In my monthly column Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts answers readers’ questions about a broad range of user experience matters. To get answers to your own questions about UX strategy, design, user research, or any other topic of interest to UX professionals in an upcoming edition of Ask UXmatters, please send your questions to: ask.uxmatters@uxmatters.com.
The following experts have contributed answers to this month’s edition of Ask UXmatters:
- Michael Faletti—Senior UX Designer and Researcher at Saggezza
- Caroline Jarrett—Owner and Director at Effortmark Limited; UXmatters columnist
- Cory Lebson—Principal Consultant at Lebsontech; Past President, User Experience Professionals’ Association (UXPA); author of The UX Careers Handbook
Q: Do you have any tips for doing remote UX research or testing?—from a UXmatters reader
Cory offers several tips that support successful remote research and testing:
- “Recruit participants who have the appropriate technological infrastructure to handle a remote session—particularly if they must share their screen with you. This requires decent technology and good bandwidth.
- “While recruiting participants who have a microphone and a Webcam usually works fine, have a backup plan that includes using a dial-in number in case their technology doesn’t work.
- “Assess whether your sample is at all skewed toward more technically savvy people because of your need to recruit participants who can do a remote session. It’s okay if you have to skew in this direction to do your research. However, you should keep this possible bias in mind when you’re analyzing your data and add the necessary caveats to your findings.
- “If you must present tasks to your participants verbally and they are at all complex, consider using a shared Google document in which you can post tasks and activities in real time. Perhaps participants could open this document on a mobile device or second computer screen if they have one.
- “Allow extra session time to get participants fully set up and connected—especially if you’re dealing with shared mobile screens, for which there often seem to be more screen-sharing hurdles than on desktop or notebook computers.”