3-min Sketch productivity hack: Alignment keyboard shortcuts

Updated Oct 2018 to provide a plugin-free solution that works in Sketch 52+

For designers working with Sketch, setting up keyboard shortcuts for frequent actions and using time-saving plugins, like Runner, are two easy ways to invest in productivity.

In this post, I’ll show you how I made it super fast to align items in Sketch.

🧰 What you’ll need

• An Apple computer with the Sketch app
• 3 minutes

☝️Instructions

1. Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts
2. Select App Shortcuts from the list on the left
3. Below the box on the right, click the + (plus) button
4. Use the Application select menu to choose Sketch
5. In the Menu Title field, copy and paste one of the following
   1. Arrange->Align->Top
   2. Arrange->Align->Right
   3. Arrange->Align->Bottom
   4. Arrange->Align->Left
   5. Arrange->Align->Horizontally
   6. Arrange->Align->Vertically
6. In the Keyboard Shortcut field, use the key combinations I chose (or pick your own shortcut)
   1. Shift+⌘+⬆ (Align Top)
   2. Shift+⌘+➡ (Align Right)
   3. Shift+⌘+⬇ (Align Bottom)
   4. Shift+⌘+⬅ (Align Left)
   5. Shift+⌘+, (Align Horizontally)
   6. Shift+⌘+. (Align Vertically)
7. Open up a Sketch file and test out your new shortcuts
8. 💥 Give yourself a high-five, you just unlocked some time savings.

🙏 Thanks

Special thanks to Tregg Frank for inspiring me to do this with his video on Sketch productivity hacks. Also, kudos to Alexis Morin for encouraging us to set up shortcuts way back in 2016.

✌️Happy Designing!

Get your time back, watch videos faster

Whether you’re learning to code on Treehouse, binge-watching Netflix, or tumbling down a YouTube rabbit hole, you can save significant time by watching video content at faster speeds.

⏱ How to watch HTML5 video faster

You can use the following tools to speed up streaming HTML5 videos or downloaded videos.

• Speed Controller extension for Chrome (for streaming video)
• VLC media player (for downloaded video)

🤔 How much time can you save?

As shown below, the faster the playback speed, the more time you save. I like to start at 1.8x or 2x and then slow it down, if necessary.

Playback Speed	Time to watch a 60m video	Time Saved
1x	60m	0m
1.2x	50m	10m
1.4x	43m	17m
1.6x	38m	22m
1.8x	33m	27m
2x	30m	30m

10 tips for designing better usability tests

1. Start with a story 📖

Our brains are wired to process stories, so take full advantage of this when creating your usability test. Instead of asking participants to imagine or pretend, tell them a simple story that sets the stage for what they’ll be doing in your test.

A story-style introduction doesn’t need to be long-winded, for example:

Your boss, Head of Marketing at SportyWear, purchased a new tool to help you with your merchandising strategy and asked you to check it out.

2. Ask interview questions 🕵🏿‍♂️

Even if you’ve screened your participants, I’ve found that it pays to start every test with one or more interview questions. Asking brief, open-ended interview questions will often yield insights that help you evaluate and analyze a participant’s feedback.

Furthermore, if you’ve already identified personas for your users, these questions can help you validate your ideas or place participants into groups. If you don’t have personas, interview questions can provide a head start for creating some.

3. Keep it simple 🍰

Write simple tasks. The less that participants have to remember during each step of your usability test, the more they can focus on thinking aloud as they complete your tasks. If a task doesn’t fit within two lines of text, try simplifying your language or splitting complex tasks into two or more simple tasks.

4. Mix open-ended & closed-ended tasks & questions 🤹🏻‍♀️

Open-ended tasks and questions are great for inviting surprises and generating new ideas. By giving participants freedom, you can often get a glimpse into their intrinsic motivations while increasing opportunities for surprising insights worth their weight in UX research gold.

A simple open-ended task might be,

Identify your biggest question about this site/app, and then try to find the answer.

And an open-ended question could be something like,

What questions do you have about this site/app?

Closed-ended tasks and questions can help you uncover problems. To discover the biggest usability issues and problems, send participants through your business’ most important conversion funnels or needle-moving user flows.

For a great close-ended task, send participants through an end-to-end user flow. For example,

Shop for a protective case for your new iPhone and stop when you’re asked to enter payment information.

Closed-ended questions, like yes/no or rating scale questions, provide constraints that facilitate visualizing data in charts or graphs. These types of questions are particularly useful when looking for trends or patterns in usability issues. Here’s an example:

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 = Very Difficult, and 10 = Very Easy, how easy or difficult was it to understand the purpose of the site from the homepage?

Use a mix of open-ended and closed-ended tasks and questions to get a bigger bang for your buck with usability testing.

5. Let participants fill in the blanks 🤐

Avoid referring to specific UI elements or marketing language. By using more generic language in your tasks and questions, you allow participants to fill in the blanks and uncover stumbling blocks in the user flows you’ve designed. If your tasks are overly specific (e.g., click on the blue gear icon in the top-right, next to “Your Account”), you’re probably missing out on valuable feedback.

6. Invite questions 🙏

Get inside participants’ heads by inviting participants to ask questions during the test. I often do this with a task like, “Based on what you’ve seen, what questions do you have right now?”

7. Ask smart screener questions 🧠

If you use one or more screener questions, avoid asking yes-or-no questions for a couple reasons. First, potential participants have a 50-50 chance of guessing their way past the screener question. Second, you end up collecting less useful data about the participant.

Instead, use multiple choice questions with 5–7 response options to reduce the likelihood of participants guessing their way through your screener and to increase the quality of data you're collecting.

Also, even after asking your smart screener questions, I still recommend beginning every test with one or more interview questions to qualify participants and validate personas.

8. Solicit peer reviews 👀

Ask a friend or colleague, preferably someone who’s not too close to your project, to check your test script for clarity, spelling errors, missing info., etc. Fixing sloppy mistakes is one of the easiest ways to set yourself up for a successful pilot test.

9. Run a pilot test 👨🏼‍✈️

Even after your test has been peer-reviewed, it’s a good idea to run your test with a single participant to identify any other problems with the language, scope, or flow of your test.

After you address any significant issues with your pilot test, you’re ready to recruit a group of participants.

10. Recruit (at least) five participants per study 🙋🏼‍♀️🙋🏿‍♂️🙋🏾‍♀️🙋🏻‍♂️🙋🏽‍♂️

If you run a study with only one or two participants, research suggests that you’re missing out on ~30% of the usability issues that you’d expect to discover with 5 participants¹. Moreover, with feedback from just a couple people, you run a greater risk of being distracted by accidental or outlier behavior.

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to recruit all five users at once. Depending on your resources, you might consider employing the RITE method of prototyping, where you iterate and make changes to your site or app between participant sessions.

¹ For more on this topic, read Jakob Nielsen’s article, Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users.

I hope you’ve found this article to be clear, actionable, and helpful. If you have questions or feedback, please contact me.

✌️Happy User Testing!