The problem with doing any mobile device observation is there is no way to see what’s on-screen without an awkward camera or physically looking at the device’s screen. That sucks because there is usually a participant who is right there trying to use their phone or device. And it also means they can’t walk around [...] Read more – ‘Why AirPlay Mirroring is the Biggest Thing to Happen to User Research in 2011’.
And here we have it – the basic state of remote research on mobile devices in 2011. That state is pointing webcams at cell phones – and it totally works. The cool part about this delightful post by Jenn Downs at Mailchimp is that they have users hug their laptop, which is a clever and [...] Read more – ‘Remote Mobile Usability by Mailchimp’.
We’re excited to hear that Usabilla is working on automated feedback from a Live webpage. This would make them the first to cross both “automated static” and “automatic live” types of remote usability testing. So far the only evidence is this tweet from Paul Veugen, their CEO: “Excited to see the first functional prototype of [...] Read more – ‘Usabilla Adding Live Site Feedback’.
It’s becoming increasingly common to want to talk to users of technologies in other countries other than your own. Often times, this means communicating with people who are not native speakers of your language. This can be a very challenging aspect to a project, especially when it comes to recruiting, and it is something that [...] Read more – ‘A Native Language Approach’.
Back in April, I had a wonderful time giving a talk in Denver at the IA Summit on unmoderated remote usability testing. The feedback on twitter about the talk was great and I thank everyone for your kind tweets. Here are the slides: Collaging: Getting Answers to the Questions You Don’t Know to Ask View [...] Read more – ‘IA Summit ’11’.
Had a blast in Portland at the Webvisions conference. Great audience, fun crowd, and a huge thank you for all the incredibly nice tweets about my talk . Here are those slides. Feel free to ask questions @boltron. View more presentations from bolt peters Read more – ‘Webvisions’.
Video + Screen sharing is something we’ve been waiting for, in a way that only requires a browser to initiate, for YEARS. Looks like our friends at Citrix have done a spectacular job on this Beta of HD video webcam sharing along with GoToMeeting 5.0 we just tried out. Both for remote research and for remote [...] Read more – ‘Webcam + Screen Sharing in GTM 5 Beta’.
For the most part, there is no way to screen share from a stock iPhone, iPad, or Android phone for that matter. You would have to Jail Break an iPhone to get it to do screen sharing or screen recording, and for us lowly researchers, that is not typically a viable option. The same is [...] Read more – ‘iPad & iPhone Remote Research’.
Should be a fun one. First European workshop that Nate is putting on – at UX London Friday April 15th!. Will try and include a little more about general research ideas for folks without a lot of experience doing research, and some methods *other than* just usability. Your Exercise Packet in Word Doc or in Mac Pages [...] Read more – ‘UX London Workshop!’.
There have been quite a few posts from our brothers and sisters around the globe about remote usability and remote research lately. There are even claims that remote usability is BOOMING. You head it there first. Here we are: 3 tools that will forever change the usability (Spanish Translated to English) Asynchronous remote usability testing: [...] Read more – ‘International Love’.
The is the second time in three years I’ve seen a type of remote research that had nothing to do with interface design, but is totally inspiring and teh awesome. Coincidentally they both had something to do with Harvard. The first was the “track your happiness” project, and this time it’s from a joint MIT [...] Read more – ‘Taking Your Pulse by Webcam’.
Check out this prototype of a JavaScript-based moderated observation tool by @davidvanleeuwen. Love this. It could replace GoToMeeting or maybe even be incorporated into something like Ethnio for quick direct observation?! If only there was an easy way to incorporate Google Voice or another voice component of HTML5. Anyone? Bueller? Read more – ‘Rad Prototype of Screen Observation with JavaScript’.
There are a couple new remote eye-tracking services that have popped up. One we have seen actually work and seems quite credible – GazeHawk, and another which we got spammed emailed about but doesn’t seem to be up and rolling yet - YouEye. Say what you will about the practice of assigning meaning to eyeball movement, [...] Read more – ‘Remote Eye Tracking Like Woah’.
If you’re doing any kind of user research, you’ve at least thought about getting official consent from your participants. Perhaps you’ve got a signed piece of paper or verbal consent to record sessions, or maybe you have a team of lawyers following you around with actual carbon copies in triplicate. Either way you need consent [...] Read more – ‘Online Consent’.
Our fellow bay area local Brian McClain of Metric Lab has written a great summary of how to use un-moderated, AKA automated, AKA self-moderated, AKA UX tools, in combination with other methods and over long periods of time. Here is the whole article over at UX Matters. Read more – ‘Creative Ways to Use Unmoderated User Research’.
This is the latest Bolt | Peters facilitator guide (AKA Moderator Script. Whatever) template. Janice Bradford was nice enough to read our book and reminded us that we promise templates on this site. Well here we go. The full text is below and if you want a nicely formatted word doc you can download that [...] Read more – ‘Remote Facilitator Guide’.
My new homegirl Ellen Beldner wrote this nice summary of her experience conducting recent remote user testing. In this article she goes so far as to agree with me about facial expressions in research. Rock on, Ellen, rock on. Read more – ‘Adventures in Remote Usability by Ellen Beldner’.
Slides from Nate’s IxDA & UPA & SVA talks in Los Angeles and New York in May and June of 2010. Most of these won’t make any damn sense but more information is in the actual book here: http://bit.ly/ZlDoQ View more presentations from bolt peters. Read more – ‘Slides from Nate’s IxDA & UPA & SVA Talks’.
There is some kind of huge development craze going on in the remote / online usability tools market. My guess is that usertesting.com has inspired some of this, along with the perceived market for interface research. Here are the new tools that have launched within the last month or two. If we are missing any [...] Read more – ‘New Tools AVALANCHE’.
Come hang with us in San Francisco or attend remotely on May 6th from 9am – 4:30pm PST. We’re holding our third Escape The Lab workshop on remote UX research methods and tools. You get hands-on training with the latest moderated and un-moderated remote UX research tools. Space is limited as we’re only allowing 10 [...] Read more – ‘Workshop on Remote UX Research – May 6th’.
Cool write-up on heybaloo.com on two remote usability tools – usertesting.com and feedbackarmy.com. Excerpt: “Remote testing neatly sidesteps these issues: the tester is probably sitting in his own house, using the site at his own pace. He’s probably on his own, so he’s happy to chat away and let you know what he thinks and [...] Read more – ‘Why Remote Usability Testing Kicks Ass – by Heybaloo’.
There’s a guest post by Brynn Evans over on the Bolt | Peters Blog, on the topic of using remote research methods to inform social interaction design. What’s social interaction design, you ask?: Social interaction design (SxD) is the practice of designing for person-to-person interactions mediated by a computer interface, going beyond pure usability and [...] Read more – ‘Using Remote Research to Inform Social Interaction Design (SxD)’.
An excerpt from our forthcoming Remote Research book, out soon by Rosenfeld Media! ——————— The soul of remote research is that it lets you conduct what we call Time-Aware Research. By now UX researchers are familiar with the importance of understanding the usage context of an interface–the physical environment where people are normally using an [...] Read more – ‘Time-Aware Research’.
At next weekend’s UXCampVancouver, Elizabeth Snowden will be giving a talk on remote usability methods. Check it out if you’re in the area! Update: Sold out! Read more – ‘UXCampVancouver 2009’.
A new article on 90 Percent of Everything discusses a few ways to screen out potential “fake users” who lie about their qualifications to participate in your study: In fact, a lot of liars can be screened out by writing a really good screener questionnaire. For example, here’s a decoy question that the Mozilla metrics [...] Read more – ‘Screening Out Liars From Your Usability Study’.
Over at MarketingProfs’ 22 Cheap or Free Web Usability Tools series, our recruiting tool Ethnio gets a shout-out. Here are the pros and cons they mention: Pros: Enables usability researchers to acquire actual users from the website for testing. Cons: Researchers must be available when a participant response is received, and the tool is for [...] Read more – ‘22 Cheap or Free Web Usability Tools’.
From UserCentered.net, an overview of moderated remote research, which they call “remote synchronous research”. ‘Remote user research and testing’ is where the user and the facilitator are in different places. Remote user research can fall into two categories, ‘synchronous’ and ‘asynchronous’. In synchronous protocols, a facilitator interacts with a participant who is remote and leads [...] Read more – ‘Oldie but Goodie’.
Liz Bacon of Devise maintains a great list of remote usability testing tools on Google Docs; check em out! (We’ll probably have something like this in the near future as well; for now, check out our Tools page!) Read more – ‘Remote Testing Tools Round-up by Liz Bacon’.
The Northeast Ohio Usability Professionals Association (NEOUPA) recently put on an event called “Remote usability studies: Get great results while saving time and money“. Quoth Jason Holmes of American Greetings, co-organizer of the event (along with Aaron Rosenberg): The NEOUPA event was great. Lots of interest, lots of enthusiasm. We had about 45 people there, [...] Read more – ‘NEOUPA: Remote Usability Studies event’.
Last week’s UX Brighton event, “Remote Research: a 360-degree View“, covered all sorts of fun remote user research tools and companies, including Webnographer (automated tool), Pidoco (wireframe testing), Flow (agency), and Ethnolabs (automated cross-platform data aggregation). Here are the best write-ups: Steve Bromley: In the heated Q&A session after, it was discussed at length that [...] Read more – ‘UX Brighton Round-up’.
There are many ways to recruit participants for a remote research study from your website. (If you’re already confused, see this post for an introduction to live recruiting.) First and foremost, there’s our web app Ethnio, which is built specifically for the purpose. It uses a DHTML layer to display a pop-up recruiting form right [...] Read more – ‘Sample Recruiting Forms’.
Want to learn remote research? Bolt | Peters is hosting a one-day workshop on August 26th, and you’re invited. Give us a day and we can teach you all the rocket surgery you need to conduct qualitative studies the real-time, native environment way. Date: Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 Time: 9am – 4:30pm. Sign-in starts at [...] Read more – ‘Escape The Lab – Aug. 26’.
The following is a list of software resources and web apps which can be used for various types of remote research, both moderated and unmoderated/automated. Moderated Tools UserVue by TechSmith. This is our trusty stand-by for moderated one-on-one interviews. Enables you to view a participant’s screen in real-time while talking to them on the phone. [...] Read more – ‘Remote Research Software and Web Apps’.
We’re proud to announce our forthcoming book Remote Research, which will be published by Rosenfeld Media in 2009! It’s a book for everyone who’s interested in learning why, when, and how to design and conduct remote user research studies themselves. From the book publisher’s website: Remote user research describes any research method that allows you [...] Read more – ‘Announcing Remote Research: The Book’.
While there are plenty of tools floating around to help you conduct one-on-one moderated interviews, if you’re just getting started with remote research, you may not want to invest in a ton of expensive software or subscription-based web services right off the bat. So let us show you a few handy ways to use more [...] Read more – ‘Build Your Own (Cheap) Moderated Testing Setup’.
In an article for Boxes and Arrows, Paul Nuschke lists five phases of a usability study: Step 1: Sales & Kickoff Step 2: Recruitment Step 3: Preparation Step 4: Testing Step 5: Analysis & Reporting This post is about that second step, where you’re recruiting users to participate in your study. Traditionally this has been [...] Read more – ‘Live Recruiting for Remote Research’.
In general, remote user research simply describes any research where the moderator and the research participants are physically separated. However, there are lots of different varieties of remote user research, and each has its own strengths, weaknesses, and circumstances in which they’re most effective. Some types allow you to test many people at once, while [...] Read more – ‘The Two Basic Types of Remote Testing’.
Let’s start off by answering the question you probably came with. The short answer is: any kind of research where the user and research moderator aren’t interacting face-to-face. So why do you care? Well, take a look at how most research is currently done. When you want to learn about how people perceive and interact [...] Read more – ‘What is Remote Usability Research?’.
Rashmi Sinha and I created this graph of different UX research methods for User Experience Week in D.C. in 2006, and posted to remoteusability.com in 2007. This week, Christian Rohrers posted a similar yet more detailed graph of all user experience research methods on Alert Box. They are pretty similar, but I actually like his [...] Read more – ‘Choosing a Remote User Experience Research Tool’.
