As previously noted, I gave a presentation to BayCHI on January 12, 2010. Folks have been asking for the slides — here you go!

Next Tuesday, Jan. 12, I’ll be presenting to BayCHI about how to do great user research with remote methods.

The program description:

Remote research can raise the quality and lower the costs of your user research efforts; using a combination of surveys, video, screensharing, and phone, you can connect with a much broader range of users than you could using traditional lab-based usability tests, while using resources more efficiently than you would doing contextual research. In this workshop-style talk, Juliette Melton will cover recruiting sources, technology tools, and caveats you might not have thought of, including managing time zones and participant distraction. We will also address pros and cons of increasingly popular non-scripted research services.

I hope to see you there!

I’m taking what has so far been a pretty exciting and enjoyable leap of faith. I’ve decided that the next step in my series of projects (”career,” as it were) is to do freelance user research on a full-time basis. I’m focusing first on usability testing, user interviews, and survey design, since these are research modalities that I’m particularly drawn towards. For now, I’m calling my little company Deluxify User Experience but am open to better suggestions. Expect a lovely new website, etc., at some point in the coming weeks.

I already have some awesome clients and am busy doing work I love. Not bad for six weeks in! If you are interested in learning more about how I can help your company, whether a stealth-mode startup or established enterprise, do drop me a line at juliette@deluxify.com.

Tomorrow, September 17 at 12pm CT Mark Trammell and I will be presenting a talk on “Effective User Research” as part of the DIYsummit. I’m pretty excited. This will be a great group of speakers, and the folks behind the scenes (waving to Christopher and Ari) know their stuff.

The DIYsummit will take place online. This does not, however, make it a “webinar” at least as far as my definition goes. A webinar is a slog through PowerPoint slides, presented online by a lifeless salesperson trying to sell some enterprise software solution. The DIYsummit looks like it will be a well-crafted and really engaging online learning experience.

Anyway, wish us luck and I hope to see you online tomorrow!

The typical “webinar” that I have experienced thus far involves an instructor speaking on a conference call while she pages through a series of slides that are viewable using screen sharing software such as WebEx. There could be some great webinars out there, but the ones that I’ve been involved with as a participant could be much better, both from pedagogical and user experience perspectives.

In a classroom, the instructor can look around the room to see if the students look confused or bored. This feedback helps her know if she should go back and explain a difficult point in a different way, or maybe tell a good story to wake the audience up. She can also ask poll the students, through a show of hands or more advanced solution, to discern the level of expertise of the group. She can then adjust her presentation as necessary.

A webinar instructor cannot see her audience. She doesn’t know if people are paying attention or falling asleep. She can’t easily poll her audience about their understanding of the material. She slogs through, slide by slide, with no way to easily adjust her delivery of the content or even know that she should adjust it.

Now let’s think about what a website can do, pedagogically. A user can go through material at his own speed, diving deeper into subject matter that he’s interested in or looking up any words that he hasn’t heard before.

The rigid nature of the webinar environment means that participants can’t adapt the experience to meet their learning needs, like they can on a website, and the instructor can’t adapt her presentation delivery like she can with an in-person lecture.

I posit that the webinar could be a much better learning tool by incorporating some of these aspects of in-person and online learning:

• Have the slide deck available for viewing or downloading at the beginning of the presentation. The participants can then go back and look at previous slides if they missed something, or skip ahead if they want to understand where the discussion is going.
• If the screen sharing tool has a chat function, use it. Ask the participants at the beginning of the session to share their level of expertise with the subject matter. You can make this easier by specifying for example that 1=newbie, 2=somewhat familiar, and 3=very familiar, and have them just type that one number. A quick scan will help clarify what kind of audience you have.
• Decide on a Twitter hashtag for the session, and share it at the beginning. Encourage participants to use the hashtag in their tweets. Monitoring the Twitter backchannel is a good way to know if the participants are bored or confused. (They are unlikely to use the screen sharing chat function to do this.)
• Share a list of URLs with the participants where they can get more information about your subject matter. Advanced members of your audience will benefit from being able to go deeper into the topic while listening to the presentation.
• Encourage the participants to use either the screen sharing chat function or Twitter to ask questions during the presentation.

Let me know if you have other tips! Let’s make webinars a better learning experience.

I’ve started venturing into the world of doing remote user testing. This means that instead of recruiting people to come in to the office to do user tests, I use screen sharing technology to see how they use the web site I’m testing on their own computer.

This has lots of benefits, most notably:

• I’m able to talk to people all over the world, not just in San Francisco.
• I can see how the participants use the site on their own machines and browsers.
• Recruiting is typically the most difficult and annoying part of doing user testing. Remote testing is easier to recruit for, since it doesn’t require the participant to go anywhere.

The technical side to this isn’t super easy, but it shouldn’t dissuade you from trying remote testing. I learned the basics of how to set up remote testing thanks to help from my awesome friend Nate Bolt. (Be sure to read his book on remote research when it comes out later this year!)

Here’s the skinny — UserVue is a great tool that is specifically built for remote testing. However, it only works on PCs. If you’re on a Mac, you have to assemble more of a Rube Goldberg-ian app suite. I did lots of tinkering with settings and applications to make this work; when I was done, I realized that these notes could be helpful for others.

THE TOOLS

You will need:

• Mac (either laptop or desktop)
• Acrobat Connect for screensharing. You do not need to buy the “Pro” version, Acrobat Connect Pro. Note that the Adobe site hides the cheap, non-Pro version. Cost: $39.95 a month.
  
  UPDATE:
  There is a free version that is basically the same but has shinier icons. It’s also slightly less annoying. In this version, you need to click on the participant name and request that they share their screen — no need to “autopromote participants to presenters.”
• Soundflower to enable audio recording. Be sure to also install Soundflowerbed during the installation process. Free
• iShowU HD for recording screensharing and audio. You do not need to buy the “Pro” version, iShowU HD Pro. $29.95
• Skype for audio. Free to use but you will need to pay to call phones from Skype. Pay in increments of €10.
• Headset for using Skype. You will need a headset that has a built in microphone. I’m using the Plantronics GameCom Pro 1 for no other reason than I found one in our office. It works well.

(Note that if you’re on a PC, UserVue does what Soundflower + Connect + Skype + iShowU does.)

SETUP INSTRUCTIONS

Sound on the computer:

Under System Preferences on the Mac, select Sound, then:

• Output: Soundflower (2ch)
• Input: headset

Soundflowerbed:

Under Soundflower (2CH), change from None (OFF) to headset

Select “Audio Setup…” then Audio Devices

Skype:

Under Preferences, select Audio

• Audio Output > Soundflower (2ch)
• Audio Input > headset

iShowU HD:

In the menu bar, make sure:

• Microphone capture enabled
• Application capture enabled

Go to Advanced Options and click on the megaphone to adjust sound preferences.

• Select: Record audio from applications
• Select: Record sound from input device
• DO NOT Select: Monitor input device
• Select name of headset from dropdown

Choose the area of your screen to record. Click “Choose” to select your capture area and toggle over to your Adobe Connect window and trace around the meeting space.

Adobe Connect:

Under “Meeting,” select “Auto-Promote Participants to Presenters

SESSION MECHANICS

• Moderator calls participant using Skype. Audio quality will be better if you call them on a mobile or landline number rather than on Skype.
• Make sure that they are at the Connect URL: http://connect.acrobat.com/XXXX
• Instruct the participant to Select “Enter as Guest” and type their name. Tell them that you will approve them to enter the meeting. Approve them to enter the meeting once they have done this.
• Ask the participant to click “Share Your Screen.”
• Tell the participant that they will be prompted to install the Adobe Acrobat Connect Add-In if they don’t already have it.
• Connect will then open for them in a new window. Ask them to click “Share Your Screen” again.
• Tell the participant that where you see “Start Screen Sharing” select “Applications” then the name of the window where the website is open that you’ll be discussing.
• At the end of the session remind the participant to select “Stop Sharing” at the bottom of the Connect window.

- - - - - - -

I’m interested in hearing about your experiences doing remote testing. Do you have gripes? Inspiring stories? Tips for other people doing user research? Good luck and have fun!

Users don’t tend to ask for large-scale site overhauls; massive changes mean having to learn a new UI, and that’s rarely something that folks get excited about. Massive changes also tend to feel unnecessary (it worked before, why fix it?) and arbitrary (why did this thing change and that other thing didn’t?) How, then, to explain to users why changes were necessary, why you made the changes you did, and how to effectively use the new UI?

(Twitter didn’t do a great job of explaining why it made a small but significant change last week, and users staged a minor revolt.)

The Google AdWords team made a smart decision to make a video about changes to the AdWords administrative interface. Team members describe how they collected user feedback to inform changes to the interface, and how these changes make the user experience better. The video makes the interface changes feel necessary (they significantly improve site performance) and human (real people put lots of thought into how to make this better, and the new features represent their best efforts).

In the future, “games are going to be one possible dimension of your personality.”

Via fora.tv

SXSW is just around the corner! Our panel, “Developing Super Senses: Tools to Know Your Users” has been scheduled for Monday, March 16 at 5pm. Come hear me, Mark Trammell, Nate Bolt, Carla Borsoi, and Andy Budd duke it out over user research best practices.

Here’s the panel description:

You know you need to do user research, but how? Should you write surveys, do focus groups, or develop personas? And how do you act on what you’ve learned? We’ve been in the trenches and have concrete suggestions on what you can, and should do NOW to conduct effective user research.

We expect your attendance. And come equipped with a good question or two.

Last week I traveled to Denver to participate in the annual Web Directions North conference. I’m a fan of web conferences, and this one was particularly enjoyable. From watching the sun set behind the Rockies while snacking on still-warm doughnuts to debating the future of SVG with new friends, this was a good week.

On Monday, Mark Trammell and I led a workshop on user research. We focused on helping the workshop participants understand what key challenges their organizations face and how different research methods could help address these challenges. The participants were engaged and thoughtful and really inspiring as I think about my own organization and the user research that I do as part of my daily life.

I also gave a talk about how three companies made significant changes to products and processes based on user research and customer feedback, and how they knew which findings and feedback to act on. I’m still collecting stories of how companies make smart choices about acting on user research findings, so contact me if you have a good story to share.

Many, many thanks to John Allsopp for putting on an awesome conference in a tricky economic environment, and to the friends and colleagues who contributed so much to making this such a great event.