• Userlytics. Another recording tool that records users’ facial expressions and audio comments as well as logging their webcam video (!) and screen movements on the website, according to a text script that you give participants. Then you watch flash videos of their experience and read summaries. Free trial, $299 per 5 testers and $47 for each additional tester.

• Trymyui. Very similar to usertesting.com and userlytics  - they find users for you, rate them, and make sure they are good at recording their own thoughts while they user your site or prototype.  Free trial and then $25 per user.

• IntuitionHQ. Very similar to Usabilla, you can create tasks and record where people click on a static images. The difference is that IntuitionHQ automatically creates static images of your live site, hence making it seem like people are interacting with a live site. They are not. But that’s cool, we actually really like these kind of tools for creating cool heatmaps of where people click on static images. $9 per test with unlimited users.

• Plainframe. This is the first UX tool I’ve heard of that let’s you create an interactive IA and site structure for users to interact with and track their behavior. You quickly put your navigation structure into a clickable “white site.”¹ They record the interactions as data for analysis, and let you play them back so you can see how the user interacts with the site dynamically. In Closed Beta as of May, 2010.

———————

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 interface. Remote research opens the door to conducting research that also happens at the moment in people’s real lives when they’re performing a task of interest. This is possible because of live recruiting (the subject of Chapter 3), a method which that allows you to instantly recruit people who are right in the middle of performing the task you’re interested in, using anything from the Web to text messages. Time-awareness in research makes all the difference in user motivation: it means that users are personally invested in what they’re doing, because they’re doing it for their own reasons, not because you’re directing them to; they would have done it whether or not they were in your study.

Consider the difference between these two scenarios:

1. You’ve been recruited for some sort of computer study. The moderator shows you this online map Web app you’ve never heard of, and asks you to use it to find some random place you’ve never heard of. It’s This task is a little tricky, but since you’re sitting in this quiet lab and focusing–and they’re not going to let you can’t collect your incentive check and leave until you finish–you figure it out eventually. Not so bad.

2. You’ve been planning a family vacation for months, but you’ve been busy at work so you procrastinated a bit on the planning, and now it’s the morning of the trip and you’re trying to quickly print out directions between finishing your packing and getting your kids packed. Your coworker told you about this MapTool website you’ve never used before, so you decide to give it a shot, and it’s not so bad; that is, until you get stuck because you can’t find the freaking button to print out the directions, and you’re supposed to leave in an hour, but you can’t until you print these damn directions, but your kids are jumping up and down on their suitcases and asking you where everything is. Why can’t they just make this stupid crap easy to use? Isn’t it OBVIOUS what’s wrong with it? Haven’t they ever seen a REAL PERSON use it before???

Circumstances matter a lot in user research, and someone who’s using an interface in real life, for real purposes, is going to behave a lot differently–and give more accurate feedback–than someone who’s just being told to accomplish some little task to be able to collect an incentive check. Time-awareness is an important concept, so we’ll bring it up again throughout our Remote Research book to demonstrate how the concept relates to different aspects of the remote research process (recruiting, moderating, and so on).

(We understand that as a commercial entity, there is no legal premise of fair use for this image, so we’re clearly violating all kinds of copyrights by using it…)

Remember that diagram in Back to The Future II? Doc argues that messing with time has sent the world crashing hopelessly toward an alternate reality where things are horrible: the “Wrong 1985.” And that’s sort of what happens when you try to assign people a hypothetical task to do, at a time when they may or may not actually want to do it: you’re meddling with their time, and it’ll create results that look like the real thing but are all wrong.

When you schedule participants in advance and then ask them to pretend to care, you’re sending your research into the Wrong 1985. If you don’t want to create a time paradox–thereby ending the universe–you should do time-aware research.

‘Remote user research and testing’ is where the user and the facilitator are in different places. Remote user research can fall into two categories, ‘synchronous’ and ‘asynchronous’.

• In synchronous protocols, a facilitator interacts with a participant who is remote and leads the research activities in real time.
• In asynchronous голова болит секс protocols, observers do not have access to the participants in real time, and there is no facilitator interacting with them during data collection.

Synchronous methods are enabled by online conferencing tools. Online conferencing tools allow two or more users to share their desktop, open an audio channel, record the video of the sharing session, send files or links via a chat, and much more. Usability practitioners now have a wide choice of online conferencing tools. The most famous are Web-Ex, GoToMeeting and Yugma, but there are many tools offering similar features on the market.

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. Any number of observers can join in to watch the session as it happens. The service has integrated calling and chat, and at the end of a session, the calling and screen recording are automatically synced and rendered to a video file (either WMV or Morae’s proprietary RDG video format). You can buy either month-long or year-long licenses.

• LiveLook. A browser-based screensharing service. We like this tool because it’s pretty cheap (they charge using prepaid minutes), no download is required, and it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux–as long as you’ve got Java, it’ll work. It’s also very lightweight, so if you’re testing on a slow connection, this is one of your best bets. Drawbacks: no recording, no audio, and you have to give your users the account login to let them share their screen, which means that you’ll have to switch the password fairly often if you want to keep the account secure.

• VULab by York University. An open-source remote usability tool which, like UserVue, allows you to record video and audio on your participants’ computers as they perform tasks. They said that they’d be releasing it earlier this year, but we’re still waiting on it, so yeah.

• Skype 2.8 for Mac OS X. A new free feature of the popular internet communication client. Screenshare and video chat integrated; relatively cheap international calling, free domestic calls. Requires all participants, observers, researchers to have the Skype client installed.

Unmoderated / Automated Tools

• ClickTale Beta. Records user interaction with webpages using javascript. Provides “movies” of “in-page” behavior of users, as well as “heat maps” that visualize how people are clicking, scrolling, and entering data. Relatively cheap!

• UZ Self-Serve Edition by UserZoom. UserZoom is an international user experience research company specializing in remote testing, and they’ve now made their remote research tools available for do-it-yourself studies. It’s a completely web-based tool that allows you to manage multiple UX projects, gather clickstream data, prompt users to perform website tasks, card sorts, surveys, and recruit users from either a panel or from your own website. They also offer full-service UX testing.

• WebEffective by Keynote. Another web-based tool for conducting in-depth customer experience, branding and market research studies. Users answer survey questions and complete tasks in pop-up windows, with no download required. Keynote employs a big panel of web users (the “Keynote Research Panel”) to provide quantitative clickstream and behavioral data, survey feedback, structured task completion data. You can also intercept users from your own website.

• m-pathy Tracks mouse-movements and clicks without installing anything on the user’s computer. It’s in German, so you might need to go here to figure out what the heck their website is saying.

• RelevantView Provides card sort, surveys and questionnaires with branching logic,  clickstreams, and more. Comes in self-, partial-, and full-service flavors; full-service gets you complete study management, from designing the survey to recruiting panels of users to fulfilling incentives to analyzing data. Probably really expensive.

• ChalkMark by OptimalWorkshop. A brand-new service that allows users to complete tasks on static images, providing “heat map” feedback similar to ClickTale’s. It takes a “keep it simple” approach by limiting each task to a single click on a single image, so it’s best for relatively simple testing.

• SMT (Simple Mouse Tracking) by Luis Leiva. An open-source project, providing mouse-tracking functionality similar to that of VULabs.

• ClickHeat by LabsMedia. Another open source project, providing heatmap functionality similar to that of VULabs and ClickTale.

• Userfocus. Browser-based service with no download or install required. Uses a panel of paid researchers.

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 common or free tools and software to hack together some of the basic tools you’ll need to conduct user research. We’ll go task-by-task, and show you how to do things quickly and cheaply; we’ll even supply some of our very own tools. You are impressed.

Calling

One of the great benefits of remote testing is that you can test with users anywhere in the world, as long as they have a phone and internet connection. Unfortunately, phones still cost money to dial long distance, even using cell phones. What to do? Well, your users have internet connections, don’t they? A Skype membership is good if you’re going to be doing a lot of long-distance testing, and they also offer prepaid minutes if you’re just doing a few sessions.

Screensharing

It’s vital to be able to see your users’ screen during the session–that’s the heart of remote web research. Like we’ve said, UserVue is our preferred screensharing and recording solution, but if you’re not in the habit of doing remote studies regularly (which you should be, anyway), you might balk at the $150/month license fee. Not to worry–there’s tons of cheaper ways to screenshare. Silverback is a Mac-only  LiveLook, GoToMeeting, Windows Meeting Space (formerly NetMeeting) and Adobe Connect are all common screensharing apps, some of which support audio.

Recording

It’s good to also record the sessions so that you’re able to go back to them later and catch anything you may have missed. If you’re using UserVue, the recording is automatic, and you get a nice, beautifully synced WMV file right at the end of the session. But what if you’re just using LiveLook or GoToMeeting, which may not even support audio? Here’s where things can get a little hairy.

First, find some software that will allow you to record video and audio output on your computer; here at Bolt|Peters, we use Techsmith’s Camtasia, but free alternatives like CamStudio are also out there. Then, make sure that both the video and audio of the session are coming out of your computer; if you’re using Skype, that’s no problem; if you’re on a land phone, you’ll need to use some gadgets that will let you route the phone signal into your computer; we use a Hello Direct Pro Amplifier, which runs about $80 new, along with a JK Audio QuickTap phone tap, $60 new. Here’s a diagram illustrating how all of the pieces (phone, computer, amplifier, phone tap) fit together:

Once you’ve got both the screensharing and audio coming through your computer, fire up your recording software and go nuts.

Notetaking

Sure, you could just fire up Wordpad and type away, but if you’ve already got a nice recording of your sessions, you’re going to want to be able to track when in the video you were typing your notes out. Here’s where automatic time-stamped notes come in; it’s a little nitty-gritty, but it’s free, so check out our B|P blog post about it here!

Okay so did I just go broke or what

What would the equipment costs and expenses be, at the bare minimum, for a typical eight-user moderated study? I’m bout to spit some game:

Skype: 2.1 cents/min worldwide,  x 45 minute sessions x 8 users = $7.50, give or take (might as well get a subscription at that rate)

LiveLook: 2.5 cents/min x 45 x 8 = ~$9

CamStudio: free

Microphone headset, computer, internet connection: I was sort of hoping you already had these

Trillian for timestamped notetaking: free

TOTAL EQUIPMENT EXPENSES: ~$16.50

Hooo! Bear in mind that these are bare-bones essentials for a study; most studies will require some special doodad or another to make it work properly, and if you want really slick, hassle-free testing, well, that’ll cost you just like it always does. Still: a whole moderated remote study for the cost of a sushi dinner. Can’t hate that.

(Photo cropped from etohaholic on flickr)

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 done one of two ways: either hire a third-party recruiting agency to find users according to specific criteria, or do it with your company’s contacts, typically customer / member email lists. Thing is, recruiting agencies are quite expensive, typically running around $200 or more per recruit (not including participant incentives), and even though they’re usually quite professional in their screening practices, who knows where they’re getting their users from? On the other hand, using your own company’s contacts bears another set of issues: what if you don’t have a very big list? What if you want to do several studies–do you bombard everybody with emails repeatedly? And so on.

Now, one of the best parts about remote research is that there’s no reason you have to schedule users in advance; since you test your users while they’re at their computers anyway, you can begin a study right when they agree to participate. Here’s where live recruiting comes in: by intercepting visitors with pop-ups or forms, you can intercept them, screen them, and call them within minutes of their arrival. This is a big advantage for lots of reasons: you can bypass much of the sometimes-lengthy recruiting step, you can have greater control and transparency over the source of your users, and most importantly, you can talk to real users who came to your site because they wanted to, not because they’re getting paid to.

So now the question is, how do you recruit users live? Well, you could hack together a form that users could use to opt-in to your study, but that requires you to hand-code the form and mess with your page content. Some remote research tools and web services like UserZoom and WebEffective offer Javascript-based intercept forms as part of their service, but they require you to sign up for the whole enchilada.

What does that leave? I am so glad you asked.

Ethnio is a free web-based service we made for the express purpose of recruiting users for remote research. All you do is stick one line of Javascript near the bottom of whichever page you want to recruit from, and users who visit that page will be greeted with a DHTML pop-up screener, which they can fill out in under a minute (here’s an example). You have complete control over the questions in the screener, so you can screen users however you want. When they finish, you see their responses come up immediately in a nice little recruiting table, and you can call whomever looks like a good fit for the research.

To illustrate, we have made a stop motion movie using felt. Please enjoy it with all your heart.

(Photo credit: bryanwright5 on flickr)

Moderated Research

Moderated research has the research facilitator (a.k.a. “moderator”) speaking directly to one or more participants. Examples of moderated research include one-on-one interviews, ethnographies, and group discussions. The major benefit of moderated research is that you can gather very in-depth qualitative feedback: not just opinions, but physical behavior, tone-of-voice, facial expression, and so on. A moderated discussion also allows the moderator to probe on new subjects as they arise over the course of a conversation, which makes the research more flexible in scope and makes it possible to explore interesting ideas and usages that were unforeseen during the planning phases of the study–we like to call these “emerging topics”.

Unmoderated / Automated Research

Unmoderated research is, of course, the complement of moderated research: the moderator does not speak directly with the participant, but instead uses a web-based tool or service to gather the feedback automatically (hence the alternate “Automated research” moniker). Typically, unmoderated research is used to gather quantitative feedback from a large (i.e. hundreds or more) sample. There’s all sorts of feedback you can get this way: you can use online surveys to get open- and closed-ended (multiple choice) opinions, use flash- or Ajax-based card sorting tools to understand the way users mentally categorize things, or use clickmaps and mouse tracking to see where users are clicking on a page to accomplish a particular task.

Which Type Should I Use?

Good question! It mostly depends on the specificity and nature of the thing you’re trying to find out. Are you trying to figure out if your webpage is generally easy-to-use, or trying to root out problems you might not have foreseen, or trying to get insight into the way your product fits into people’s lives? Then you’ll want to go with moderated research, which provides you with a very rich portrait of users’ behavior and usage context. On the other hand, are you trying to decide what color a webpage should be, where to place a particular button, or how to organize a navigation bar? For those specific small-scale questions, it’s probably best to go with an unmoderated method, which will allow you to get a broad look at how a large sample addresses a particular task or question.

We’ll be posting more on specific methodologies in the future; keep an eye out!

(Photo credits: foundphotoslj and racatumba on Flickr)

WHAT YOU NEED:

• Landline phone
• Computer w/ Skype and UserVue
• Microphone headset for the computer
• Twix brand chocolate bar

LET’S DO THIS:

STEP 1:

Download and register for an account.

STEP 2: Login to Skype and start a UserVue session, like normal.

STEP 3:

Click “Call” in UserVue.

STEP 4:

Put your desk phone number in as Your Phone Number put the Skype call-in number as Participant’s Phone Number, and then click “Dial”.

STEP 5: Have the first Twix bar (there are two in a package). You’ll need the energy for the next few steps.

STEP 6:

Pick up your desk phone when it rings, and then dial “1″ when the voice prompts you to do so.

STEP 7:

Answer the call in Skype. Your desk phone will be connected to your Skype line.

STEP 8:

Mute and silence the desk phone to avoid getting an echo. You won’t be speaking through it at all.

STEP 9:

In Skype, click Add Caller, and enter the participant’s number. If the built-in international line menu doesn’t work for any reason, then try setting the country to US and then typing in 011, the desired country code, then the participant’s number. Click Call.

STEP 10:

When the user picks up, begin the session. Direct him/her through the UserVue process as usual.

A WORD OF WARNING

Though it works and you can usually talk to your users just fine, there is a drop in the sound quality of the UserVue recordings. Also, the usual caveats apply when calling internationally with Skype, i.e. it drops out sometimes. You have been warned!

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 axis labels better, and the display of methods rather than tools. Especially because a bunch of the tools from 2006 are gone now. Ah, the web.