Tag: Live Recruiting

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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 Deep Thoughts Moderator Strategies

Stop Bullshit Research in Five Easy Steps

Anyone in the UX field who’s worked for a few companies will recognize a type of moderated research that gives off a reek of inauthenticity. Tell me if this sounds familiar: one moderator and six users sit around a table in a converted meeting room. The moderator tells the users, each of whom have been prescheduled and screened through a recruiting agency, to go to a prototype website and pretend they’re looking for a 20 GB googlydooter, or whatever. The users go into their cubicles, where the prototype is brought up on six identical, factory-default computers. Some of the users finish in five minutes, some don’t finish at all, but everyone gets exactly fifteen minutes to finish their task. (The early finishers drum their fingers in boredom, waiting for the moderator to call time.) Finally, the moderator brings up a projection of the prototype, and asks the users to voice their opinions, one-at-a-time, keeping their responses brief, to give everyone time to speak. The process lasts about 1-2 hours, making everyone kind of tired. The participants are paid their incentives, and the moderator drives home, wiping bitter tears from his eyes as he pulls into his driveway.

How could that possibly have been useful? he thinks to himself. What has my life come to?

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blog Live Recruiting

When Live Really Means Live

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.

So for the last few, we decided to go really, really live. We wouldn’t call a user more than 30 seconds after they filled out the screener, and instead of scrolling back up the list, we’d sit and wait for a qualified user to come in, each time.

We felt a little funny sitting there not doing anything for minutes at a time…and we found out a lot about our clients’ weekends, kids, and hobbies as we all sat watching the response screen, ready to pounce (actually, that was fun). But the quality of the truly live intercept interviews was unparalleled. Users stumbled, reacted to minor issues, and hardly ever said “I would think this” or “I would do that.” Because they were really doing it, right then.

A great reminder about why we do things this way, and how it’s worth it to wait to catch someone “really” live.

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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.

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