This blog may be retired, but Idealist.org lives on!
Getting into Your Head: Our Plans for User Research in 2011
Highlights from the Fishbowl retreat continue! If you missed our previous post about our development process, check it out.
One part of our process and general strategy is the focus on making data-driven decisions about web development and design. By collecting many different types of data, we hope to have a better understanding of user behavior, and as a result, improve the site’s usability and ensure a greater relevance to our users.
- Focus Groups: a form of qualitative research in which a targeted group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, and attitudes toward a product.
- Beta Testers: a group of representative users who complete tasks relevant to their real-life use of the site, and answer pointed questions about the usefulness of specific features.
- A/B Testing: simultaneously displaying differing live versions of a page to different user segments in order to gather data comparing the control to a variable of layout, copy text, or other design elements.
- Usability Testing: watching people use what has been (or will be) created to see if it works as intended and that tasks can be completed efficiently, accurately, and without frustration.
- Inherent Value Testing: a usability testing technique that can measure how the site communicates the product’s inherent value to new users.
- Google Analytics to measure traffic, pageviews, etc
- Internal Reporting Tool (TBD) to measure content, user behavior
- Get Satisfaction – online forum for user questions, problems, and ideas.
- Salesforce – a CRM that helps us organize and respond to user emails, and prioritize the most common questions and difficulties.
- Pop-up surveys (a survey question integrated during or after a common flow)
If you’re interested in participating in any kind of user research, sign up here!
If you use social networking sites to promote your organization, we have questions for you. Since we re-launched the site, we’ve been pretty quiet about some of the enhanced social features for orgs. We still want to learn more about how we can improve these features, and how orgs like yours can benefit from them.
Sign up to participate in our study!
It takes no more than two hours over the course of two weeks, and doesn’t require you to leave your home, office, or home office.
More Details
Who: You represent your organization online – whether your role involves HR, social media, outreach/communications, or programs.
What: You’ll update your organization’s page on Idealist. Over the course of two weeks, we’ll send two short emails detailing some of the new features on the site, along with specific questions to get you thinking about the usefulness of those features. We’ll ask that you respond with your feedback within about a week.
When: From March 21 – April 1, we estimate that it will take no more than two hours of your time.
Where: The comfort of your own computer!
Why: The re-launch brought a more social, robust organization page. With your help, we’ll keep improving the features there, making it even easier for you to recruit the right candidates, find new champions for your causes, and keep up with other organizations’ progress.
Bonus: we hope it will be a chance for you to get familiar with the new site. You can make sure that your org page reflects the work you’re doing (and take this time to post information about an upcoming program, event, or volunteer opportunity, if you have one!).
Interested? Click here to sign up!
A Retreat into Our Development Process
The Fishbowl (Idealist.org’s web development team) + our Community Manager met for several days in Portland, Oregon to reflect on the past year, set goals for 2011, and generally sing our hearts out via Karaoke and Rock Band.
One of the sessions gave us a chance to reflect on our development process. After coming out of a long period where our focus was re-building Idealist.org on a new platform, plus making improvements and expanding its functionalities, this retreat session allowed us to focus on shifting our process to accommodate a whole new style of working that uses short, iterative development cycles.
We drew on our own experiences, looked towards other development teams we admire, and made some revisions to our development process. Here are some highlights:
- In order to accommodate new feature development while at the same time taking care of the regular maintenance a site like ours requires, we’re borrowing a two-team development cycle model from 37signals where teams alternate responsibility for maintenance work. This way everyone gets to do the fun stuff sometimes, while sharing the burden of the less fun, but still important, bug fixing and small improvements.
- Inspired by Kiva’s Innovation Iteration, we’re incorporating our own “Fantastic Fifth” iteration to allow for developers to work on projects they’re excited about but that might not otherwise be prioritized. We expect this will benefit Idealist users in lots of ways we can’t yet imagine!
- We’re moving to a new ticket tracking tool, Jira. And we’re taking this opportunity to re-define our workflow. We’ve created a lighter process, and identified a few of our problem areas where improved communication would help.
Release Notes: March 7-11
Some small improvements based on feedback from you:
- We extended the “Edit Search” box that appears near the top of the search results page, so that it’s easier to see more of your search terms.
- We added a “Last Modified Date” to org pages.
- We added Poster and Location information in RSS feeds, and also fixed some outstanding formatting issues.
- We switched the tab order in the Inbox so that Notifications is the first (default) tab, and Messages is the second. We prioritized Notifications, since that’s where the majority of messages are right now.
- You may have noticed that in Firefox the footer was wrapping and creating a second row. That has been resolved.
- We’d been missing some success messages after certain actions (e.g. sending a message). They should all appear now!
- We resolved an issue where sometimes duplicate admin requests were being sent.
- We fixed a problem where users whose email addresses were unverified weren’t able to reset their password.
Stay tuned next week for some insights from our team retreat!
A meetup about database technology? Yes, please.
If you’re in Portland and into geeky stuff (like database technology), come check out Mike, Jason, and Dan talk about Idealist.org infrastructure. Topics will include: Xapian, RabbitMQ, and Redis!
Find out more about the event here: http://www.meetup.com/updatepdx/events/16387558/
When: Thursday, Feb 24 at 6pm
Where:
Urban Airship
334 NW 11th Ave
Portland, OR
Testing, testing: Help make Idealist more usable
[cross-posted from the Idealist.org Blog]
Want to help make Idealist better? We’d love for you to participate in our usability testing program!
What’s this all about?
There are lots of ways that we collect feedback from our users. One important one is to observe Idealist members “in the wild,” so to speak. Instead of asking your (undoubtedly valuable) opinion, we want to actually watch you use the site, and see what aspects of the site could be improved.
Sign up to participate here. We’ll be conducting in-person usability tests for those in the NYC area, and remote tests for people everywhere else (as long as you have access to a broadband internet connection and a telephone or computer microphone).
Photo via Alishba Zarmeen
What to expect
Whether you participate remotely or come visit us, you’ll sit down one-on-one with me (Hi! Nice to meet you.), so I can observe while you use basic features of the website and ask a few questions about your experience. Usability testing is the kind of test where you can’t get a wrong answer, so there’s no pressure on you, just the website. The most challenging part for you? Probably remembering to think aloud as you use the site.
Who we’re looking for
Everyone! Seriously, whether you have very little experience using the web or are as tech savvy as they come, you’re welcome to participate. Also, we’ll be testing features for individuals and organizations, so we’re looking for people who use the site in different ways: you could be a job seeker, a potential volunteer, an HR professional, volunteer manager, or your organization’s social media expert, or really anyone else.
What’s next?
- We conduct usability testing on an ongoing basis, so if you’re interested, sign up! We’ll ask you a few questions to get a sense of how you use the site, and then I’ll be in touch when it seems like you’re a good fit for an upcoming usability test.
- Can’t participate in usability testing? You can still make your voice heard publicly on Get Satisfaction or by sending an email directly to our Community Support Team through the contact page.
Thank you!
Release Notes: Jan 29 – Feb 6
- Mike started working on a set of improvements to the Grad Fair pages and seeker/exhibitor sign-up processes. As you can see, we’re already gearing up for Grad Fair season!
- We added a new debugging feature that will allow us to see a lot more information about each site error. This is the first step towards producing useful errors that users can refer to when they call or email.
- Brett worked on implementing a tool that converts HTML to Creole (the language that our job listing and org page descriptions should be written in). Now pasting standard HTML into those fields will automatically render it into Creole, and formatting will look better. Let us know if you’re having trouble with this feature, and we can help you with your HTML.
- Users can now edit their search terms while retaining any filters they’ve selected. For example, a user who had searched for the term “peace” and then filtered on both “jobs” and “part time” can now add the term “justice” without having to re-run the search from scratch.
- Organization owners can now remove other owners (as long as there’s always at least one left).
- Resolved a translation mix-up in Email Alerts for users registered in Spanish and English. ¡Qué alivio!
- The education level facet “Master’s Degree” was missing on job searches, and is now back.
- Fixed a formatting bug on the notification of a new user-org connection.
- We were having an issue with users who had deleted themselves and couldn’t re-sign up using the same email address. That has been resolved.
- There was a bug where Internet Explorer users couldn’t add their work/volunteering/education history. That has been resolved.
- The whole team spent much of Tuesday dealing with a mondo-bug that was preventing users from creating new orgs. Seeing the drama unfold was like watching an episode of House!
Release Notes: Jan 15 – Jan 28
Related to Posting
- We re-ordered the user and org active and inactive listing widgets so you’ll see the most recent listings first.
- We improved how the suggested terms in keyword fields work, and resolved a related bug.
- For those people copying and pasting job listings and other text from sites already formatted in HTML, we’re now properly rendering HTML in Org and Listing Description fields.
- When posting on Idealist, you have the option to publish a listing (or submit an org page) right away or save it as a draft. We made a small design change to more clearly differentiate the flows so that people don’t unintentionally save as draft when they mean to publish.
- Lots of work on our atom feeds (which is how many other sites display our user-submitted content)
- Organizations with an unpaid invoice will now receive an automatic email reminder when their invoice hits 30 days, 45 days, and then finally 90 days overdue.
On Personal Profiles & Org Pages
- Users can now delete items from their recent activity feeds (for themselves and for orgs they administer).
- We added a note to encourage organization administrators to upload square logos to their org pages, because they look best.
- We fixed a bug that was preventing users from editing a couple parts of their profile when using Internet Explorer.
Connections
- We added links to the requesting user or org in connection request notifications/emails.
Searching
- We added some help text to the Advanced Search page.
- We fixed a bug where filtering your search didn’t send you back to the beginning of the updated search results.
- We’re now providing a bit of help for people who have broken RSS feeds leftover from the previous version of the website.
Some other random stuff
- We’ve beefed up our spam monitoring and have additional data-based spam prevention measures in the works!
- Instead of landing on an unhelpful “Forbidden” page, clicking on a listing that has been removed or on a page that is marked as private will land you on a more informative (and friendlier) page.
- We fixed links in the header on the Spanish and French versions of the site.
- We fixed a bug in the flow to make a donation through PayPal.
Release Notes: Jan 1-14
We’re constantly working on Idealist.org system updates, bug fixes, and feature requests. January has been a bit of a challenging month since a good number of the developers have been on vacation (destinations include: Belize, Hawaii, New York, a honeymoon in India, and a staycation in Portland). They still managed to get lots done, though! Some highlights of the most recent fixes include:
- Enhanced the keywords on org pages and job listings to include suggested Areas of Focus and Job Functions, and added them as search criteria on the advanced search page.
- Made it easier to filter on Education Requirements when searching job listings.
- RSS Feeds on profiles and org pages are smarter: instead of requiring the URL of the RSS feed, we grab the right link for you when you enter your regular URL for your profiles on Twitter, Facebook, or any other site.
- Tools to better control spammers: made it easier to block spammy users; after a user has been blocked by three people, the system now automatically marks them as spam; and other super secret strategies to make spammers less effective.
- Fixed a bug affecting the appearance of search facets
- Geocoded listings — this means that valid locations on listings are now recognized by our system and mapped, and thus can be included in proximity searches.
