No subject

I just saw a presentation that included a bit of this at Seybold -- the 
presentation page is here:

http://www.otivo.com/projects/seyboldsf/7.html

Terrie also mentioned Nate Bolt (mentioned in the previous summary)
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A longer response from Quinn, Laura [laura.quinn at pfizer.com]:
You asked about distance usability testing... You didn't specify at what
point you were trying to test, but I've had a fair amount of success
essentially paper-prototyping remotely.  I've done it a couple of times,
but in particular on a project in which I was designing a very task/
workflow based system that had to meet the needs of a couple of
international offices.  I tested in NY and London, but Virginia and
Australia were outside the travel budget...

I designed wireframes in visio, and linked them all together by adding
hyperlinks and exporting to html.  I then posted the linked prototype to
a server, and sent the link/ username/ password to the person to be
tested about 10 minutes before the test (in an attempt to not have them
cruising around before I called them).  I think walked through the same
test script that I used for the regular testing (task based, but also
asking them to describe what they were doing and looking at as well as
what they were thinking about) 

Certainly it was not the same as being there (presumably, I missed all
sorts of non-verbal cues and stuff, as well as what people were looking
at and the
like) but I found it a whole lot better than nothing.  In general, I
found the same types of issues as with the in person tests, but also a
number of regional workflow problems that I wouldn't have known about
otherwise.  It was definitely useful to have done some in person testing
first, to both work out all the kinks in the script and to have some
sense about what someone might be doing or thinking that I couldn't see.

I did have some strange firewall issues with people not being able to
see the prototypes; in several tests there was an uncomfortable first
couple minutes as we tried to get the prototype up (and testing the
usability of my copying the user name  in the email to the user name box
process).  Not surprisingly, people were also notably more likely to be
confused about the prototype and their inability to type into fields,
the data not refreshing, etc. than with the actual paper version.