A/B Tests are great if you’re focused on the right issues. However, many teams focus on the wrong problem. Even worse, they’ll focus on the wrong concept altogether, opting for incremental improvements instead of dramatic changes for the better.
More often than not, A/B tests are used to are a dog and pony show for the executives than to solve real problems.
Jared Spool has written a great article about this over at UIE:
In our study, we watched more than a dozen of the presenters’ company’s own customers attempt to buy products. While many were successful, a surprising number weren’t, even though this company is the biggest in its industry (and hailed by many as the most successful). Their site looks slick, but when folks sat down to use it for its primary goal, it’s design put up a ton of frustrating obstacles.
In many cases, the users thought they ordered the product they wanted, only to discover upon receipt that it wasn’t at all what they wanted. As we watched those shoppers make their orders, we could see that they would not get what they wanted.
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The A/B tests they presented showed they were applying a ton of effort to optimize things that weren’t close to the things we saw preventing sales on their site. If the message was that A/B testing helps, I didn’t get that because I saw them futzing around with tweaking insignificant button text when there were huge deficiencies in the design that they still haven’t resolved.
One of the most important things about any job search is knowing the companies that you are applying to. Jessica Greco has crafted a great post about researching your way into a new UX Job. Some very good points:
Research comparable jobs. If you’re the type to take on more responsibilities as they become necessary, you may be working at a higher level than your title indicates. Apply those research skills to publicly available job descriptions and salary surveys. How does your experience compare? You may be surprised to find out you’re being underpaid. Check out the data on DesignSalaries.org for information to sink your teeth into.
Prioritize your needs and wants. Is money most crucial, or do you have some wiggle room? Is it more important to be part of a team, or to work on more diverse projects? Do you want to work more closely with developers? Are you focused on making new connections, so you can eventually go freelance? Do you want to be part of a growing team that can provide you with a future management position?
Be honest with yourself. What’s essential, and what’s just nice to have? What do you really want out of your future? Any indecision on your part will effect lackluster results. Try to articulate what you really want before you begin your job hunt.
Need that resume and career advice to get the UX job you love?
I’m offering the Usability Counts UX Resume Template in Microsoft Word format.
It includes comments and annotations to give you tips on how to write your resume. You also get a list of 30 other recommended articles for developing your User Experience career. It might not get you a job right away, but it should give you ideas on how to better structure your career history and accomplishments.
You just have to fill out a 30-second form. I’ll be involved an event where we give you tips on how to write your resume, and interview for great UX Jobs. We may contact you to see if you’re interested, and for no other purpose.
I promise I won’t spam you with Luxury Watch advertisements or sell your email address to Jared Spool. Just download the UX Drinking Game to make me feel better.
Nothing needs to be said. Click here to view all the videos.
I’ve got quite a few responses, but I want more. Click here to answer the survey.
Here are some quotes from the survey:
Very timely survey. Organizational challenges seem to loom over everything we do. I find myself designing things that never get built, or things that get built but never implemented, or being left out of the process entirely and seeing things implemented that have never been designed.
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Our relatively new UX team is struggling to settle into a comfortable rhythm of working. And it’s been a challenge to not only sell UX to other departments, but also to develop a process for assigning UX resources to projects. Top management is committed to UX being a key market differentiator for us, though, so I feel confident we’ll get there.
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I have been in a UX role in two differently styled operations, each with its share of frustrations: in an agency we were afraid to produce anything that wasn’t “perfect” and in a product app startup we push new code so fast that nothing gets built to spec. I think experience lives in a world between those two extremes (engineers and business) and it is a delicate balance rarely seen in practice.
What are your challenges? Tell us!
Does your company even come close to something like this?
There’s work and there’s your life’s work.
The kind of work that has your fingerprints all over all. The kind of work that you’d never compromise on. That you’d sacrifice a weekend for. You can do that kind of work at Apple. People don’t come here to play it safe. They come here to swim in the deep end.
They want their work to add up to something.
Something big. Something that couldn’t happen anywhere else.
Welcome to Apple.
We should all work like this.
So why is the initial user experience always rough in self-designed products?
A big problem with self design is that it doesn’t deal with things that you won’t do frequently with the design. One of those things is using the design for the first time, because, well, you can only do that once.
You see this in a lot of self-designed products: the initial user experience is rough, never explaining why you’d use any of the key functions, and hardly ever giving the user a great way to get started. Because self-designers rarely are working from a blank slate, the initial process of populating the application with data is not as smooth as the usage patterns once you get going. The entire getting-started process is really difficult.
Great Read. Also, read this: Actually, You Might Be Your User.
We’re floating an idea around Jobvite — holding a free workshop for UX Designers to help them build their resume, provide education on how to use social media to engage with great companies, and meet potential employers to learn of opportunities. It would be a short workshop (2 to 3 hours), but after designers would have the tools they needed to get a great job.
This would be in San Francisco, CA, sometime in late June 2012.
Would you attend this? What would you like to see?
And of course, there would be a happy hour where any designer could come check out the opportunities.
We’re also going to be looking for speakers for this. Interested?
Comment below with your thoughts.
I. Hate. Email.
So I’m glad to see social is making the jump from consumer to enterprise, because social platforms that take convesations in context are more effective communication channels. How many times have you searched for that email thread you weren’t on?
Our entire company is sharing on a constant basis. Important files, observations, questions answered — all shared in a way that everyone can see and reference. I can jump in and provide feedback and ideas, interacting with all parts of my team in real-time, and so can the rest of the company. We have even included our customers in this line of communication. We recently held a meeting with our largest customers and used a Chatter group to solicit content and planning ideas for the event. It was a fantastic meeting and the agenda was spot on. Chatter and similar technologies facilitate amazing collaboration and visibility.
…Atos, a 70,000 employee IT services firm based in France, has committed to eliminating all internal email by 2014 in favor of social technologies. The CEO claims that only 15 percent of their internal email was useful and the rest contributed to lost time.
Patrick Neeman is Director of User Experience at Jobvite, a social recruiting platform and runs both the UX Drinking Game and Startup Drinking Game | More | Contact
