Learning about users when you can’t go there: Remote attended usability studies

Abstract

This paper describes a method for conducting usability test sessions remotely, when the user researcher is in a different location from the participants, and observers from the product team can watch from different geographic locations. This remote attended usability methodology (also called the remote synchronous method) is distinguished from automated user data collection, which is more suitable for quantitative research. Two case histories describe studies of nonprofit and commercial websites, with details about facilitating the user sessions that characterize the remote methodology. The paper concludes with a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of remote attended usability studies. Keywords: usability, user experience, user research, remote usability testing.