My new homegirl Ellen Beldner wrote this nice summary of her experience conducting recent remote user testing. In this article she goes so far as to agree with me about facial expressions in research. Rock on, Ellen, rock on.
Writing Archive
Time-Aware Research
An excerpt from our forthcoming Remote Research book, out soon by Rosenfeld Media! ——————— The soul of remote research is that it lets you conduct what we call Time-Aware Research. By now UX researchers are familiar with the importance of understanding the usage context of an interface–the physical environment where people are normally using an [...]
Remote Research Software and Web Apps
The following is a list of software resources and web apps which can be used for various types of remote research, both moderated and unmoderated/automated. Moderated Tools UserVue by TechSmith. This is our trusty stand-by for moderated one-on-one interviews. Enables you to view a participant’s screen in real-time while talking to them on the phone. [...]
Build Your Own (Cheap) Moderated Testing Setup
While there are plenty of tools floating around to help you conduct one-on-one moderated interviews, if you’re just getting started with remote research, you may not want to invest in a ton of expensive software or subscription-based web services right off the bat. So let us show you a few handy ways to use more [...]
Live Recruiting for Remote Research
In an article for Boxes and Arrows, Paul Nuschke lists five phases of a usability study: Step 1: Sales & Kickoff Step 2: Recruitment Step 3: Preparation Step 4: Testing Step 5: Analysis & Reporting This post is about that second step, where you’re recruiting users to participate in your study. Traditionally this has been [...]
The Two Basic Types of Remote Testing
In general, remote user research simply describes any research where the moderator and the research participants are physically separated. However, there are lots of different varieties of remote user research, and each has its own strengths, weaknesses, and circumstances in which they’re most effective. Some types allow you to test many people at once, while [...]
HOW-TO Use UserVue Internationally
UserVue has long been our tool of choice for moderated remote user research, but we’ve always kind of hated that we couldn’t use it internationally — instead, we like using LiveLook or GoToMeeting along with a phone tap and screen recorder (Camtasia or CamStudio). But if you’re going to take a stab at using UserVue [...]
Choosing a Remote User Experience Research Tool
Rashmi Sinha and I created this graph of different UX research methods for User Experience Week in D.C. in 2006, and posted to remoteusability.com in 2007. This week, Christian Rohrers posted a similar yet more detailed graph of all user experience research methods on Alert Box. They are pretty similar, but I actually like his [...]