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blog Remote Hacks Remote Research

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!”

Need usability testing help!

Well, not exactly simple but do-able without too much effort.

Here’s what Whitney told us she needed:

  • A way to call a user in her home
  • Have that user share her desktop (Mac or PC)
  • Ask the user a few questions, and observe what the user does
  • Record both the audio and video in a single file — on a Mac
  • Take notes all the while
  • Oh, and make it low cost while you’re at it

And here’s what we told Whitney:

diagram

First, you’re going to need the follow “equipment”:

  • A laptop and extra monitor
  • A USB headset
  • A set of headphones
  • GoToMeeting (GTM)
  • iSHowU HD
  • Optional: An Fiio amp to boost the audio in the headphones

Then, setup GoToMeeting to manage the screensharing and audio. We keep a persistent meeting ID in use, which we bookmark on a landing page. This landing page is where we go to launch the meeting (as the organizer), where our clients connect, and where we direct our users. GoToMeeting doesn’t use a browser plugin; instead they use Java or ActiveX to deliver an application that runs at the OS level. It works on both Macs and PCs, although Mac users can only share their primary desktop.

These are the settings you want to use in GTM:
diagram-GTM

Basically, you want to disable a bunch of features to make it feel like it’s just you and the user in the meeting. This includes disabling the Attendee List and turning off Entry/Exit beeps. Unfortunately, GTM always announces the number of callers on the line when the user connects either by phone or mic & speakers.

Audio beeps off

Pay attention to the Audio Output setting: you have to hijack the audio from GTM and send it to iShowU HD to record. In fact, you’ll need to install that driver (Soundflower 2ch) to allow you to record audio from native applications.

GTM - audio settings

“MUTE ALL” is also this wonderful trick we learned from the good folks at GTM. If you do it the very first thing, then everyone who joins the meeting afterwards will come in muted by default! This lets you rest assured that any clients who connect late won’t be heard by the participant.

Next, use iShowU HD to record just a portion of your screen. You can use pretty standard settings for video capture, but make sure you choose the correct Audio settings: turn on ‘Audio from Applications’ to capture that audio stream from GTM that we hijacked and the Mic Input from your Headset (DSP55).

diagram-ishowu

This is what the Advanced -> Audio panel should look like:

iShowU audio settings

Finally, make sure your Mac System Preferences are set properly. This is used to make sure you can hear and communicate during the call! Set the output to your headphones, and the input to your USB headset.
diagram-Sysprefs

Here’s what the settings look like:
sys-sound

Good luck getting things set up! This actually works brilliantly — but we’re always on the lookout for new and better solutions. Let us know what you’ve found that works for you!

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blog Events

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!

Categories
blog Remote Research

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!]

What is social interaction design?

Social interaction design (SxD) is the practice of designing for person-to-person interactions mediated by a computer interface, going beyond pure usability and human-computer interaction. Even fairly solitary experiences like editing a Wikipedia page occur in a social context in which other users’ past interactions influence what new editors contribute.

“It’s the interactions among users that informs design.” —Adrian Chan

sxd sketch
[Sketch and original photo by Kai Chan Vong]

What’s a good example of an SxD problem?

conversation threadVark.com is a question-answering service that routes users’ questions to people in their extended networks who may have relevant knowledge of the topic. The original service operates through IM, Twitter, and email; more recently an iPhone app has been developed.

Let’s consider the difference between the mobile and desktop experiences of Vark.com. Both asking and answering activities work rather well in desktop email and IM. In contrast, responding on-the-go is awkward—more often than not, we’re distracted, hurried, or unable to type a coherent answer without bumping into a fire hydrant.

There’s also an assumption that the answer resides solely in our heads, when in reality, providing an answer often requires sharing links or performing a quick search—that is, we may not have the answer immediately on hand, but we know where to look.

Furthermore, successful answers often manifest as conversations on the desktop (example above), in which messages are exchanged in a back and forth manner so that the questioner can clarify her question and the answerer can refine her response. This type of sustained interaction is much harder to establish with on-the-go users.
mobile vark
Finally, iPhone prompts (right) often lack enough information about the nature of the question or your relationship to the questioner. One reason for Vark’s success is that it seeks out answers from people within an extended, personal network, naturally building trust and accountability into the system. But without knowing how you know the questioner, the iPhone app experience feels instead intrusive and disruptive, and lacks any strong social motivator to respond.

Why is remote research useful for SxD?

Traditionally, user-centered designers conducted field studies or shadowed someone to learn more about their practices. The digital space complicates matters—not only is it difficult to shadow someone, but people’s actions are so fluid and varied that it’s hard to isolate specific behaviors in order to study them.

Remote research has emerged as a great way to do needs-finding for SxD, for three reasons:

First, it’s hard to recreate interactions between two or more people in a lab setting. Last year when I was studying user interactions during social search tasks, I realized that I needed to talk to multiple people: both the user who posed the question as well as the people who provided replies. I started by observing the questioning process: how the question was phrased, which communities or individuals were questioned, the historical relationships between the parties. Then I explored the answering process: answerers’ perception of the request, why they chose to reply, if they had a history of interacting like this.

What’s interesting is that answers provided over social networking sites (like Twitter and Facebook) were mostly jokes or “nudges” to attract the user’s attention (“Hey, remember me?”). But answerers in private channels (email, IM, phone) were more serious and thoughtful because people were contacted directly and had longstanding relationships with the user (“She asked me personally, and she’s helped me in the past”).

Second, social interactions unfold over time, and their repercussions aren’t always apparent in a hour-long lab study. I recall one user in my social search study who asked a question on ping.fm. He received a prompt reply which “seemed right”, so he reported it as his “final answer”. I followed up two days later to see if he had received any other replies. In fact, the conversation thread on ping.fm had progressed, and the community had collectively concluded that the earlier reply was incorrect. This observation was only made possible by the passage of time.

Third, social interactions are best understood within the context where they occured. Not just physical location, but also past history (between the people interacting) and reasons for having the interaction. For example, my sister tweets about her new startup, but I’m not familiar with her a field and don’t have a professional relationship with her, so I seldom reply to her tweets. However, when she emails, calls, or writes on my Facebook wall, I reply instantly—even on an unfamiliar topic. If you were only studying my Twitter use, you might wrongly conclude that I’m an ingrateful sister, but this interpretation would be taken out of the full context of my relationship with her.

Thus, whether you’re designing for healthcare, fitness, games, dating, or online privacy, it’s critical to gain insight into where, when, and why people to act the way they do. Community engagement through social media will differ substantially depending on people’s personalities, reputation, location, local culture and rules, nature of their relationships, and history of the community. Remote research methods—like experience sampling, remote observations, and critical incident surveys—are great tools for understanding the many facets of social behavior, and suggest productive avenues for pursuing SxD.

Additional resources:
Social interaction design salon (group blog)
Digital ethnography for social interaction design (slide show)


Categories
blog Remote Research

Give the Gift of Remote Research

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In the past few weeks, remote user research has been touted as a solution to climate change and a swine flu containment strategy—but did you know that it also makes an amazing holiday gift?

We’re giving 15% off in December on the following services:

  • Live moderated remote research: We recruit your website’s visitors using Ethnio and call them right away to conduct a live, 40-minute behavioral research study. You get to watch and participate while it all happens. Great for formative design research, usability research, and design validation!
  • Automated research: capture the behavior of hundreds of users on specially-designed tasks to get answers to specific usability questions.
  • Expert design evaluation: After nearly 10 years and over 200 user research projects, we can evaluate your product for major and minor design and interaction issues.
  • Remote research training: Want to learn how to recruit users live from your website, use screen sharing tools, and record and edit remote research sessions? We’ll train you.
  • Weird, insane user research projects: Got a user research project that you have no idea how to approach? We’re experts at finding new ways to research stuff—check out our automotive and video game research projects for examples of the crazy methods we’ve come up with.

Imagine the look on your design team’s collective face as they get answers to their toughest interaction design problems. I mean, what else were you going to get them, a leopard-print Snuggie? A Chia Obama?

To get started, fill out the form below, and we’ll get back to you, usually in less than a day!

(Photo via H Dickens on Flickr)

Categories
blog Events

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.

Date: Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Time: 9am – 4:30pm. Sign-in starts at 8:30am, drinks and schmoozing afterwards
Place: Bolt | Peters User Experience at 60 Rausch St., unit 102, San Francisco, CA
More Info: http://escapethelab.com
Cost: $399. Register now (space very limited). 1/2 off for students and underemployed.
By: Bolt | Peters User Experience, the makers of Ethnio

Bolt | Peters Instructors

Cyd Harrell, Director of Research
Frances James, Lead UX Researcher
Nate Bolt, CEO

Who Should Attend?

Researchers, designers, and product managers who want to watch real people use technology from the comfort of their own desks. (While saving travel costs and the planet!)

What We’ll Cover

  • Strengths and weaknesses of remote ux research
  • Study design & scripting
  • Participant recruiting options
  • Moderating in the remote environment
  • Tools for screen sharing, recording, and communication
  • What can go wrong and what to do about it

What You’ll Take Home

  • A Trapper Keeper full of script outlines, consent forms, and software comparisons
  • A starter account for Ethnio online recruiting
  • A coupon for 20% off our forthcoming book, Remote Research
  • 15% discount on all Rosenfeld Media books
  • A newfound confidence in conducting your own remote research!

Register now at:

http://escapethelab.com/register.html (Space is superduper limited.)
Hope to see you there!

Bolt | Peters User Experience

Categories
blog ethnio Live Recruiting

Ethnio gets shouted out

The fine folks at Conversion Rate Experts have just posted a blog entry about web tools that help you learn why users abandon your site, and both B|P and Ethnio get shout-outs:

Ideally you want to interview your visitors who aren’t customers yet. That’s where Ethnio comes to the rescue…

Ethnio provides an easy way of adding a pop-up survey to your website, which asks your visitors if they’d like to participate in a usability test. You can customize the survey, so you can ask them details about themselves, such as why they visited your site and whether this is their first visit.

This is all about the pragmatic side of remote research: naturally, getting to know your users is critical for understanding why they’re leaving your site. Using a tool like Ethnio helps ensure that the people you’re talking to actually represent your users. Need a refresher course on live recruiting? I got your Ethnio right here, hombre.

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Best Practices blog Moderator Strategies Remote Research

Remote is Better, pt. 1: Getting Clients’ Hands Dirty

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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Best Practices blog Remote Research

HOW-TO Use UserVue Internationally

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.

WHAT YOU NEED:

  • Desk phone
  • Computer w/ Skype and UserVue
  • Microphone headset for the computer
  • Moderator
  • Twix brand chocolate bar

LET’S DO THIS:

STEP 1:

Download and register for an account.

STEP 2: Login to Skype and start a UserVue session, like normal.




STEP 3:

Click “Call” in UserVue.


STEP 4:

Put your desk phone number in as Your Phone Number put the Skype call-in number as Participant’s Phone Number, and then click “Dial”.



STEP 5: Have the first Twix bar (there are two to a package). You’ll need the energy for the next few steps.


STEP 6:

Pick up your desk phone when it rings, and then dial “1” when the cold mechanical voice prompts you.

STEP 7:

Answer the call in Skype. Your desk phone will be connected to your Skype line.

STEP 8:

Mute and silence the desk phone. You won’t be speaking through it at all.

STEP 9:

In Skype, click Add Caller, and enter the participant’s number. If the built-in nternational line menu doesn’t work for any reason, then try setting the country to US and then typing in 011, the desired country code, then the participant’s number. Click Call.

STEP 10:

When the user picks up, you win. Direct him/her through the UserVue process like normal.

STEP 11:

Consume the second Twix bar–you’ve earned it. (There should be no more Twix bars. If you still have a Twix bar remaining by the end of this study, then you did it wrong, and the police will already be on their way to your house.)

(OR JAIL)

A WORD OF WARNING

Though it works and you can usually talk to your users just fine, there is a drop in the sound quality of the UserVue recordings. Also, the usual caveats apply when calling internationally with Skype, i.e. it drops out sometimes. You have been warned.

Categories
blog Live Recruiting

Peering into the Users’ Technological Ecosystem

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.