Who’s honoring us now

With apologies to Stephen Colbert, we’re boasting about the awesome reviews of Nate and Tony’s book Remote Research – check these THREE AWESOME BOOK REVIEWS out:

This Picture Nate Took Hit #1 on Flickr

Party Invitations

This was originally posted on the GoGamestorm blog on August 16, 2010. We’ve used this activity in several client brainstorming meetings with much success! Give it a whirl and report back on your results! Objective of play: Improve the onboarding process of a product or service. Number of players: 5-30 Duration of play: 30-60 minutes How to play:

Want to work at BP?

We’re Hiring a Peace-Loving UX Researcher

Bolt | Peters needs a new colleague to join our acclaimed User Experience team, but unlike so many companies looking for UX Ninjas or Ninja Developers, we don’t want people bent on assassination under the cover of darkness. Instead, you must have a strong background in UX research including study design, moderation, and analysis, and you need to be eager to learn and develop new methodologies.  Ideally you also have IA or Design chops, with a portfolio of work you can show us.  You’re active in the UX community and want to become more prominent; you’re a polished writer and speaker whether presenting client results or your own ideas.  You play well with others, have strong opinions but know how to listen neutrally, and have a pragmatic approach to helping clients create change.  Oh, and you don’t mind getting your hands dirty with a little video editing.

The Super Technical Guide to GoToMeeting for Remote Usability on a Mac

When Whitney Hess tweeted this week about needing help with a remote usability test, we jumped on the opportunity to help. “Simple,” we said! “That’s what we do everyday!”

Giving Great Talks: A Mashup

UX Intern Wanted

We are seeking a UX Intern to help with interaction design and research work at our five-person user experience consultancy. We’re looking for someone who can primarily do stunning visual design, and secondarily wants to conduct UX research and contribute to designing qualitative and quantitative studies. We won’t ask you to make copies but we will ask you to do a lot of different things, and to keep up with our pace. In return, we’ll involve you in real-world project work with our unforgivably fresh set of clients ranging from Sony to Greenpeace, mentor you in our cutting edge methods, and treat you as a full member of our awesome team.

Seeking an Office Superstar

Red hot news alert. We are seeking a full-time office superstar who is interested in some aspect of technology or design, and can help us run our five-person user experience research and design office. Our highly-esteemed and amazing current superstar is going back to graduate school for an MFA after serving four glorious years. Primarily we need help with bookkeeping, project assistance, executive assistant duties for the CEO, and some client interaction. B|P is a small user experience research firm based in San Francisco – that means we film people using computers in-person and remotely, see where they run into difficulty, and make reports and documentaries about their behavior for manufacturers.

ZDNet Writes an Article About Our iPad Article for UX Magazine

The guys over at ZDNet who cover all things Mac-related have written up a quick summary of our recent comparison of mobile interaction with the Square payment system between the iPad and iPhone. Cool to see this article get so many comments and shout-outs. Both links below:

Escape the Lab – May 6th

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 in-person and 10 remote attendees, so register soon. It’s about 50% sold-out right now. Also, we’re giving away two FREE spots for whoever tweets the best answer to why they love or hate remote research with the tag #ETLAB.

Date: Thursday, May 6th, 2010
Time: 9am – 4:30pm
Place: Bolt | Peters User Experience at 576 Natoma Street, San Francisco, CA
Cost: $399 In-person or $199 Remote. $299 for URF Alumni.
More info: http://escapethelab.com/

Hope to see you there!

Usertesting.com Review by Rolf Molich

[Guest author: Rolf Molich owns and manages DialogDesign, a small Danish usability consultancy that he founded in 1993. Rolf conceived and coordinated the Comparative Usability Evaluation studies CUE-1 through CUE-8 in which almost 100 professional usability teams tested or reviewed the same applications.]

Using Remote Research to Inform Social Interaction Design (SxD)

[Guest author: Brynn Evans is a digital anthropologist, design researcher, and author who studies social interaction design and social search. She extends a thousand thanks and a bear hug to Tony Tulathimutte for help in editing this post!]

Ford’s UX Research

image by IDEO

Winter Update ’09

Give the Gift of Remote Research

Designing the Google Sites H1N1 / Emergency Templates

Web & Flow: The List

Wikipedia Usability Study, pt. 2

Summer ’09 Update

Above: pieces to the remote puzzle exercise at our Escape The Lab workshop. You got this update from Bolt | Peters, a research firm in SF, because you know us, have attended an event, or use the Ethnio mothership.

Top Ten UX Mistakes on Consumer Websites

Building a consumer website is tough, because there are so many competing demands: design, marketing, implementation and operations—the list goes on. It’s all a ridiculous mess, and so it’s easy to forget that it all boils down to the human beings who will actually be the ones buying things on your site. Here are ten mistakes we’ve noticed dozens of companies (not to mention a handful of clients) make time and again with their websites:

Escape The Lab – Aug. 26

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.

First New BP Site in Seven Years

I think it’s a badge of honor for web consulting companies to not update their public sites sometimes. It says “hey we’re busy working on your problems, we don’t have time to work on our own.” That’s certainly been the case with boltpeters.com for the last seven years; with some new home pages and design tweaks, it’s basically been the same hand-coded HTML that we put together in 2002. Well, finally, we’ve updated the site. Hope you like it. Definitely drop a line to let us know if it offends every fiber in your body, or otherwise.

The Sound of 200 Jakob Nielsens

This year at SXSW we used a unique handout to engage the audience:

And Now, Computers… for WOMEN!

Hear that? It’s the sound of the glass ceiling shattering into a million pieces—because now, for the first time in HERhisstory, Dell has made their computers accessible not only to men, but to female people!

Design, UX, and Literature

Sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling writes a piece for ACM’s Interactions magazine about the relationship between design and literature.