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.

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)