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:

During the talk I gave an introduction to the method of unmoderated remote usability testing, discussed the pros and cons, explained how to conduct an unmoderated study, and reviewed some unmoderated testing tools. One of the main points of the talk was that there are no short cuts to conducting good research. Some of the tools present the option (i.e. short cut) to use pre-recruited panels to get participants for your study and I caution heavily against this. Who participates in your test is just as important for an unmoderated usability test as it is for a moderated test. Your team will base important design decisions on the data you obtain, so participants should be real or prospective users of your product.

Since the market is flooded with unmoderated testing tools (29 to my knowledge!), a handout was made available that provides an overview of all of the known tools on the market. If you’re considering an unmoderated study and you don’t know where to start to evaluate all the tools that are available, this is a truly invaluable resource to have at your fingertips. Here is the handout:

Note: This list only comprises remote unmoderated tools that provide task elicitation.

If you have any questions about remote unmoderated usability testing or if you know of a new tool that should be included, please let me know @kylesoucy.

View more presentations from Kyle Soucy.