The ZURBlog is where we discuss interaction design and strategy.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… another new ZURBian! We’d like to extend a big ZURB welcome to Chris Michel, our newest designer.

Chris just moved from Clovis to good ‘ol Santa Cruz, where he lives with his wife and makes the drive over the hill everyday to come to ZURB HQ in Campbell. He’s already learned to love highway 17 and was 2 hours late on his second day due to an epic cabbage-truck accident (which we of course hassled him for mercilessly).

He brings a hard-working and simultaneously laid-back attitude to the ZURB mix and is hoping ZURB will open his horizons as a designer and give him a sense of being part of something bigger.

We welcomed him to the team with a client kick-off call on his first day, which he admitted to being his most stressful moment this week, but he’s taking it in stride.

"My favorite part about ZURB so far is the openness of the office. Everyone is so willing and helpful. I've also really enjoyed the energy that pours out of each person and into the work."

Yeah, that’s pretty much what we like about it, too. Welcome to the team, Chris.

Once upon a time in a land not so far away LinkedIn had big plans but zero users. Nowadays they dominate the space of social networking for professionals. How did they break through? We know the right person to ask — Konstantin Guericke, LinkedIn's Co-Founder and former VP of Marketing. Together we go in the wayback machine to user number one.

LinkedIn was born 7 years ago. In the next year the social media sector would blow up from being dominated by Friendster to the launch of MySpace later that year to the launch of Facebook in 2004. Most of social networks at the time were trying to make money by selling ads which appealed to a huge audience of young adults. LinkedIn however appealed to grown up professionals and was designed to be a subscription service where a member paid a fee to join the network. How did they manage to get the older professionals to jump on the SM bandwagon and pay a fee at the time when better-funded competitors were trying to move into the market?

Konstantin will get on his soapbox at ZURB HQ next week to share with us:

• The challenges behind asking people to join a site which doesn't have much members
• Dealing with better-funded competitors trying to move into the same market
• The early design mistakes which needed attention right away
• The pros and cons of a subscription model vs. advertising
• What we can expect from social networks in the future

About the man

Konstantin's says that he is a social architect with a passion in exploring the intersection of psychology, sociology and computing. Before founding LinkedIn he helped Micrografx lead illustration & image editing software development, managed the creation of one of the first 3D modeling and animation products for Caligari, marketed one of the first 3-D virtual web collaboration tools at Black Sun Interactive, and managed one of the first hosted presentation solutions which was later acquired by WebEx. He is currently working on a stealth project which we all want to know more about.

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!

ZURBvision: A 3D camera built from two iPod Nanos

ZURB Office 3D Video Nate Bolt 3D Video

It came about like this: we were walking down to get coffee and discussing the finer points of Nate Bolt's SHOTS video. Nate was coming to the office to do a Soapbox and we decided two dimensions weren't enough to fully capture him, so we set about to build our own 3D camera. It was a huge success and much easier then you would think. Here is our process in three easy steps, so that you can follow along at home.

Step 1: Acquire two identical video cameras

Everyone at ZURB got an iPod Nano at the holiday party last year and two happened to be in the office on Friday, score! Attach the cameras to a fixed surface about 6-7 inches apart. I found a piece of metal and a couple rubber bands that did the trick.

You need to have the cameras pretty level with each other (think how your eyes work) but don't sweat getting them perfectly aligned, your going to fix that in step two.

Step 2: Record video from both cameras

In case this is not obvious; you're going to record from both cameras at the same time. However you don't need to start both camera at exactly the same time since we can easily sync them when we do the editing. Which brings us to the tricky part...

The end format we need is a single video file that has both sources side by side. A little Googling found a Windows app called StereoMovie Maker that will help you combine, sync and align the two videos. It's not the most intuitive software so here is the workflow we developed:

1. Transcode your video files to MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 (StereoMovie Maker only supports these formats).
2. Click File -> Open Left / Right /Movies...
3. Select your two video files.
4. Use the arrows at the bottom of the screen to sync the timing of the two videos.
5. Click Adjust -> Easy Adjustment to open the adjustment window.
6. Focus on something distinct in the background (like the power outlet in this example) and using the horizontal and vertical sliders align the red and blue images so they completely overlap
7. Click File -> Save Stereo Movie.
8. Make sure you select the Side-by-side option.
9. Select the Microsoft Video 1 compressor. YouTube has no problem reading this format and it is significantly smaller then using no compression.

If you did this all correctly then your saved video should look like this, both videos sources side by side in a single file:

Step 3: Upload to YouTube

Upload the video to YouTube and add the tag yt3d:enable=true. This tells YouTube to combine your two side by side videos into a single 3D video.

That's it; once YouTube has finished processing the video you can go to its YouTube page and test it out with your Red / Cyan glasses. If have Amber / Blue or Green / Magenta Glasses you can use those instead by toggling the 3D options next to the pop out button in the lower right hand corner of the player.

Note that embedded YouTube videos do not support 3D, you must go to the YouTube video page for this feature.

Here are the two videos we made on Friday with this setup:

ZURB Office 3D Video Nate Bolt 3D Video

Do you want to work for a company that does awesome things like building 3D cameras from scratch? Check out our talent page and show us what you got.

Nate Bolt el Presidente of Bolt|Peters

Nate's office dog Sela the reason for Nate's #1 ranking on Google for Remote Robotic Dog Treat Dispenser

This Friday July 9th Nate Bolt the man you've seen speak at Interaction Design Association, write for A List Apart, and publish a Rosenfeld Media book will get on his soapbox to teach us a new way to do UX Research.

Hey you!

Yes, I’m talking to you. Have you ever had an idea for a product or a website? Most of us have. Did you ever ask anybody about their opinion of it? How did you do that? Face to face interviews? Focus groups?

Once you had a prototype of the idea did you ever observe someone using your product? How did you do that? Record them with a camera? Use software to record their mouse movements?

Ok, be honest. Was it a little expensive? Time and resource guzzling? How much time and money could you have saved if you accomplished the same task remotely? Remote user research is *"a type of user experience research that is conducted over the phone and Internet, instead of in person. It seeks to understand how people interact with technology."*[1]

We’re excited to have Nate Bolt the man behind 230+ user research studies at Bolt|Peters get on his soapbox to teach us how to design and conduct remote research studies from top to bottom using a phone and a laptop.

Hmm. Interesting. Is there a down side? How do I do this?

People say that remote research is inexpensive, it's great for cross-country teams, and you get a lot of data without leaving your office. But wait, what are the downsides? How is something like this setup?

In a 25 minute interactive discussion Nate will share:

• When we should & shouldn't go remote
• How to create tasks for participants
• How to find participants
• How to handle problem participants
• Best ways to gather data remotely
• Best remote tools to use

You miss this and you might be spending tons of $$$, time and resources on user research you could have done remotely. No big deal.

Rosenfeld Media was kind enough to offer ZURB blog readers a 20% discount with code RRZURB off all of their books including Nate Bolt's book: Remote Research.

About Nate: Nate Bolt is the El Presidente at Bolt|Peters where he has overseen more than 200 remote user research studies for Sony, Oracle, HP, Greenpeace, Electronic Arts, and many others. Beginning in 2003 he led the creation of the first moderated remote user research software, Ethnio, which is being used around the world now to recruit hundreds of thousands of live participants for research.