Giving Great Talks: A Mashup

Stop Bullshit Research in Five Easy Steps

Anyone in the UX field who’s worked for a few companies will recognize a type of moderated research that gives off a reek of inauthenticity. Tell me if this sounds familiar: one moderator and six users sit around a table in a converted meeting room. The moderator tells the users, each of whom have been prescheduled and screened through a recruiting agency, to go to a prototype website and pretend they’re looking for a 20 GB googlydooter, or whatever. The users go into their cubicles, where the prototype is brought up on six identical, factory-default computers. Some of the users finish in five minutes, some don’t finish at all, but everyone gets exactly fifteen minutes to finish their task. (The early finishers drum their fingers in boredom, waiting for the moderator to call time.) Finally, the moderator brings up a projection of the prototype, and asks the users to voice their opinions, one-at-a-time, keeping their responses brief, to give everyone time to speak. The process lasts about 1-2 hours, making everyone kind of tired. The participants are paid their incentives, and the moderator drives home, wiping bitter tears from his eyes as he pulls into his driveway.

How could that possibly have been useful? he thinks to himself. What has my life come to?

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So you wanna be a UX researcher?

It’s May! Time for graduations and job hunts, and while B|P isn’t hiring right this minute (we have an awesome team and are busy refining our practices) we will be again, before too long. It seemed like a good time for a post on what I look for when hiring user experience researchers, so here goes, in reverse order of importance:

#4: Education. If you have less than 3 or 4 years of experience, I’m looking for a degree in a related field, and that really can be anything from cognitive science to anthropology to HCI to…well, surprise me, I can be convinced. If it’s from a top school in our field, that’s cool, but it’s no big deal if it’s not. A Master’s is nice for showing a commitment to the field, but doesn’t tell me much about you as a practicing researcher. And whether you do or don’t have a related degree, you’ll definitely grab my attention with interesting people-oriented research projects during your education. (If you have more than 3 or 4 years of experience, I don’t much care where you went to school or what you studied—I’ll be evaluating your professional record exclusively.)

HOW-TO Take Time-Stamped Collaborative Notes

One thing we’ve always wanted to have is a way to allow multiple people watching one of our research sessions to take automatically time-stamped, collaborative notes–everyone working in the same document, live, with entries labeled by author. Then I realized that it’s been under our noses the whole time: IM chat rooms! With a simple piece of free software, you’ve got a time-stamping, notetaking powerhouse at your disposal. And it even supports smileys. All it takes is a little ingenuity!

Remote is Better, pt. 1: Getting Clients’ Hands Dirty

In this inaugural entry in our B|P continuing series “Remote is Better”, we discuss how separating the moderator and the user eliminates the need for “two-way mirrors”–now you can get your clients into the driver’s seat with you (metaphorically). We show you how!

Lots of people think of remote research as a trade-off or a compromise–a cheap, quick alternative for when you can’t get users in the lab face-to-face. What often gets overlooked are the many, many qualitative benefits of testing remotely: if done properly, remote research can give you all kinds of data and insight that would be impossible to get otherwise. Of course, doing it properly means you need to know what you’re doing. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were people around with years of remote research experience, who were nice (or dumb) enough to give away all their best practices on their official blog?

HOW-TO Use UserVue Internationally

At the clubs, people are always asking the same thing: “I love UserVue for remote user research, but I hate that I can’t use it internationally!” For those unhappy party people, here is a guide to dialing internationally with UserVue.

Product Detail is King

Just this week, we’ll be presenting the same usability finding that has come out of three separate studies. We’ve been calling the finding “Product Detail is King.”

It may sound obvious, but when users are looking at products online — whether it’s software, healthcare, or crockpots – detailed information about the products is of utmost importance. And a user’s success in finding that fine level of detail can truly make or break whether they have a positive experience on the site.