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Mobile Research

Understand mobile interface experience through real world observation.

Like all of our native environment research, the B|P mobile research model is based on the idea that to learn about a common-but-complex activity like interacting with a device and the physical around you at the same time, you’ve got to gear up, get out in the field with real people, and watch them do real things on their phones or tablets. With a video camera, a laptop, and a go-anywhere internet connection, we follow along with users as they go about their daily routines, while our moderator listens, watches, and talks to the driver. We broadcast the whole process live over the web to our observers, so they can be right there with us.

More than an interview, more than observing from a distance, our ethnographic research gives you the whole story: we get deep into people’s lives to uncover how people use mobile interfaces, the ways they adapt to the logistic and technological limitations of those interactions, and how the interfaces perform.

The Method

We can also conduct mobile research from a lab or our office, and stream the contents of the user’s screen, as well as their face and body language to you and your team anywhere in the world. We also live in-person viewing if having your team in one place for this kind of research is helpful.

Live Webcasts and Moderator Chat


In addition to being broadcast live over the web with our wireless mobile connection, the entire process is also filmed in high-definition video, which can be viewed later at any point. Clients can also communicate with the moderator in real-time over IM, in case they notice anything they want to learn more about.

Visualizing the Data

After the research is all done, we bring it all together – notes, videos, and pictures – in a way thats easy for our clients to visualize. All of the photos are fully tagged to make it easy to search, for example, for all participants using cell phones while they drive. The moderator’s notes are also tagged and color-coded by issue and made available in a spreadsheet. Highlight videos are created to bring all the interesting moments to surface – though of course, you can also watch the recordings in their entirety, whenever you want.