opportunity__cost

One of answers seems to make sense:

The 2 weeks duration comes from the Fortnight unit, which is some kind of old english for 2 weeks.

A single Fortnight is 1209600 seconds, or 1209600000 millisecond, which was a technical limit in some older systems.

Bing 3 – Google 4

So based on the current results it’s really a very near run thing. I’m quite surprised to see this actually, evidently Bing’s UI is easier to navigate than I might have expected.

I think a lot of us have learnt behaviors for Google based on years of experience, so Bing is really doing well to stay up there with Google, especially considering the two UIs are quite far apart.

Both services could obviously make a few small tweaks to their UIs, but as you’d expect with two such popular websites, they are already very streamlined.

As more people take the test, we can expect to see results to evolve somewhat. Be sure to check back at http://video.intuitionhq.com/pub/405 to see how they change.

I feel like I am going to give Bing a try and see if it makes me feel better. :)

I believe we can get people engaged with digital services in a way that tells them how such services work and why they should care enough to use them. I also believe we can do this without explicitly making them fill out a sign-up form as a first step.

An old (2008), but still actual post by Luke Wroblewski about new look at the sign up forms (still a way to go in 2010). He also has a section on gradual engagement solution, which implementation showed nice results in many companies (ie. Twitter).

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!

Most humans are used to spatial thinking. Even if - like mine - your desk is a huge mess, you can probably find your stuff pretty quickly because you just know where you put it. Each thing on your desk has a fixed place in space which does not change on its own. If you put something somewhere, it’ll still be there the next day, and you’ll know where you can find it.

When designing user interfaces, it’s important to keep people’s ability for spatial thinking in mind. People can easily find things based on position. If a human puts something somewhere, he’ll probably be able to find it again if the user interface doesn’t move it. If possible, the user interface should always display things where the user put them, and allow for spatial organization.

This is one of the rare occasions when I see my thoughts materialized and verbalized by someone else, just like they need to be.

Good post about what you see daily on your iPhone and why is it so.

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.

Jeremy built the form to work as you'd expect. You can tab between the "blanks" just the way you tab between standard Web form input fields. You can click on any "blank" to start entering text. The password "blank" masks any characters you enter just like a standard password input, and the whole form manages errors if you answer any questions incorrectly. In other words, it works like a standard Web form but it looks quite different. The presentation is inviting and fun, which is quite unlike a standard Web form.

Narrative "Mad Libs" format for signup forms was used in the several A/B tests and *actually* increased conversion by 25-40%.

I find it very cool. What do you think?

On Tuesday we posted an internal MySpace product document presenting detailed recommendations on rebuilding the MySpace developer/apps platform. Included in that post was an embed of the document hosted on Scribd. MySpace has chosen to send a DMCA notice to Scribd to have that document removed, and Scribd complied.

So we’re putting it on our own servers. You can download it in all its glory here.

If you want to fight this, MySpace, you have to come through our lawyers.

MySpace is get to fight it back, by the way. I don't think it's going to happen though. :)

Here is the direct link:

http://tctechcrunch.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/apps-expert-review-2a.pdf

(Plenty of illustrations with comments.)