Most user researchers feel they get the best results if they recruit and schedule study participants themselves. We agree. There’s an art to it, which makes it hard to outsource, but it takes a lot of time. An awful lot. Take a minute and think about how many hours you or the people you work with on user research spent on recruiting and scheduling last year. And if you’re conducting guerilla-style research with friends and family or any kind of participants, then we love what you’re doing, but this is for the projects that have more specific criteria and typically require an agency or detailed recruiting effort.
If you’re doing that, please click through for more discussion and a poll.
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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!”
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[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.]
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[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!]
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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?
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We wanted a way to include our B|P homie Mike in our holiday lunch, but he works from London now, and flying him out just for lunch seemed a tad much. So instead, we decided to bring him with us remotely. All we needed was one laptop with a big-ass battery, one EVDO revA card, two skype accounts w/ the new MPEG4 video codec, one booster to place at his chair so the laptop would be at table level, and one friendly waitress at the Slow Club, in San Francisco.
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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.
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