Hi, Do you have a link to your project? (I have a link to mine in my profile)
- I didn't engage the users that signed up in any way, no.
- On HackerNews and other places, I got mixed feedback. I think I a bit ignored the feedback that said that what I built wasn't so very user friendly.
- My experience with UX designers and testers have been good, or great. Some of them were not of much help, but that doesn't matter much — what matters is that _some_ of the freelancers were really talented (from my point of view). I hired perhaps 10 different freelancers, they charged between $5 and $35 per hour. Usually the a bit more expensive ones were better. I got the impression that the freelancers where doing their best and working fairly quickly. (The freelancer site has a time tracker that takes screenshots.)
- Usability testing: This works fairly well with almost anyone. They recorded screencasts with sound. Problems could be that the sound was a bit low. Or the video didn't work. Then instead they wrote something in text. — I think it makes sense to let both 1) experienced UX designers and 2) people with not much experience, test the software. Someone who didn't know anything about tech, was actually very helpful, because she made it easier for me to understand how to write so that also non-tech users understand.
- The biggest problem with usability testing, was that it takes rather long to watch the videos afterwards :- P If they spend 30 min recording, then it takes 30 mins for me to watch. Sometimes it's more time efficient with feedback in text + screenshots in a PDF/LibreOffice doc.
- No blog, but I've thought about writing a blog post entitled "Doing everything the wrong way" or something like that. (I did other mistakes too. Perhaps I still do :- P )
(sorry for the late reply, didn't notice the new comments here)