A couple weeks ago, we were doing research onsite at a client’s office. We had an audience of about 10 and we were live recruiting. It was a high traffic site and we were catching most users within 5 minutes. The interviews were good, but since the focus was on form filling and error message handling, we decided nothing could replace seeing users encounter the pages for the very first time.
Of course by now everyone knows what we mean by “Live Recruits†– they’re usability recruits that we snag when they’re in the midst of visiting the website we’re testing. It’s most often done through mini-surveys on a DHTML overlay (not a popup!). If someone fills out our survey and they’re a match for our target quotas, they’re contacted and interviewed immediately. There’s no scheduling participants and no lag time between the time when a participant is on a site and when they’re interviewed. We talk to them about the tasks they were already doing: no make believe required. It’s the closest way we’ve figured out to observing users interact with a design in their real life circumstances, without artificial barriers of the lab.
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In this business we like to say that the person with the freshest eyes has a perspective that is the least tainted. So as the new kid at Bolt | Peters, I thought I’d talk about my take on this whole remote usability thing.
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