———————

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.

Date: Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
Time: 9am – 4:30pm. Sign-in starts at 8:30am, drinks and schmoozing afterwards
Place: Bolt | Peters User Experience at 60 Rausch St., unit 102, San Francisco, CA
More Info: http://escapethelab.com
Cost: $399. Register now (space very limited). 1/2 off for students and underemployed.
By: Bolt | Peters User Experience, the makers of Ethnio

Bolt | Peters Instructors

Cyd Harrell, Director of Research
Frances James, Lead UX Researcher
Nate Bolt, CEO

Who Should Attend?

Researchers, designers, and product managers who want to watch real people use technology from the comfort of their own desks. (While saving travel costs and the planet!)

What We’ll Cover

• Strengths and weaknesses of remote ux research
• Study design & scripting
• Participant recruiting options
• Moderating in the remote environment
• Tools for screen sharing, recording, and communication
• What can go wrong and what to do about it

What You’ll Take Home

• A Trapper Keeper full of script outlines, consent forms, and software comparisons
• A starter account for Ethnio online recruiting
• A coupon for 20% off our forthcoming book, Remote Research
• 15% discount on all Rosenfeld Media books
• A newfound confidence in conducting your own remote research!

Register now at:

http://escapethelab.com/register.html (Space is superduper limited.)
Hope to see you there!

Bolt | Peters User Experience

From the book publisher’s website:

Remote user research describes any research method that allows you to observe, interview, or get feedback from users while they’re at a distance, in their “native environment” (at their desk, in their home or office) doing their own tasks. Remote studies allow you to recruit quickly, cheaply, and immediately, and give you the opportunity to observe users as they behave naturally in their own environment, on their own time. Our book will teach you how to design and conduct remote research studies, top-to-bottom, with little more than a phone and a laptop.

Be sure to follow the Remote Research book blog to get updates, read chapter excerpts, and even contribute your own suggestions and requests for the book; it’s still in progress, so we want to hear your comments!

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)