FAQ Design, Twitter Tools and Crowdsourcing – The Monday May 30th Roundup

Big roundup this week, since we have some left over material from last week. I think we have a total of  10 posts, on subjects ranging from email to eyetracking.

Specifically, this week, we have FAQ design, cool twitter tools, working with custom reports AND variables, and a study on incentives in crowdsourcing.

Create

• We start this week off with Six Revisions guide to designing effective FAQ pages. The best part? Their first step is to “say no” to FAQ pages. “The FAQ page supports the rest of the website’s content; if it doesn’t enhance what’s already there, it shouldn’t be a priority.”
• Alas Poor Yorik has taken a break from posting about Cold Fusion to provide us all with a means for loading mobile friendly web pages using javascript and CSS.

Attract

• Facebook has implemented a “send” button. Unlike “share” or “like”, “send” puts your content into a message and sends it to the friends they select. It’s basically the Facebook equivalent of “Forward to a Friend”.
• Inspired Mag has a bunch of cool twitter tools. Some include Buffer, which spaces out your tweets so that you dont overload your followers, and Backtweets, which lets you find who is sharing a URL.

Analyze

• Google’s Asia-Pacific conversion room blog (god that’s a mouth full) has posted a guest post on using custom reports to identify useful pages. This is actually a really useful post, as it gives direct exampled of how you can use GA to find deeper insights about your ecommerce store.
• The GA blog has a guide to the new features that have been added to Intelligence since the V5 update.
• Justin Cutroni has a guide to using custom variables, including the code needed to set them up, design best practices and more.

Optimize

• UX Matters has a post on mobile user experience, which is has split into three layers: hardware, OS, and websites. As always, not only is each post fairly detailed, but
• GetElastic has 10 tips for condusting and analyzing eye tracking tests. These include starting from a hypothesis, through to doing A/B tests.
• Finally, and coolest of all, Crowdflower has a post, and study, on designing incentive systems for crowdsourced workers. The interesting thing here is how standard incentives didnt work that well, while economic punishments did (quite opposite of the last study I read on this subject, which found that increasing economic incentives didn’t have much of an effect).