Super-fast research recruiting with TaskRabbit

Henry Tsai
Head of UX, Astrid
May 04, 2012

We’ve made user research a priority at our startup, but recruiting participants remains a time-consuming part of the process. To speed things up, I’ve been hiring TaskRabbits as research participants. It’s not perfect, but it’s a fast, cheap, and reliable way to find people who can participate in user studies....

Photo by Dirk Gently

Change aversion: why users hate what you launched (and what to do about it)

Aaron Sedley
UX Researcher, Google
Apr 24, 2012

Change is good. When a product becomes more fun or makes us more efficient, we embrace change. Technology startups often lead the way, rapidly iterating in an ongoing effort to create better experiences for their users. But dealing with change can be difficult. We’ve all experienced it. For example, moving...

Photo by Kelly Hofer

Story-centered design: how to make a screencast

Jake Knapp
Design Partner, Google Ventures
Apr 11, 2012

Screencasts are a quick and easy way to bring your designs to life, as Braden Kowitz explained in his introduction to story-centered design. To create a screencast, you record a video of your design in action, with you as the user. You talk through the design and click where the...

Photo by Robyn Lee

Improve your startup’s surveys and get even better data

Elizabeth Ferrall-Nunge
UX Researcher, Twitter
Apr 04, 2012

Startups frequently use surveys as a cheap and easy way to get feedback from users. But the resulting data will only be as good as the survey itself. I often see products with surveys that have easy-to-fix mistakes like misleading questions, improper sampling, and skewed rating scales. That’s a shame...

Photo by Collin Mel

How to choose the right UX metrics for your product

Kerry Rodden
Quantitative UX Researcher, YouTube
Mar 27, 2012

When designing for the web, you can analyze usage data for your product and compare different interfaces in A/B tests. This is sometimes called “data-driven design”, but I prefer to think of it as data-informed design — the designer is still driving, not the data. To make this work in...

Photo by Fred Seibert

Story-centered design: hacking your brain to think like a user

Braden Kowitz
Design Partner, Google Ventures
Mar 22, 2012

When I first started designing interactive products, it was a struggle. Small projects were fine. But when the interactions got more complex, I noticed that tools, team communication, and even my own thinking started breaking down. I see many startups facing these same problems today. So I wanted to share...

Photo by Leandro Pérez

How to build an opinionated product: design the marketing first

Jake Knapp
Design Partner, Google Ventures
Mar 16, 2012

Many years ago, I worked on Microsoft Encarta. For those too young to remember, Encarta was sort of like Wikipedia, only instead of on the Internet it was printed on shiny plastic plates called CD-ROMs. Each year, when the new version of Encarta was finished, Microsoft would hire an agency...

Photo by pasukaru76

Get better data from user studies: 16 interviewing tips

Michael Margolis
UX Research Partner, Google Ventures
Mar 07, 2012

One of my favorite parts of my job is interviewing a huge variety of people about their habits, needs, attitudes, and reactions to designs. I like the challenge of quickly getting strangers to talk freely and frankly about themselves, and to try figuring out new designs and products in front...

Photo by hand-nor-glove

Hiring a designer: how to review portfolios

Chad Thornton
Designer, Airbnb
Feb 29, 2012

It’s easy to spot a beautiful portfolio. Designers know that looks sell, and many people sell themselves that way. Of course, the ability to make something that looks good matters, especially for visual designers. But the challenge is that great images say nothing about what it will be like to...

Photo by Karen Blakeman

How to find great participants for your user study

Michael Margolis
UX Research Partner, Google Ventures
Feb 22, 2012

“It’s too hard to find users for usability tests.” Startups often point to recruiting users as one of the biggest reasons they’re not regularly talking to their users. The process can seem mysterious and time-consuming; just a big hassle. But it’s actually pretty simple and straightforward when you know how....

Photo by Christian Guthier

Micro-surveys: a faster way to learn about your users

Sasha Lubomirsky
UX Researcher, Airbnb
Feb 15, 2012

Why did you click on this blog post? Right now, you’re probably able to answer that question with relative ease. Micro-surveys are short and to the point. Similar to the question above, they only have one or two questions and they’re extremely targeted. This means that they’re not only easy...

Photo by Denver Gingerich

Shortening the build-measure-learn cycle with clickable mockups

Braden Kowitz
Design Partner, Google Ventures
Feb 06, 2012

I’ve been working with a startup for the past three weeks. We just finished a round of product design work, so we knew what features we wanted to build. Most of the time, teams in this situation jump to mockups and start coding features right away. Once the features are...

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