We decided to try beaming in our favorite London-based B|P employee, Captain Ethnio (AKA Mike Towber) at our holiday lunch this year. It was awesome, and even the waitress got a kick out of talking with mike. Turns out restaurant people only look at you funny for a minute when you ask to use their booster seat for your laptop.
We’ll be presenting our crazy “simulated native environment for video games” methodology at the CHI 2008 conference in Florence, Italy. We’re excited to finally have a paper accepted at CHI, even though the cool kids don’t go anymore we are still excited. More video game projects this year will be coming, along with the first remote game experience study, everrrrr.
Actually, we only party once a year. Usually to celebrate our company anniversary, of which there have now been SIX. So you are formally invited to come celebrate six years of B|P and two years of ethnio this February 21st at our SOMA office. And also come celebrate our five year anniversary since we got really busy last year and spaced out on throwing that party. We know, we know. You can see photos of our space and some previous parties if you’re into that kind of thing, or just RSVP to the official invite below.
Recently, in addition to our always-cool remote web research, we’ve been getting off the web and into peoples’ cars. In November we had a great time riding along with drivers in different parts of California and observing their use of in-car technology. The goal is to help a car manufacturer design cockpit interfaces around the needs of real people driving. And we broadcast the whole thing to our clients live from the cars using EV-DO! Also, we’ve been getting outta people’s dreams. (Oh c’mon you love that song.)
Our new live recruiting web app, Ethnio recruits real people for all kinds of research – not just remote usability testing. As we get down with research that is more about people’s lives and less about usability, we want you to be able to make the same transition. So use ethnio for free and do better research! Also, plain old remote usability is soooo 2007. You can now recruit participants for in-person focus groups, ethnography, field research, or good old usability testing (if you have to). Sort and filter potential participants in real-time, keep track of who you’ve contacted, and edit any part of the recruiting screener on the fly. Check out the felt stop-motion movie, which breaks it on down:
Apple is going to release an ultra-portable tomorrow at MacWorld without a doubt, and I think it will be a Mac Shuffle that lets you do random computing functions every time you press the space bar. Like email all your friends or create a photo album. You can just leave it on random and not even have to worry about what computing function will be next. Genius. 