The ZURBlog is where we discuss interaction design and strategy.

We had some amazing sushi and a captivating remote UX research discussion with Nate Bolt. Feel free to slip those headphones on and listen to the podcast as you page through the slides below.

Remote UX is an INCREDIBLY small niche

Nate started off with a nifty comparison: “About 5% of all research is remote. Research in general is a niche industry. User research within is pretty small. UX research within that is even smaller. Remote UX research is even smaller.”

Why do people love remote?

• Remote is a cheap access to someone’s physical environment
• You want to intercept somebody who is “in the moment.” Ex: They are in the middle of entering their credit card to buy something.
• Easier to recruit
• Easier to observe and record their actions
• Can get participants from all around the world

When not to use remote

So when is remote research a bad idea? If you need specific skill sets. Example: If you want feedback on a video game from 13-year-old kids who are French and Chilean but speak English and have web cams. This is really bad idea for remote testing. Why?

• Bandwith is a huge issue
• Translation is a huge issue
• Its hard to get consent to talk to kids
• Hard to make behavioral inferences form web cams is tough
• Security is a problem
• People mis-assess their language skills. Nate mentioned that they ran into this issue a lot. A quick tip to overcome this is to ask a question such as “What happens to a balloon when you let it go? Up? Down? “ as preliminary screening to make sure they actually speak the language. Always better than asking “Do you speak English?”

Designing the actual study

Nate outlined an example study he did for Intuit trying to figure out why folks were bailing out of checkout. The remote UX study was setup had:

• 10 participants live with screen sharing tool
• 10 participants from usertesting.com (self moderated which meant the participants were talking to a mic on their own, nobody was on the phone with them)
• Used Ethnio to intercept users as were about to checkout and ask them what is going on in their mind

Two tips to remember

• Screen whether people will be good participants. A good question to ask before you recruit a participants is: What did you come to this site to do today? Folks that answer “I have the last model and am looking for the next one” are killer participants! Folks that say “Just because” are the ones you’ve got to X out.



• Try to avoid professional survey takers. Folks that say: “Oh yeah – I would totally use that!” are the ones you want to get rid of. Try to ask people to perform a task instead of asking them about their opinion. Nate did a study testing Survey Monkey’s new UI. Nate asked the users to create a survey for something they needed to test. He could see the people that truly carted about the tool. Those are the ones that he recruited for more testing.

The talk had a lot more details and information which you can get by listening to the full podcast above as you page through the slides. We'd like to thank Nate Bolt once again for showing us the ins and outs of Remote UX Research!