opportunity__cost

Why UserTesting.com?

1. $29 introductory price
2. Instantly tap into our 24x7 panel of users
3. Users match your target demographics
4. Observe users in their natural environment
5. Watch screen activity
6. Listen to the users' voices
7. Ask users follow-up questions
8. Annotate and share results
9. Export to QuickTime and .wmv
10. 1-year money-back guarantee

Well, after being recently featured in the TC, UserTesting.com is coming up with a panel of users, who'd be willing to user-test your site, record the video and talk-talk-talk about it. And this is all for a silly introductory price of... $29 per head.

Let me paraphrase it. You are ask some weird guy (or gal - you can choose the gender), within some age bracket (you can choose two or three age brackets), from some country (it can be as wide as "United States"), with some household income (definitely, there is some income - he needs to pay for his Internet connection, unless he's stealing his neighbor's wireless) to open your site, do *something* (if you're good enough in delivering your thoughts to the person in writing, you have fair chances to have it right) and than tell you about it. And this is all for... $29. Oh, don't forget that the guy will have "roughly 15 minutes" to complete the task (don't be silly to say "tasks"). It's... like... $116/hour. *I'm not paid that much.* Even close.

And the normal price is $39 per head. They do have some ideas or plans about revenue sharing (or they probably do this already), and it looks like $10 goes to a user, $29 stays in the pocket. It's sorta $30/hour for a user (decent paycheck for somebody sitting at home and just browsing sites, don't ya think?), and the company keeps the cream.

I mean, I don't want to rant or trash the idea. It's good, there is a need for it and it's probably useful. But come on. That's a decent cost. For such a premium I can bring a perspective client to the office, ask him to do the same shit, run a show for him, do the freaking sales pitch and he will still be smiling!

Email Subject Line Test: Which Otherwise Identical Message Got More Clicks (Not Opens) – Dash vs. Colon?

VERSION A	VS.	VERSION B

Very nice experiment.

My gut told me version A is a better winner, as dash works as "call for action". And I was sorta right.

Version A made it by almost 15% over the version B in clicks, however, version B received more open by more than 12%. I don't have a good explanation for that, but that's an interesting thing to come by.

In the past few years, there has been massive growth in new and exciting cheap or free web site usability testing tools, so here’s my list of 24 tools you may need to use from time to time.

Gone are the days of using expensive recruitment firms, labs and massive amounts of time to create, deploy and report on usability tests.

By using these usability testing tools and others like them, you have for the first time a complete set of tools designed to tackle almost any usability research job.

From recruiting real users (with tools such as Ethnio) to conducting live one on one remote moderated tests (UserVue) to analyzing results of usability changes using A/B testing (Google Website Optimizer), there is a plethora of useful and usable tools to conduct usability testing.

Great and the most detailed review of usability testing tools. Craig saves you a plenty of time instead of evaluating these tools yourself.

On the other note, I've run an experiment on using Amazon Mechanical Turk for conducting UX tests. As I thought, it didn't real work out. About 80% of "robots" went the easy way and just clicked on the first selection available. And although they claimed to spend from 4 to 15 minutes on test (each), the control response points averaged less than 3 minutes for a test.

Few interesting facts. They did click on the first available option while running through the navigation-path test, however, they provided a very mixed responses for a final survey screen (one question with five answers pre-set). It looks like they felt like it'll be a good indicator of them bringing some value back.

The other thing, those ones whom I rejected from the final run because of too little of time spent or abandoning the survey (but claiming a completion), the good portion of them actually reached out to me by email fighting back. I guess they spent at least as much effort as was required for completing a survey just to bitch on me. :)

Take care.

The question becomes 'do you want a smaller, highly engaged community, or a larger, less engaged community?' There's no easy answer here; it's more of a think-long-and-hard sort of situation that greatly depends on individual aspects of your startup.

Great blog post on using A/B testing to increase user engagement and some conclusions made.