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Thanks to everyone that came out for drinks and UX research discussions at User Research Friday a few months ago here at B|P! Along with KDA Research and Uzanto, we put on this little conference and had a wild turn-out, with talks from folks including Ravit Lichetenberg from HP, Wendy Castleman from Intuit, Indi Young, Lane Becker / Todd Wilkens from Adaptive Path, and many others. We’ve got some videos and notes of the sessions up onuserresearchfriday.com which has a sign up to hear about the next one. We’ll probably make advanced UX research the focus of the next event, since many fine citizens let us know they were familiar with the broad concepts we discussed. So bring your smarty pants next time, because it’s gonna get complicated. And crunk.

A big thanks to those that used the Ethnio alpha and beta over the last year, and participated in our Ethnio usability testing! We have more Ethnio news coming soon, and B|P is proud to announce three products as part of the Ethnio remote usability family:

• Live Recruiting –  Recruit participants for usability studies and market research directly off your web site or web application. Recruiting this way ensures getting actual site visitors that care about completing a task on the site or application to participate in the study.

• Screen Sharing – Ethnio Screen Sharing allows you to quickly have your participant share their desktop so you can watch them interact with your web site or application while they are in their native task environment (home, office…tree house) during the study.

• Recording Pro – In addition to recruiting and screen sharing, Recording Pro has built in conference calling and Flash video recording of the participant’s screen and audio from the session, and allows up to 10 observers to join the session as well. They call in to an 800 number, can view the screen, and are automatically muted. We think it’s pretty cool.

To support the development of Ethnio, and the continued demand for remote usability studies, we have some new folks that have joined the team since our last update. Mike Towber is the fourth member here at B|P to graduate from UC San Diego’s Distributed Cognition HCI program. Also joining the team is Lead Software Architect Julian Wixson. Julian brings 15 years of professional programming experience to the development of Ethnio. Kate Nartker now plays the role of Office Superstar, handles all our accounting, and keeps the office and all of us in line. You can see the whole team here.

We’re pleased to announce that we’re hiring for two positions, a User Experience Research Specialist, and a User Research Intern! Since so many people are hiring during these Boom #2 days, you are probably sick of seeing these requests, and we can only hope that your frustration with the frequency of large-scale technology industry job market fluctuations will not prevent you from sending us someone that might be a good fit!

Whew! From Vancouver to Montreal to Broomfield, CO, we enjoyed meeting lots of you on our recent conference tour. You can get flickr’d out with photos of folks hanging at ourbooth at CHI or UPA here. Thanks to all those who stopped by and kicked it. It was great to hear about your recent remote research and experience with Ethnio.

B|P has made our remote usability study pricing public, with an interactive spreadsheet. You just enter in how many users you might like in a study, choose which deliverables you’d like, and it will give you a price range. Consulting firms hate to make their pricing public, but we think it makes things just a little easier.To see pricing, visit our remote usability testing page, and click on B|P Cost Estimator on the right.

Our favorite usability comic site, OK-Cancel, is featuring a guide to remote usability testing written by Nate. It will definitely not make sense to anyone who is not involved with usability in some fashion. It will make even less sense if you have not had your soul sucked away by the computer industry and are leading a happy healthy life outside of the interwebs. More power to you, friend.

For all you multi-channel retailers, this month’s Multichannel Merchant has an article,  ‘It’s The User, Stupid’ on how usability can “quickly gel differing opinions,” from your business stakeholders, designers, and developers. They quote Nate like crazy, which is always dangerous.

Come say hello to Bolt | Peters and the get fresh crew at Adaptive Path’s User Experience Week this year, August 14-17, in Washington DC, where Nate will be presenting ‘Playing Games and Cursing: The Truth About Remote User Research’ with Rashmi Sinha. Nate and Rashmi will be discussing Ethnio andMindCanvas,  Rashmi’s saucy Game-like Elicitation Methods (GEMs) research web service. Together they’ll  show how interface research that is typically done in a lab can be done remotely, and will help people curse at software and web sites less, by playing games and exhibiting more natural behavior.

Blog we created with explanations of the different remote usability methods and links to the latest tools and methods. 

Remote Usability Web Site »

Dolby asked B|P to conduct usability research as part of an effort to completely re-design the Dolby website. Based on the findings from the first round of research that B|P conducted, Dolby was able to improve key areas of the site in the redesign, including site navigation, content structure and screen flow. The second phase was completed in November measuring usability improvements of the re-designed site compared to the previous one.

Techinsurance and B|P share the belief that improved user experience leads directly to the success of online products in the marketplace. This mutual understanding was so strong that both parties committed to an agreement structured around payment as a percentage of improved conversion rates for contractedge.com, a legal software web site. Techinsurance implemented the B|P usability recommendations for contractedge.com, and as a result saw a conversion rate increase of 103%!
Find out how you can structure a similar relationship with B|P.

To meet growing customer demand, we have made three new hires in 2004. Senior Information Architect Benjamin Lerch brings to B|P eight years of user interface research and design experience; Information Architect Brian Enright is the third graduate of UC San Diego’s Distributed Cognition HCI program to join B|P. Jocelyn Wine is our new office manager handling the ever-increasing load of administrative tasks. Thank you Jocelyn!

We’ve moved our satellite office! It’s now at 854 Folsom Street in San Francisco — right down the block from Yerba Buena Gardens and MOMA. We now have four permanent remote usability testing stations here, which can be used concurrently to test up to 20 users per day, as well as big leather couches and a full bar. Come visit! Of course, we still have our main office at One Market Street in San Francisco where we conduct our lab-based usability test sessions.

Bolt | Peters would like to wish you happy holidays and a wonderful new year. We are wrapping up the year here with a new office, three new team members, and the Alpha release of our new remote usability testing software! We would love to hear what you’ve been up to, so drop us a line and let us know

Want to conduct your own remote usability study? We walk you through every step of the research, from recruiting to observation.

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