We have an immediate opening for an intern at our acclaimed UX and design research team (in the New York office at Studiomates!).
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B|P X3 at SXSW12
Most user researchers feel they get the best results if they recruit and schedule study participants themselves. We agree. There’s an art to it, which makes it hard to outsource, but it takes a lot of time. An awful lot. Take a minute and think about how many hours you or the people you work with on user research spent on recruiting and scheduling last year. And if you’re conducting guerilla-style research with friends and family or any kind of participants, then we love what you’re doing, but this is for the projects that have more specific criteria and typically require an agency or detailed recruiting effort.
If you’re doing that, please click through for more discussion and a poll.
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UX Poetry
Congratulations. You may have just clicked on our first-ever (maybe the first ever) UX poem. What do you think? I guess I’m outing myself as a poet too. Hi! The BP homepage was a challenge from Nate to write about our work, hopefully the first of many.
By the way, you can see more of my non-UX-related work at http://www.cydharrell.com if you’re interested. And if you’ve never seen the Joyce Kilmer poem on which this is based, it’s here.
—–
UX Poem
I think that I shall never see
a website lovely as a tree
diagram—
a diagram that in its lines
elucidates the way one finds
most any leaf; assuming though
that “one” is not just anyone
(not me, not you—some more abstract
persona that we all can act
as, as we drive agreement
on the structure and IA,
with proper reference to requirements
and use cases of course.)
But I’m pretty sure I’ll never see
a user navigate a tree
like a cat or a persona.
All those things in the forest
between us and home?
They’re big blurs of green to fools like me
not made by god for climbing trees.
–Cyd Harrell, 2009
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“Tough Economic Times” – the Quiz!
Remember June 2000? Over in Silicon Valley, there seemed to be a sort of nervous-but-not-panicked vibe in the air: “Everyone else’s company is going to hell, but we seem to be doing alright.” Then the internet bubble burst and everyone shed fat tears of milk!
So now it’s December 2008, and in our experience, people seem to be saying the same things: “Things are sucky, but we’re okay.” We were wondering just how true that was, so we made this quick, three-question quiz to find out! Take it and see for yourself!
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BayCHI and UX Magazine
On Aug. 12th 2008, literally dozens of BayCHI attendees fled the packed PARC conference hall after the sheer exuberance of Nate Bolt’s talk, “in the moment: research about life not just interfaces,” brought down the roof, which was on fire. Nobody was permanently harmed, but nearly half in attendance remain severely rocked. On top of that, User Experience Magazine, which I’m sure you read “just for the articles”, has published our article on client participation in remote research. That is a quick follow up to CHI accepting Tony and Nate’s paper, “Science of Fun: One-to-Many Moderating” that we used for Spore testing. This goes to show that enough talent, hard work, insight, and blackmail will get you published just about anywhere.
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Vote for B|P @ SXSW
Nate will also be participating on a panel about user research at SXSW this year – if you vote that is. So you know what would super help us out? If you went ahead and voted for the aforementioned panel. You have to make a quick annoying account (sorry), but please remember that not voting for our panel is like voting for some other, more boring panel that nobody wants to sit through.
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Spore Research: Oh Snap That Was Us
When Will Wright and EA dropped Spore, their newest and most ambitious video game to date, they contacted B|P to study players’ experience and see if they were having fun. So we came up with SNERD, a game research methodology that simulates a native gaming environment, uses touch screens to gather input, broadcasts 18 live video streams, and took the power down for our entire block. On the reals, we researched 59 individual gamers playing 393 hours over 13 months to help the Spore team hone the player experience. That’s a whole lot of players swearing, and it’s all in the outtakes video.
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Client Project Pages are Moved
Your project files and videos have been moved over to http://bpluv.com now, and should you have any problems whatsoever accessing those files please drop us a line or call 415.282.7839.
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Remote Tasting from London
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.
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Whutup Italy
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.
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B|P Parties All the Time
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.
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Get into My Car
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.)
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The New Ethnio. It’s Free.
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:
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UXI Chicago
I’m hitting up Adaptive Path’s UX Intensive workshop in Chicago this week, and helping them out as the event photographer and box mover. There has been some dope discussions of research methods today by Todd Wilkens.
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A Very Funny Thing
Achewood, an internet comic where independently wealthy cats write advice columns and robots lie, comments astutely on the usability profession:
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New Team Members
To support the growth of our research service business and the success of Ethnio, we have some new folks that have joined the team in the past couple of months. Cyd Harrell brings nine years of experience in UX to our team as our new Director of UX Research. Before joining the team, Cyd was a director at Charles Schwab for their representative facing financial service application. That’s RFFSA if you want to get technical.
Also joining the team is Bryan Tsao. Bryan is the 5th graduate of the UCSD HCI program in 5 years to join our team. In addition to helping B|P out with user research and the development of Ethnio, Bryan is getting his masters at from UC Berkeley in the new iSchool (Information Management and Systems). Welcome Cyd and Bryan! Now if you meet people from the iSchool at CAL, don’t say “so you go to iSchool?,” because it sounds like you are asking if they go to high school, and that’s just awkward.
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Remote Dog Treats
We are proud to announce that B|P will be leveraging its experience in remote research to expand into Remote Robotic Dog Treat Dispensers. Working with Lego, or actually, working with the toy robot kit we bought from Lego, Nate and Mike built this little robotic arm that receives IM’s with the word “treat” and then dispenses a small treat to the office dog.
You’ll soon be able to IM the wild pooch a treat and watch it on our office webcam. The venerable Make zine picked it up, and you can check out the video below! We know what you’re thinking, and no, it’s not clear to anyone at the office why we built this, either.
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Just a Little Help, Please
It’s wild how many of our Ethnio customers have been asking for just a little bit of testing assistance for their remote research projects. So many of you are expert practitioners real physical world research, and just need a little assistance in conducting remote research. Whether it’s study design, training, moderating a couple users, helping combine moderated and automated remote methods, using MindCanvas or RelevantView, or just making sure your remote study goes smoothly, we’re down to help. B|P can ensure that the executive team watching your first remote study will denounce corporate social hierarchy and just give you a hug. Unless you don’t want a hug from your executive team, in which case we’ll make sure you get a nice email.
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Ethnio Goes International
B|P is excited to announce that international dialing and call recording is now included free-of-charge with all Ethnio licenses. But what is Ethnio anyway? It’s the world’s first remote usability web application that allows you to watch and record anyone using a computer in the world with the express purpose of making their computer easier to use. Now you can expand your user research to international users! No need to fly to Japan and France to conduct usability studies unless you’re craving sushi or croissants on the corporate dime. Also, some of the latest organizations that have started using Ethnio are Adobe, CareerBuilder, and HP. They’re off and running with both assisted studies, where our practitioners help with set-up, moderating, or live recruiting, and doing all the remote research on their own.
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Genentech Hearts B|P
We completed a rapid remote usability study for Genentech recently for their internal time-reporting tool, and got them up and running with Ethnio. Rather than run off at the mouth about how much we helped them, we’ll just pass along their words:
“The B|P project was a total success. Their research for Genentech actually elevated the importance of usability to the executive level here. It’s now a focus for our entire I.T. organization. The old time-reporting system flooded our Service Desk with support calls the day it launched. The new application launch barely made a ripple. ”
sarah murgel
manager, user experience & interface design, corporate information technology — genentech
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User Research Friday Recap
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.
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Ethnio Triple Threat
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.
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New Team Members
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.
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B|P is Hiring!
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!