[Sigia-l] Tools for Remote Usability Testing

[Amy Thurston]

A timely post, we hope.  For all those who have done remote testing, please consider sharing your experiences and contributing toward a set of guidelines and best practices.  There's been lots of anecdotal information about remote testing, but we're hoping to gather more systematically the knowledge gained from real-world implementation of these technologies.  We look forward to hearing from you. 
Best regards, 
Amy

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We'd like to invite you to participate in a UPA Conference workshop Erica Olmsted and I are facilitating on June 23rd about "Remote Usability Testing: Practices and Procedures." 

Remote usability testing, while presenting new opportunities to discover user behavior, brings unique challenges to even seasoned usability professionals. The goal of this workshop is to discuss experiences with remote usability testing and remote technologies, then to develop best practices for designing and implementing remote tests. 

The facilitators invite position papers from usability practitioners who have designed, developed, implemented, and used remote usability testing technologies and techniques. Remote usability testing, for the purposes of this workshop, could include same time-different place studies, such as telephone interviews, controlled desktop studies, etc., as well as different time-different place techniques, such as online surveys, pop-up questionnaires, clickstream monitoring, etc.

The purpose of this workshop is to compare and discuss the relative values of different types of usability testing, as well as share and compare best practices based on your experiences. Discussion may include such topics as:

*Are remote participants, especially those in different time-different place studies, more likely to be deceptive than participants interacting with a live usability professional? 
*How important, if at all, is it to have live dialogue, live screen views, and live video of the participant, and the ability for all parties to seen the same screen? 
*Does the usability evaluator lose critical information by not seeing the body language and hearing speech subtleties or typical office interruptions by not sitting with the participant in person? 
*Have other evaluators systematically compared results from remote and in-person tests to show differences, especially advantages and disadvantages? 
*Might remote testing be comparable, or even preferred, for some applications and discouraged for others? If so, what would the criteria for selecting these techniques be? 
*What are the reasons for selecting remote testing - geographical diversity, participant diversity, cost, convenience? Does remote testing support or discourage third-party observers? 

The facilitators particularly welcome papers from people who are working with established remote testing arrangements, and who have conducted remote usability tests on a range of products with a variety of users in several geographically- and temporally-diverse environments. We discourage position papers from those who have not actually performed remote usability testing, but have done only face-to-face usability testing (or no usability testing at all), as the goal of this session is to develop lessons learned from the remote experiences. 

If you're registering early for the UPA conference and need more time to finish your position paper for this workshop, you may register for the rest of the conference and add the workshop fee later.  Please don't hesitate to e-mail or call me if you have any questions about this posting or the workshop description on the UPA website (http://www.upassoc.org/conf2003/Workshops/w3.htm).

Regards,
Amy

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Amy Thurston
Senior Usability Specialist
UserWorks, Inc. 
For a Better User Experience
301.431.0500
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