Robert Jones from WhatUsersDo chats about how you can earn from home working for them

Robert Jones (Who you can find on Twitter here) the Panel manager from the fantastic WhatUsersDo talks about website testing with their company which pays you £8-£15 per 20 minute website review.

Money Shed members have been aware of earning money through WhatUsersDo for quite some time now but can you tell us how the company came to be?

WhatUsersDo was founded by Lee Duddell was set up over five years ago so anyone, in any size or type of organisation, can remotely gather user research from across the world with real people. Lee became increasingly frustrated with the amateurish way that companies were making important design decisions. Personal opinions, hunches and incomplete data were driving experience design. And not User Insight.

 

How were the first few months/years of operation? Was it easy to convince potential clients of the benefits of the services WhatUsersDo offer?

When I joined the company it was going through it’s first major growth strategy, there were lots of new people but the service was also still quite new. That’s the good thing with new tools and research methods though, people are interested in how they can do things differently and keep up with the times.

 

Can you talk us through the process of how you decide on the questions / tasks for each piece of work – Do you with with the client to determine how best to guide the worker through what the client wants?

There are two ways the tasks for tests are decided, but first and foremost the task is defined by the goal that a client has. For example if a client is planning on launching a brand new home page, WhatUsersDo testers may pre-test the website before launch. They may beta test a pre-live app before a big brand launches a it or a client may want to see users going through specific journeys e.g. booking a hotel. Some clients write the tasks themselves, others use our in house User Experience Research team to write the tasks. We always prefer to write the tasks in house as it means we can better service the client according to their specific goals.

What is it you feel differs WhatUsersDo from say companies like UTest?

From a tester perspective WhatUsersDo is interested in the natural experience that users have using websites, there are some companies which pay usability company to find bugs or would prefer to watch participants in a lab. For us it’s all about the real people using websites in their own home, on their own devices and telling us about the experience.

 

Can you tell us a bit about how client are reactive to the results they get back? Is it just a case of trying to understand how their site is being used or do you regularly see clients make changes based on the feedback that your company provide?

All of our clients receive the test videos, some also have workshops or a presentation from our UX team. The problem with any research is taking action on results and insight. The good thing about WhatUsersDo is that our clients can see the experience, the good, the bad and the problems that real people are encountering using their website. Our videos are used right across the departments and teams of our clients to encourage change. The great thing is that we do see changes to websites as a result of our website tests and sometimes any problems found are fixed or improved pretty quickly.

 

In the last few months there has been a move into testing websites on mobile devices such as iPads etc. Is testing of this sort quite an easy sell to clients? – I imagine views on those sort of devices are only going to keep going up at the moment.

 

We’re working on growing our mobile testing panel, this is a key priority for us because we have big client demand. We’re also working on new ways to test mobile sites and apps that doesn’t involve cameras.

 

What do you see the world of user based testing heading over the next few years?

I think a blog post by our founder explains our predictions quite well: https://whatusersdo.com/resources/articles/top-10-mostly-ux-predictions-2014

 

What are clients maybe asking of you to provide that the current ‘in place’ system doesn’t facilitate?

Objective expertise, speed of insight delivery, variety and scale of projects, international testing…..and the maximisation of budgets!

 

Why would you recommend people to join the WhatUsersDo panel?

WhatUsersDo pays a really great incentive (£8 per website test) and testers tell us they find it really interesting, fun and rewarding. This is a chance to help make websites better and improve the experience for anyone.

 

You can join the WhatUsersDo panel by clicking here