Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by preommr | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat unrelated: Why are so many people are using Zoom for user testing? WTF?! What is the point of things like live collaboration if people are just going to screen share.

Are people having problems with sharing their projects with clients or something?

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More on topic/ (original comment):

I'll say something since one of the worst things is putting a ton of work into something and getting crickets.

There's clearly a lot of effort put into this. Really like things like clearly outlining a scenario, and external links. Not enough people remember that the web is supposed to be interconnected and build on other resources. I especially like that it's not just one site, but a variety of sources like videos as well as articles.

But I don't understand why this is presented as a series of "challenges". It works much better as a reference that I can use to stay up-to-date with the industry. I am not actually going to sit down and do "exercises" to make mock survey questions. That kind of stuff is useless without context of a real job with real parameters, real requirements, real people you can ask to clarify their goals.

The website as a whole is an excellent resource for ui/ux. Definitely bookmarking. And I hope you continue to push out good content like this because it'll make a central authority in a pretty big field.

Also, I am really curious what the other countries were in your survey. Because that was the largest group of people. Is it mostly from asia or something?

Why is screen sharing a problem? All you want is to observe the user using your application or web site while trying to achieve a task. When there are critical incidents, you want to notice that. So it's important to see the screen and to record it. Screen sharing achieves that.

Before covid you could sit yourself next to the user. Now that's impossible, so we use remote tools and screen share. Either the user using the app on his device. Or, I think you describe the scenario where the user controls the testers device via shared controls while screen sharing? That's clever, that way you can have a testing environment set up without the user having to download anything but the screen sharing software.

What's your concern there?

Hey Jordan here, one of the creators. Thanks for the feedback and questions!

On using Zoom for user testing, I think that's down to having to do remote research. I actually just did some tests over Zoom last week: had a call, had the user run through certain tasks while they screen shared, and chatted with them. It worked decently well for not being able to be there in person with them.

Totally agree that the web should be an interconnected place that builds off of itself!

These can definitely be used as a reference, but our aim is to also make them useful (for mostly younger designers) as a way to practice skills/methods. Project-based learning is very effective and this gives people a way to do that. It's not as good as learning on a real job with real data/requirements/etc, but the idea is that you can at least get some exposure to practicing some crucial skills.

There are LOTS of other countries represented in the survey, I'd suggest downloading the raw data to check it out (it's free).

> Also, I am really curious what the other countries were in your survey. Because that was the largest group of people. Is it mostly from asia or something?

Good question—it's low numbers spread across like 100+ countries that we grouped into an "Other" category (but maybe that's not clear). You can see those countries in the raw data here: https://gumroad.com/l/2020-design-tools-survey

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