Dedications
Nate: To my family, friends, colleagues, teachers, and loved ones
Thanks for listening to me ramble on about this field for solong.
Tony: To Mike Hardnett and Renee Zalles
How to Use This Book
Who Should Read This Book?
This book is about remote user research, which is a method of using Internet tools and services to conduct user research with participants who are in another location. (User research, in turn, is the field of studying how people interact with technology.)
Are you a user experience/human-computer interaction practitioner? If so, you’re totally gonna love this book, especially if you’ve ever been frustrated with current in-person or lab methods of user research for any of the several reasons we describe in Chapter 1. If you’re a software or Web developer looking for insights into your own (or your competitors’) designs, or an interaction designer or consultant, you’ll probably dig this book too.
Is there anyone this book isn’t for? You don’t need to be a veteran user-experience researcher to understand what we talk about in this book, although we do focus mostly on the “remote” aspects of remote research. You won’t find much advice on how to conduct user research in general—for that, a great place to start is Mike Kuniavsky’s Observing the User Experience.
What’s in This Book?
Remote Research is a how-to book about remote research methods: using a phone and the Internet to conduct user experience research from a distance.
In the Introduction and Chapter 1, you’ll get an overview of what remote research is all about, when you should and shouldn’t use remote methods, and the two main kinds of remote research studies: moderated and automated.
In Chapters 2 through 5, you’ll learn how to set up, recruit, and conduct a basic remote moderated study. We describe a method called “live recruiting,” which involves intercepting visitors to your own Web site to participate in your studies immediately. We also discuss the privacy and consent issues around recruiting, session recording, and remote participation.
In Chapter 6 we describe various automated research methods, illustrating them with case studies.
Chapter 7 provides advice about how to analyze and report on the findings of remote research studies.
Chapter 8 is a short guide to tools and services you can use to fill the many technological needs of remote research, including screen sharing applications, recording software, and several online automated research Web apps.
Chapter 9 illustrates how many of the basic principles described earlier in the book can be adapted and applied to special testing circumstances, where normal remote testing methods aren’t possible or desirable.
Chapter 10 is a review of the major challenges you’ll face when planning, conducting, and presenting a remote research study.
What Comes with This Book?
This book comes with two companion Web sites. The first is the Remote Research page
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We’ve also made the book’s diagrams, screenshots, and other illustrations available under a Creative Common license for you to download and include in your own presentations. You’ll find the original illustrations and diagrams from this book at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/, or you can just double-click the pushpin next to the image to see them in high resolution.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is remote user research, anyway? Is it anything like focus groups or surveys?
Remote user research is simply a type of user experience (UX) research that’s conducted over the phone and Internet, instead of in person. In general, UX research seeks to understand how people interact with technology. Unlike focus groups and surveys, market research techniques that are used to learn people’s opinions and preferences, UX research focuses on studying people’s behavior. In that sense, remote user research isn’t really like market research; however, both remote user research and market research can be applied toward improving the design of existing technologies and inspiring new ones. See Chapter 1, “The Appeal of Lab Research”.
What kinds of remote research are there?
That’s a huge question, and we spend a good chunk of this book introducing and describing the many varieties and specialties of remote research out there. In general, there are two branches of remote research: moderated and automated. In a moderated study, a researcher talks directly to the participants as they use the interface in question, and it’s good for obtaining rich, qualitative feedback. In an automated study, you use online tools and services to gather behavioral or written feedback and information automatically, without the researcher’s direct involvement. For more about moderated testing, see Chapter 2, “Preparing for a Real Study”, and all of Chapter 5. For more about automated testing, see Chapter 6.
I’m skeptical about remote research. If it’s so great, why haven’t I heard of it?
A lot of the misgivings that people have about remote research come from its novelty. The method is still cutting edge, and the technique requires a certain degree of know-how. Until now, there hasn’t been a book you could learn the method from—which is, of course, the reason we wrote it.
Still, lots of companies have done it, with great success. We’ve done remote studies with Sony, Autodesk, Greenpeace, AAA, HP, Genentech, Wikipedia, UCSF Medical Center, the Washington Post, Esurance, Princess Cruises, Hallmark, Oracle, and Blue Shield of California, among many others.
I’m still skeptical. Can you really get valid behavioral feedback without seeing your participants in person?
Since remote research is conducted over the phone and Internet, many people worry about missing “rich details” like facial expressions and body language. First, we believe that for most user research studies, the way that users interact with the interface and their think-aloud comments are the only really necessary things to focus on. And on top of that, much of the tone does come through the user’s voice and language. We weigh the pros and cons of in-person research and remote research in Chapter 1, “Is Lab Research Dead?”, and discuss moderating over the phone in Chapter 5, “Ain’t Nothing Wrong