Gregg Bernstein, Senior Researcher at Vox, just published this pretty thorough and awesome description of the tools and methods he uses there for remote testing. Quick summary is below and you can read the full article here. Calendly for scheduling Slack for communicating InVision for testing and collaboration ScreenFlow for recording Evernote for note taking Google Apps for findable, archivable […] Read more – ‘Vox Remote Testing Workflow’.
An excerpt from our book, Remote Research, published by Rosenfeld Media. The soul of remote research is that it lets you conduct what we call Live Intercept 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 interface. Remote research opens […] Read more – ‘Live Intercept Research’.
For any fellow remote mobile research nerds, this is huge news. The upcoming spec for WebRTC that allows peer-to-peer video and eventually screen-sharing is working on Android and iOS in development versions of FireFox. What this means is that in the near future apps like, ahem, ethnio, will be able to easily allow for webcam […] Read more – ‘Holy Shit WebRTC Hits Mobile’.
Attempting to gather customer feedback remotely can be scary (Halloween is over, I know). Thankfully, there are many tools out there that make remote user experience research simple and less intimidating to both the company looking for feedback and the customers giving the feedback. These tools can be found on the Tools section of RemoteResear.ch. Today […] Read more – ‘A Practical Guide: How to Interview and Observe Customers Remotely’.
Turns out there are more and more ways to recruit research participants from Twitter, and when you @reply someone, there is a real art to making sure they don’t think you are a spammer and click through to your totally legit research link. Here is an image from my presentation at UX Week 2012 that […] Read more – ‘The Anatomy of a Recruiting Tweet (for User Research)’.
The fine folks at UX Magazine have posted this article on combining in-person methods with remote research methods by Sabine Idler of our friends at Usabilla. Hello there our favorite topic! The summary of the article is that you get benefits to each method by combining, but I’d argue that the real benefits come from combining moderated […] Read more – ‘Combining In-Person & Remote Research on UX Mag’.
The long-awaited remote recording of app interactions on iOS devices may be getting closer. A Y Combinator(?) company, delight.io (site’s down as of Apr 30th), released this video which shows a recording using their SDK. Now it’s important to explain what this means is that you have to build their SDK into your app to […] Read more – ‘Woah! Remote Usability Recording on iOS Devices. With an SDK.’.
Our friend Diane Loviglio over at Mozilla posted this pretty helpful guide to how they test tablets over there. They offer up some cool variations on the hugging technique that MailChimp uses, so check out the full article over on Mozilla’s blog. Read more – ‘Tablet remote usability testing at Mozilla’.
There is a new app called Reflector that lets you easily mirror from an iPhone or iPad to a Mac desktop, which you can then share remotely in real-time. That’s a big deal because 1) it’s fast and reliable 2) it’s wireless, and 3) you can screen share a mobile device remotely. Using this in conjunction […] Read more – ‘Mobile Remote Screen-Sharing with Reflector’.
The folks over at Normal Modes have posted this handy quick summary of, well, you guessed it. Six benefits of remote usability testing. Here’s the quick list and click on through to the article for the details: Ease of recruiting & convenience for participants Geographic diversity in participants Lower no-show rate Lower overall costs All […] Read more – ‘Six Benefits of Remote Usability Testing’.
And here we have it – the basic state of remote research on mobile devices in 2011 2012 2013 2014. 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 […] Read more – ‘Laptop Hugging’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
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’.
