Lessons Learned from Conducting Group-Based Research on Facebook

Abstract

Existing research methods are largely intended to be conducted co-located and synchronously with a study population, but this approach is not feasible with remote or distributed populations. We describe a group-based study we conducted asynchronously on Facebook with a remote population. This study made use of adapted versions of a number of commonly used HCI research methods. We provide a thorough description of our research process, and a discussion of the lessons learned from this approach.