We ran our annual Readers Survey late last month. It was a chance to get an overview of our amazing community and to hear your opinions on what we’re doing. It’s always an eye opener, and it reignites our love of what we do. We love sharing these kinds of things with you, so grab a coffee and settle in…
Firstly, we were staggered (and honoured) to have heard from 250 of you. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and ideas. Those insights are pure gold.
There were a few common themes that stood out.
You’re growing up!
Our audience (that’s you!) is noticeably maturing. We have a lot more mid–senior level practitioners reading our content, with just under 14% of respondents just starting out, and significant numbers in the 6+ year bracket. That is an expected change if we make the assumption that many of you have been with us throughout your UX journey, but it indicates to us that we need to ensure we create some more advanced content so that we cater to your changing needs.
You love our content but our website needs some work
We hear ya, and we agree. Many of you have suggested that we make our content more searchable, and our IA more intuitive. You know that we have some gold hidden in our coffers that will make you rich, but you’re having trouble finding it. That makes a lot of sense to us and we’re thinking on ways to do just that. In good news, we’re currently undergoing a long overdue redesign of the site so keep your eyes peeled for that in the new year.
You didn’t know that we sold products
Deep down we knew this was a thing but we’re glad you’ve made us think on it. We’re pretty gun shy when it comes to marketing ourselves because we value our reputation and we don’t want to tarnish that. That said, we have some really amazing ebooks (see what I did there?) and it’s bordering on criminal not to make sure they’re on your radar, so we’ll work on making that more of a focus when we roll out the aforementioned site relaunch.
You either hold our community close to your heart or you’ve never heard of it
So this one surprised us a little. Community is at the very heart of what we do, so we need to get this sorted out. Those of you that are part of our forum community are full of praise, but a surprising number of you weren’t aware that we have an active community. We plan to surface some community content onto our new homepage and do something about advertising a little better in the coming months.
You need mentoring
We’ve always known how important the role of a UX mentor is and how difficult they are to come by, so it’s of little surprise that many of you would like us to solve that problem for you. We attempted to do that this year with our peer mentoring program on Slack, and while this program has been a huge success, it hasn’t quite filled the gap so we will put our thinking caps back on.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner
Every year we add a bit of a sweetener to our Readers Survey in the way of a competition. This year we awarded prizes for the best response to the following question: What could we do to make our content or offerings much better?
You had so many great ideas, but the one we loved best was from Canadian UXer Tess Good.
Tess said:
“I’d love a different approach to topic discovery – for [specific] topics. Give me a highly visible starting point and let me refine it as I go for my context. I [also] find the nav overwhelming and segmented in ways that aren’t helpful – when I have a question about research I want everything you’ve got (i.e. article, any resource type, training, etc).
Also I struggle with the UI – I use search to accomplish the above but find scanning the results really difficult.
Lots could be done with hierarchy and layout – even the way the text except wraps around the image in search results and article / resource lists is hard on the eyes. Shorter more curated excerpts would be dope. More results per page for quick scanning would be helpful.”
And here was her response when we told her she’d won:
“UX Mastery has been a huge asset to me as I made a career change to specialize in UX Strategy. Working in agencies I’m always tackling new things and need a flexible toolbox of techniques and approaches – the resources and articles UX Mastery curates continue to help me so much! Thanks for letting me weigh in on the web experience, I hope it benefits the community.”
We loved the feedback from runners’ up Marcelyn T, Liz and Joanne Ginnever.
Liz said:
“Better publicity. I receive your emails (and sign up for the Advent calendar every year), but aside from a few Q&A sessions, I didn’t know you had other coursework available. I’d love a brief weekly or bi-weekly newsletter with your offerings, maybe a reader-supplied tip or two, and user supplied art. I’d read it, and learn, both more about UX Mastery and UX in general.”
Marcelyn said:
“I will engage if I have people to talk to/be held accountable to. It would be interesting to bring different skill sets together – the HCD person (present!), the UI person, the product manager – around specific projects like pro bono work for a non-profit – so we could learn from each other and benefit others at the same time. If we posted our progress and artifacts on UX Mastery, we could build a story for the rest of the community to follow and boost engagement – sort of like an on-line reality show. I think this would work best if teams were based in the same time zone and could nominate and self-select into projects.”
Joanne said:
“There is a lot of stuff and if you are new to UX it is sometimes hard to know what it is you need to be looking for. It might be an idea to categorise content by what stage you are at e.g. UX beginner, UX genius… The Community element could be incorporated a bit more too, possibly have the latest question on the homepage which would draw users in and they could discover yet even more.”
So wrapping it all up…
We’re feeling pretty rapt (pun intended) that we have such an engaged community of readers who are so willing to jump in with constructive feedback and suggestions. If you were one of those people, we are incredibly grateful. If you weren’t, well, we love you anyway.
