• 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 NEOUPA event was great.  Lots of interest, lots of enthusiasm.  We had about 45 people there, even though it was our first event ever in Akron.  Usually, we’re in Cleveland and have a crowd of regulars that didn’t make the trip south.

And we got a few people a little mad because they thought we were dissing usability labs (which we weren’t doing) but they were threatened.  Aaron and I have both worked in several different labs over the years and we’ll continue to do in-person studies, but are big proponents of remotely moderated studies too.  I guess we made remote testing sound too good for their liking. Oh well.

As we put on our own remote usability training event (Escape The Lab and User Research Friday), we’ve also found that people accustomed to in-person lab methods can be skeptical about remote studies, often citing the inability to see the users’ facial expressions (an issue we address in our book, and also discussed here). We like riling the lab testing hardliners, even though there’s of course nothing strictly wrong with lab testing—lively debate about the pros / cons of each method is a step in the right direction.

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

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.