week thousands fellow web makers, CEOs, VCs and geeks descended on Dublin for the Dublin Web Summit. They had done an amazing job of promoting the event - there were flags on the mains streets, front-page coverage in papers and loads of media reporting live from the event (to the point where the wifi was almost useless!). The event itself had four stages, an expo room with startups from all over the world, and startup pitching stages. The overall highlight had to be DWS By Night, where they had taken over a whole street of pubs and clubs with free drinks for attendees. There were bound to be some sore heads on Thursday morning!
Startup pitching stages
Though the calibre of speakers on the stages was second to none (in Europe at least), I spent a lot of time on the startup pitching stages seeing what was happening in the startup world. Some highlights from the pitching stages and stands:
- Copygr.am. Tools for Instagram, and photographic prints. The design is lovely, but the prints are too expensive.
- Fabsie. Designer flatpack furniture manufactured on demand from crowdsourced manufacturers. I was really impressed by this but wonder how far they can go with the aesthetic they are locked into with laser cut wood.
- Resump. “ResumUp is a service which shows you who and what you need to know to achieve all your career goals.” It helps you visualise your skills and connects you with people who are already in your network to progress your career.
- Atoomba. Basically IFTT for your (Android) mobile.
- Smart Things. These guys won the pitching competition for their impressive system to connect devices to the internet. This (or something like it) is going to be a big deal.
- Tictail. Quick and easy online stores with a killer UI. I tried it out and had as store online in 2minutes, and actually enjoyed the process. The resulting stores are just OK but the creation process is really impressive.
Chris Poole 4chan, Founder
The subheading of this talk was something like how I unwittingly became a sysadmin, and was a story of how 4chan serves 600m page views a month and 1m new posts a day on five second-hand servers - each of which is a single point of failure - and no full-time staff.
By looking at the numbers that Google Analytics (which fires in the client via JavaScript) and Cloudflare (which was the entry point to the web request) were reporting, he realised that that half of their traffic was coming from web scrapers and third-party extensions, so it was only then that they added an API (which now serves 50m requests a day).
This was a really interesting talk with some refreshingly honest views, but it does go against a lot of things I believe as a software engineer, and I very much doubt that he has taken the same approach with his VC-funded startup Canv.as
Curating the e-commerce revolution
A panel discussion with:
- Chris Morton, Ceo & Co-Founder of Lyst
- Diego Berdakin, President of BeachMint
- Shauna Mei, Founder AHAlife.com
- Carl Fritjofsson, Co-Founder & COO Wrapp
- Olivia Gossett, founder of ILWYW.com
The basic theme of the discussion was that in online fashion retail, customers expect recommendations and a back-story (and increasingly customisation) in order to connect with the product. There seemed to be general agreement that the Net a Porter “shop the story” approach is a model that works well.
Amazon’s approach is to fulfil commands (you search for TVs, you get TVs), but is terrible for serendipitous discovery. “You never go to a grocery store and bring back only what was on your list”.
Serendipity through content. Create desire through stories and context.
Here’s a recording of the panel (watch from 1:47:40)
More highlights in brief
- The BBC’s Chief Architect, News and Knowledge Gary O'Connor on BBC’s dipping their toe in the water of cloud computing. An interesting perspective on the challenges in selling it into ops (they had no choice really, because they had to scale to accommodate London 2012 coverage), selecting a provider (AWS).
- Mike McCue, Founder and CEO of Flipboard with MG Siegler, TechCrunch. I didn’t really consider Flipboard to be important to publishing, but I have changed my mind now.
- Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker provided some interesting insights into the state of the web at the moment and Mozilla’s mission to keep it open.
- Patrick Collison from Stripe was really interesting talk about how they got started, their challenges and growth.
Most of the event should be available on this Livestream page.
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I’m just back from WebPerfDays at Facebook’s London engineering offices in Covent Garden. It was a really great day out, with some great presenters.
A few notes…
- Joshua Bixby is a really good presenter and I’ll be following his blog.
- Not all performace stats apply to all companies. There were several examples cited of how reducing page load time had either no discernable effect, or even a negative impact (though they were very specific cases).
- “Mortal companies” have different problems to the Googles, Facebooks and Amazons of the world.
- Using a CDN doesn’t guarantee those assets are delivered to the user faster. Our measurements would suggest otherwise, but a second look at the data would be wise.
- 97% of mobile response time is on the front end!
- I like the concept of a “poverty line” in performance. i.e. if a metric is below a certain threshold it’s “poor”.
- A significant percentage of mobile users prefer the full site rather than a mobile version.
- Simply cleaning up code and doing all the things you already know you should be doing will get you 80% of the way to where you need to get to with front-end code.
- We should check out writegoodcode.com.
- After you optimise your front-end code, you have to be be vigilant about maitaining the gains you have made.
- Other people probably have more difficult performance problems to solve than us. Seatwave have to cope for massive (60x) request peaks in requests in a matter of seconds (i.e. when their TVC is aired in the middle of X-Factor or a new concert goes on sale).
- We should take a close look on the performance of our third party dependencies. They are generally recognised as evil when it comes to web performance.
- Lonely Planet have a really great DevOps culture in their company (see their (dev blog)[http://devops.lonelyplanet.com/]) where metrics are king and web performance is recognised as a priority throughout the whole organisation. * They have gone some way to replacing “HiPPO” (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) with real data.
- Webpagetest.org is a tool that a lot of web performance experts seem to refer to.
- Facebook have problems that are extremely unique, and fascinating from an observer’s standpoint, but intimidatingly complex from a developer’s. Sławek Biel did a really interesting presentation about how Facebook optimises its data access.
- Overall, it’s just reminded me that we need to continue to focus on performance as part of what we do.
Update: Some of the presentations are now available online.
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We’re big fans of Basecamp here at Easyart. It’s very close to replacing email for our internal discussions. Here’s what we like:
- It’s open. I might have a discussion with one person, but others can be aware of what’s going on by overhearing the discussion in the project or in the daily recap. It’s also easy to see who is over subscribed.
- Distance is less important. We have two sites, numerous people that work from home, and a number of contractors. Using Basecamp is our primary means of communication makes collaboration more effective no matter where you are located.
- It’s incredibly simple and fun to use. It does a small amount of things – to-dos, text documents, discussions, files – really well (we use Google for calendars). I had been meaning to write an internal document on how to use Basecamp but it has never been necessary!
- It’s totally usable by email only. Some of our busier people use it purely through email, while others use a combination of online and email.
A few things would make it even more useful:
- Mentions. Sometimes the amount of email Basecamp generates is overwhelming, and unless you are assigned to a task you might never know that someone is waiting for a response from you.
- A proper CalDAV calendar. We need to be able to create events from other apps and devices if the calendar is going to be useful for us.
- A way to “loop in” other collaborators into a task or discussion, on the site. The only way to do this at the moment is to loop them in on email only.
- Chat integration. We switched from Campfire to Flowdock back in March, but because most of the action is now in Basecamp, we don’t use chat as much. It would be nice to be able to send one-liners in Basecamp without starting new discussions.
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