Jacob Hayes

Why a pen name

Uxnotivo publishes its guides under the pen name Jacob Hayes. We chose a pen name for two reasons. First, it keeps attention on what matters in a guide: whether its claims are accurate and whether readers can check them. Second, it protects the privacy of the person behind the work, in line with how Uxnotivo handles identity across the site.

A pen name brings a responsibility. Readers cannot judge the guides by a famous name or a list of credentials, so every guide must earn trust through its sources. That is why each factual claim links to a numbered source, why primary sources are preferred and why quotations are reproduced exactly as they appear in the original.

We do not attach invented credentials, employers, degrees or years of experience to the name. If a guide needs specialist authority, it cites the specialist source directly.

What the guides cover

The guides fall into three areas.

Research methods

How to run a heuristic evaluation, how many people to include in a usability study, how to write test tasks that do not lead participants and how to score the System Usability Scale.

Rules and responsibilities in the United States

Consent and participant incentives, including the IRS reporting threshold; session replay and privacy; accessibility testing with disabled users; and A/B testing without confusing search engines.

Context for decisions

How Core Web Vitals relate to what visitors experience, and what agencies publish about UX audit costs.

Standards behind the name

Every guide published under this name follows the same editorial policy: primary sources first, secondary and commercial sources labeled, quotations copied exactly and corrections made openly. Rather than repeat that policy here, this page focuses on what readers can expect from the guides themselves.

Guides by the question you have

• "Is my site obviously broken somewhere?" Start with the heuristic evaluation guide and run the ten principles over your key pages.
• "How many people do we need to test with?" The sample size guide separates finding problems from measuring them.
• "How do we ask without leading?" The task writing guide has before and after rewrites.
• "What paperwork do participants need, and do payments get reported?" See consent and incentives.
• "Is a SUS score of 70 a percentage?" No, and the SUS guide explains why with a worked example.
• "Will an A/B test hurt our search traffic?" The A/B testing guide quotes Google's own rules.
• "Do we need disabled participants, or is a checker enough?" The accessibility testing guide covers WCAG 2.2, the W3C and the DOJ.
• "Is our session replay tool a legal risk?" The privacy guide summarizes regulators, courts and state laws.
• "Why do slow pages feel broken?" The Core Web Vitals guide links each metric to what visitors notice.
• "What should an audit cost?" The cost guide compares published ranges, labeled as commercial sources.

Contact and corrections

If you find an error in a guide, a broken source link or a claim that no longer reflects its source, please write to hello@uxnotivo.online with the guide's address and the details. Corrections are handled under our editorial policy, and significant corrections are noted on the guide.

How to read a guide critically

We encourage readers to treat our guides the way they would treat any source: check the claims that matter to you. Each guide ends with a numbered source list. Primary sources are listed with their publisher and date, secondary sources are labeled as such, and commercial sources are flagged so you can weigh their interest. If a claim matters to a decision you are making, follow the link and read the original passage in context.