As with any topic in the field of interactive media, it’s tough to know where to start if you want to learn more about user experience (UX). Many of our clients find our newsletter and blog useful, they might read other blogs and read the occasional book but rarely get the time or budget to attend formal training (either with us or elsewhere). Many of the organisations and charities we work with are finding less training budget available each year and are struggling to find viable learning opportunities.

We’re often asked for recommendations for ways to learn more about UX. Although we have plenty of books and blogs we can suggest, we’ve struggled to recommend courses people can do in their own time for little budget. So we’ve been doing some research to put together this list of short courses you can do in your own time for free or without breaking the bank. In this guide you should find plenty of inspiration for courses specifically about UX or in a related field.

We have grouped the courses into three categories: free, pay per course, and paid subscriptions. Under each of those categories, we’ve grouped the courses by source website. Each course gives a summary outline of what’s covered and who delivers the course material so it shouldn’t be too hard to assess credibility.

Free short courses

Coursera.org

Human-Computer Interaction

Online Games: Literature, New Media, and Narrative

Gamification

Udemy.com

Introduction to Web and eCommerce User eXperience Design

Pay per course

Udemy.com

Practical Statistics for The User Experience I ($199)

How To Develop & Document Personas & Scenarios ($89) 

Secrets of Intuitive & Usable Design: The Conceptual Model ($179)

Web Usability Made Simple ($199)

Design Your User Experience in 7 Simple Steps ($197)

How To Develop & Document A Task Analysis ($129)

Optimizing The Early Phases of Innovation ($20)

UXDesignEdge.com

UX Design Basics ($295)

Uie.com Virtual Seminars

A range of future and past virtual seminars offered from $129 per seminar

Paid subscription

Lydia.com (Subscription from $25/month or $250/year)

Interaction Design Fundamentals

Fireworks CS5: Rapid Prototyping

Interaction Design: Process and Inspiration

Dale Herigstad & Schematic, Interactive Design Agency

Web Form Design Best Practices

Hot Studio, Experience Design

Web Accessibility Principles

Pluralsight.com (subscription from $29/month or $299/year)

Creating User Experiences: Fundamental Design Principles

We hope you find this a useful learning resource for UX. If you have any other suggestions for short courses you can complete online, in your own time let us know so we can keep this list up to date. If you give one of the courses a try, we’d love to hear how you get on with it.

If you’d like to talk to us about bespoke UX training please get in touch, alternatively you can keep on top of what’s new in the field of user experience with our monthly newsletter (sign-up below).

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

When usability testing charity websites we see the same user need being unfulfilled time and again. Before making a decision to donate, volunteer, or fundraise for you, users need to know where the money goes.

They’ve heard about charities eating up all the money themselves and only a small amount getting to the people who need it. They want to know your charity isn’t like that. But you also know that users aren’t going to read your AGM notes and won’t invest time reading about your financial structure. So what do you do? In this article we’ll show you some of the sites doing it well and give you some inspiration on how to fix your site to generate more online donations.

Offer a simple ‘where the money goes’ graphic

The simplest way to show users their money is going to the right place is to show them where the money goes using a basic graphical representation of the income you receive and what happens to the money. Users just need a simple understanding to tick the box in their mind which either adds you to the credible list, or puts you in the reject pile. Here are some examples of how some charities have done this well:

Unicef provide a page summarising where the money goes with a simple pie chart and a summary of their spending in 2010. A little out of date and wordy, but still a useful overview.

Plan UK is one of our clients and testing showed that users struggled to understand where the money was going. We recommended they create content for this and then in subsequent usability tests we found it worked well.

Oxfam provide a very simple overview using a pie chart. Like Unicef they also provide a useful understanding to show what happens to the money from every £1 donated. This is a great example of how to cover this off for users in a very small piece of real estate with a link to find out more.

Action Aid take more of an infographic approach which incorporates a summary of what happens with the money donated as well as a good overview of how users can help.

Centrepoint show that a pie chart isn’t the only way to show this information with a very simple breakdown of where their money is spent.

Key takeaways

• Show simple overview of where the money goes, a simple pie chart is enough (Unicef, Oxfam, Plan UK)
• Infographics can be a useful way to demonstrate lots of information easily (ActionAid)
• A breakdown of how the money has been spent is useful (Centrepoint)
• Simplifying the spend in terms of pence in a pound is useful (Oxfam, Unicef)

Provide evidence of what impact the money has had

For some users seeing a basic overview of where the money goes is enough to move them on to donations. However, for other users in our research, we’ve seen them look more into what the charity has actually achieved. They get an overall sense of what causes it supports, but often we observed users seeking direct evidence and tangible examples of what impact the charity has had. Users want to see the good their money can do.

Ideally they want to see brief case studies and news stories showing some of the recent success stories you’ve had. Giving them a basic overview of some recent projects with some engaging content such as video and photos would be a fantastic start, however we struggled to uncover many good examples of easy to find summaries of the impact voluntary support and donations have had. Our recommendation is to stop hiding this content deep in the site in impact reports, newsletters, and PDFs and bring it right to the front of the website. Show the proof of what successes big or small you’ve had in the last year. Here are some of the better examples we found, but we did struggle to generate many great examples:

Oxfam provide an area titled ‘The impact of our work’ which provides compelling video and imagery. The layout of the content also allows users to scan the content and get a good overview of what Oxfam are doing.

Shelter provide an excellent visual slideshow which takes users through a summary of their recent achievements. The content is visual, doesn’t take too long to go through, and easy to digest.

War Child offer a video highlighting the impact of their work last year. Users get an excellent visual overview of what the charity has been doing.

Comic Relief offer an excellent statistical view of the difference they have made. This is an excellent way to deliver a lot of information in an easy to glance manner.

Key takeaways

• Not many charities do this well
• A well presented statistical summary is a useful option if you want to avoid detailing recent projects (Comic Relief)
• Simple and easily digestible chunks of information showing this year versus last year is useful (Shelter)
• Videos and images offer compelling ways to show impact (Oxfam, War Child)
• Using inclusive language such as ‘see for yourself’, ‘we did this’ helps users engage (Oxfam)
• A section called ‘2011 highlights’ is a useful home for this content (War Child)

Helping users understand where the money goes and what impact their support will have in tangible, easy to understand ways is critical to receiving more support through your website. With these examples you have some inspiration to take action on your website. If you’d like to talk to us about how we can help you generate more revenue and support online, please get in touch.

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

What is it?

Crazy Egg is an online tool that monitors individual pages from your website, giving you a breakdown of where different visitors have clicked and on which part of the screen. There is also some more basic analytics data available on which pages have been viewed most frequently, and where your visitors have come from using different visual displays.

All you have to do is insert a small bit of code into the html of the page you want it to monitor, and sit back and relax. The site does it all for you from then on providing live results as it tracks the progress and every click that visitors make on the chosen pages.
 

What are its advantages?

Simple steps to set it up. Probably the best advantage of Crazy Egg is that it’s easy to setup on any website providing you have access to the site’s code. In just three steps you can set up Crazy Egg to monitor as many pages of your site as you wish (With a free account you can monitor up to 4 pages. To monitor more you have to upgrade to a paid account but prices start at as low as $9 for 10 pages which is peanuts really).

Five different and interactive ways of viewing the results. Crazy Egg provides you with an array of different ways of viewing the results; each has their own uses and will cater to different peoples’ preferences of viewing information.

The four different visual views the Crazy Egg provides; (from left to right) heatmap,
scrollmap, confetti, overlay

 
Now all the different views certainly look eye catching and interesting, but the one that we think is the most informative and useful is the confetti visual which displays all the clicks in a colour coded fashion giving you the option to filter which clicks from which external sources you want to see displayed on the page. The other views certainly have their uses too and collectively provide back up evidence to support theories drawn from the overall information gathered. For example, the scroll map in conjunction with the heat or confetti map can give you a good gauge as to where the most focused part of the page is and whether users are clicking on your call to action buttons within those areas.

The list view is the last of the different states and displays a table of the items
clicked on within the page

 
Exportable reports of your results. Crazy Egg allows you to export a report of your results which is good for sharing and bringing them to meetings. The different views also allow for an interesting display of information (not the normal pie or bar charts). A slight limitation of this however, is the fact that it merely exports a ‘screenshot’ of your snapshot in the visual that you viewing it in when you click export report.

Crazy Egg data can aid design decisions. The information that Crazy Egg provides about your website pages can prove helpful when discovering what elements of your website need to change – to be moved or altered aesthetically to enhance their use. As I mentioned earlier, the accuracy and specificity of Crazy Egg is really where its advantage over other analytic tools such as Google Analytics lies. In allowing you to see exactly where your users are trying to click, or more importantly where they aren’t trying to click, it allows you to make informed conclusions of where potential areas of improvement are within the site. Finding out what improvements, however, requires more research than Crazy Egg can provide.
 

What are its limitations?

Despite many claims it is not a usability tool. Don’t let the reviews fool you. It can be helpful in allowing you to spot a problem such as a button that does not get used, but it doesn’t give you any other information as to why people aren’t clicking on that button. You can make assumptions from the data that Crazy Egg gives you but each assumption you make could create yet another problem. Still, once the problem is spotted, these questions can easily be resolved by investing in a proper usability test of the site.

The confetti visitor box doesn’t move off the snapshot. When viewing the confetti results there is a little black box that lists the different visitor information for you in one area. However, the box is within the captured shot or ‘screenshot’ of your page, and so at no point can you see the whole page on its own. I realise you can minimise the box but even then I found it distracting. This might just be a pernickety personal irritation but I found it quite frustrating when trying to see the spread of clicks across the page.

The information on each type of visitor is displayed in the box above which cannot leave the screen

 
You can only compare two ‘snapshots’ via the heatmap view. Crazy Egg allows you to compare two or more page results within the site; though you can only compare them within the heatmap view. This can become tiresome especially if you wanted to see the comparison of specific clicks between pages.
 

The comparison feature on Crazy Egg only allows for a comparison of the heatmap view

When we recommend using it

We would recommend using it if you want to gain an insight into what your users are doing, in a very basic form, when they come onto your site – i.e. what links are being used and which seem to be ignored. This can help in making design decisions to improve your users’ interactions with your site. However each of these decisions still includes a large element of guess work which is why user testing is always a thorough technique to be used in conjunction with site analytics to ensure that you know exactly what needs to be changed, why, and what it needs to be changed to.

About Samantha Harvey

Sam recently graduated from Visual Communication. She joined our team in April 2011 and has been conducting user research and has been making sure our user interfaces follow good design principles. She's keen to point out our poor selection of fonts... er I mean typography (sorry Sam). Follow Samantha on twitter @samharvey_ux

This is a fantastic video from Penny-Arcade about the virtues of testing concepts and designs early and often with users. The video is aimed at games designers but applies to any designer and translates particularly well to web designers.

It’s not often that we share videos on our blog, but this one is too good not to shout about it. It delivers the message we tell our clients, but in a much better and more enjoyable medium. If you don’t mind sitting through the annoying advert at the beginning, you’ll find the reward is absolutely worth it. Enjoy!

About Damian Rees

Damian has worked as a usability and user experience consultant for over 13 years. He has worked in senior roles within companies like the BBC and National Air Traffic Services where he has researched and designed for users in a variety of different contexts including web applications, voice recognition, and air traffic control interfaces. Follow Damian on twitter @damianrees

What is it?

Loop11 is an online, remote usability testing tool. In simple terms Loop 11 allows you to create an online survey that includes tasks for users to complete on a website of your choice. You have the ability to mix questions with tasks in any order you wish, and for each task you can set a goal for the user to achieve i.e. find a size 10, blue women’s jumper for under £30. You then have to set the URL that they will start on at the beginning of the task. There is a demo of how it works on the website which takes you through what your users will see when they complete a test.
 

A step by step process of setting up your test

 
Below are two examples showing how the test looks to the user when they are completing a task (Figure 1) or answering a question (Figure 2). On each task the objective is always displayed at the top along with the progression buttons. When asking a question, Loop11 gives you various question types which allow the users to answer in an assortment of different ways, the example I have shown represents a normal text field answer/comment box.
 

 Figure 1. An example of how a task would look like to a user 

Figure 2. You can insert questions after, or before the tasks, above is an example of a text field question

What are its advantages?

This is the closest tool we have found so far to an actual usability test. Loop11 is one of the only sites we have found that really lets you create something similar to the usability tests we regularly carry out. You have control over the design of a proper test script which is the main reason we have found it to be so useful.

You don’t have to be there with the user (in the same room). Loop11 tests are un-moderated so all you have to do is design it, then set it live and spread the word by sending a link to your selected participants. Users can then complete the tasks in their own home at their own pace. Its main advantage over face to face usability tests is that it allows you to test as many users as you want.

Loop11 isn’t free, but it is cheaper than moderated usability testing. You also don’t have to spend much money on incentives as users are participating when they want, and where they want (we’ve written more about this on UXbooth). We still included a small incentive as a thank you for users spending their time completing the test, and as we made sure the test itself wasn’t long it worked out rather well for everyone.

You can test Loop11 on any device that browses the internet. We haven’t tested this but we would assume that in most cases this would be correct as Loop11 uses the browser and is fully online so it shouldn’t matter too much what device you use it on.

View ready made reports on participants completing your test. After you have set the test live and participants start completing it you can view reports which show how many people succeeded in completing tasks, how long it took them, and how many pages they went through to get there. This information comes in 3 exportable formats (Excel XML, PDF, CSV, and Excel XML with participants) so that you have access to the original data to do with as you please. The PDF option also exports the report version which includes graphically presented results for the overall test, and for each task itself, however we found that the excel document of raw data was the most useful as it allowed us to work with the data to produce a report with the information we required. We could then brand it and use it within our projects.

A sample version of the PDF report that Loop11 exports after a test is finished

What are its limitations?

Once a test is published there is no going back. You can’t edit the test after publishing it; you can only delete it altogether, so you better get it right the first time! We would recommend thinking carefully about the order of your test before adding them to the test list. Re-test, and double check as many times as possible in preview mode before putting it live.

Judging the success or failure rate can be tricky. The site tests live websites so for each task you have to set the URL you want users to start from. In order to track success and fail tracking you need to add URLs which specify the pages users reach which you consider a to count as a success. This can be problematic if your task can be completed in a variety of different ways. If you don’t anticipate them all, you could record a failure even if they succeed.

Tasks need to be carefully designed. The design of each task becomes critical when doing an un-moderated test especially with this tool as it needs to be much less fluid than a typical face to face usability test where normally we would deliberately allow users the freedom to complete the task as they would naturally. With Loop11 you are forced to be more quantitative with your approach to get a more defined fail/success criterion. Therefore we found that the tool forced us to design tasks to be much more basic and definite.  For example, in a face to face test we might ask users to define the problem they typically face and then show us how they would solve that problem using the site. With Loop 11 we would design the task to answer a very specific question we know they can find an answer to on a specific page.

Slow loading times on some websites. Sometimes the website you may want to use will perform slowly which could affect how likely people are to complete the test. We also noticed it crashed on a few sites too. We recommend checking how well a site performs in the preview mode before you commit to purchase. Loop11 do provide a piece of JavaScript that you can insert into the body text of the site to enhance the speed. Unfortunately we couldn’t do this on the site we were using which is a drawback if you are testing a site without access to the backend.

You might get more people participating than you bargained for. One quite costly drawback, especially for those of us who incentivise participants, is that despite setting a limit for the number of tests it only cuts them off after that number have completed the form. However, it cannot then stop people who have already started the test whilst the 20^th (in this example) person was completing it. Therefore you may end up paying out for slightly more people than you originally wanted (we set a limit of 20 but had to pay 24 participants).

You don’t know who really completed the test properly. Probably the most obvious limitation when it comes to un-moderated testing is. Obviously you would like to think that anyone who sat down to do the test would want to do it properly, but you will get those who just rush through the tasks and questions to gain the incentive at the end. Normally you can look at the results and usually spot the person who you think didn’t complete it properly, the people who took the shortest time to complete their tasks and didn’t write any comments. The question you then have to ask yourself is whether you discount them from the testing?
 

When we recommend using it

If you’re looking for a quick, high level view of how a website is doing then this would be a good solution for you. It also helps if you are having problems testing users who are geographically spread or too time poor to meet one to one, by using Loop11 you can overcome this by testing anywhere that has internet accessibility anytime they want. Due to Loop11’s nature it is a useful tool for benchmarking a site, finding out where users are running into an issue to then carrying out some face to face usability testing to find out exactly where the problem lies. The scenario where we are likely to use it is to monitor the usability of sites we have already worked on. However, as the tool has strict success/fail metrics it is only really suited to carefully designed tasks which have a clear answer.
 
See anything I’ve missed? Just let me know!

About Samantha Harvey

Sam recently graduated from Visual Communication. She joined our team in April 2011 and has been conducting user research and has been making sure our user interfaces follow good design principles. She's keen to point out our poor selection of fonts... er I mean typography (sorry Sam). Follow Samantha on twitter @samharvey_ux