buddycloud blog

50¢ user testing

It’s painful to realise the harsh difference between:

“I think I know how people use our website”

and

“Why is he clicking there? Can’t he see you have to click on the follow button before you can post? Aaaarch!”

User testing is painful: it shows up your false assumptions. The great news is that the sooner you know, the sooner you can begin sanding off the rough edges in your product.

There are some user testing services that charge $39 per test. This approach will cost you 50¢ per test and give you a video of a complete newbie using your website.

The trick is a combination of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Screencast-o-matic.

Here are the steps to begin testing:

Sign up and create a HIT (Human Intelligence Tasks) in Mechanical Turk. For simplicity click on Create Hit Individually The other forms are too complicated for our needs.
When creating your HIT, in Answer Format, select: File upload. Our users are going to upload their screencast here.
Provide detailed instructions. Here’s a current test that we are running at buddycloud:

Go to http://screencast-o-matic.com/ and hit “start recording”.
Go to https://beta.buddycloud.org and hit register.
(screencast-o-matic will record your voice) tell us about what you see and how you find the registration process.
Log in at https://beta.buddycloud.com
Tell us what you think of buddycloud. What is your first impression of buddycloud?
Follow a channel on the buddycloud website.
How could we could improve this sign-up service.
Go back to your screencast-o-matic screen and stop the recording.
Upload your screencast-o-matic recording to this Mechanical-turk HIT’s upload box.
Have a lovely day!

Set a rate per HIT. 50¢ per test gets a good response rate.
Mechanical Turk will email you when a new file is uploaded. Download and share with your team. And don’t forget to approve the HIT so that your worker gets paid.