Winter Update ’09

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.

Inauguration Edition

We dedicate this edition of our newsletter to the upcoming inauguration of Barack Obama. Our own Kate Nartker commemorates the occasion with a felt Obama logo:

B|P is The Truth

Just a reminder: in addition to publishing cute newsletters, we also do kick-ass UX work that settles arguments, gets design priorities straight, dramatically increases conversion, and gives you an excuse to eat popcorn and Junior Mints in the office while watching sessions. You should totally call us.

No Such Thing as a Free Ethnio

We’re finally starting to charge money for Ethnio live recruiting. Lots more details in the full blog post, available right down here:

User Experience Blitz

No time or budget to put on a full-scale user research project in this crap-fiesta of an economic downturn? No problem! We can intercept real-life customers, cut through the bullsh*t, and help with concrete design changes based on behavioral research – all in a casual, one-day study.with serious results.

Stop… Panel Time. SXSW ’09.

Thanks to your votes, our panel was picked! Nate‘s on it, so go to SXSW this year and heckle him. There should be quite a lively debate with Mark Trammell from Digg, Andy Budd from Clearleft, Juliette Melton from Lumos Labs, and Carla Borsoi from Ask.com.

Boxes and Arrows Article

If you’re curious about how B|P applied our user experience focus and HCI principles to the Spore player research project, then our upcoming article inBoxes and Arrows will be for you—watch for it early next week.

B|P Down 30%, Sales Cycle Tripled!

That’s right: we said it. Bolt | Peters biz is down by about 30% from this time last year, and setting projects up is taking about three times as long. Now, since we showed you ours, will you show us yours? Take our anonymous mini-survey, ‘cuz we’re all dying to get a better idea of just what the state of the tech industry is like lately. If you just want to cheat and see what everybody else is saying, you can do that, but deep down in your heart you’ll know you peeked.

Seven Years. One Party.

If you’ll be around San Francisco on Thursday, February 26th, mark your calendar for our seven-year birthday party! Dig the invite on Upcoming orFacebook. There will be a full(-ish) bar, tasty snacks, and a local soul/jazz quartet fronted by the illmatic Joe Bagale.

User Research Friday Goes Legit

Holy moly! We were floored by the amount of enthusiasm for URF 2008. Nearly 200 people joined us at the Mighty Gallery & Bar in San Francisco to enjoy drinks, bacon-flavored chocolates, and a stellar line-up of speakers. The audience twittered, took pictures, shmoozed, and generally had a great time —Cooper Journal and Core77 wrote up their experiences. It was such a success that we’re planning an ’09 edition, as well as possibly another one in Portland. If you have a great suggestion for a topic or presenter, email us!

Remote Research: The Book

Finally, everybody can stop chattering at parties about the lack of deep, knowledgeable books about remote research methods. What, that’s never happened to you? Well, we’re writing one anyway. Rosenfeld Media has signed Nate & Tony (not pictured below, we swear) to co-author the book, which is due out in late 2009. Check the Rosenfeld site for more info.

BayCHI and UX Magazine

On Aug. 12th 2008, literally dozens of BayCHI attendees fled the packed PARC conference hall after the sheer exuberance of Nate Bolt’s talk, “in the moment: research about life not just interfaces,” brought down the roof, which was on fire. Nobody was permanently harmed, but nearly half in attendance remain severely rocked. On top of that, User Experience Magazine, which I’m sure you read “just for the articles”, has published our article on client participation in remote research. That is a quick follow up to CHI accepting Tony and Nate’s paper, “Science of Fun: One-to-Many Moderating” that we used for Spore testing. This goes to show that enough talent, hard work, insight, and blackmail will get you published just about anywhere.

Vote for B|P @ SXSW

Nate will also be participating on a panel about user research at SXSW this year – if you vote that is. So you know what would super help us out? If you went ahead and voted for the aforementioned panel. You have to make a quick annoying account (sorry), but please remember that not voting for our panel is like voting for some other, more boring panel that nobody wants to sit through.

The Remote Challenge

Are you still testing users in a lab? Sign up for your first remote study with B|P, and if you don’t like it better than the lab, we’ll give you your money back – seriously. How serious, you ask? Up to $30k serious. (Some restrictions apply, of course, but it’s on the honor system, so go here to take the challenge.)

Ethnio Goes Multi-platinum

Since we made Ethnio free and awesome, there have been over 6 million people who have seen an Ethnio recruiting screener, 250,000 people who have filled one out, and over 20 requests per second to the ol’ Ethnio servers. That is so holy crap. Big thanks to everyone who has used it over the years, and sorry for the down time and time-outs and time-warps. We learned it from Twitter (burn!). With some help from a few local Rails geniuses, we’ll be eliminating the downtime and dishing out more of the raw recruiting vengeance you can’t help but love.
Dig on Ethnio

Spore Research: Oh Snap That Was Us

When Will Wright and EA dropped Spore, their newest and most ambitious video game to date, they contacted B|P to study players’ experience and see if they were having fun. So we came up with SNERD, a game research methodology that simulates a native gaming environment, uses touch screens to gather input, broadcasts 18 live video streams, and took the power down for our entire block. On the reals, we researched 59 individual gamers playing 393 hours over 13 months to help the Spore team hone the player experience. That’s a whole lot of players swearing, and it’s all in the outtakes video.