User Research Friday Redux

UPDATE: Steve Portigal provides a thoughtful writeup of the even here and asks “can we do better?”

Well thanks to Bolt Peters we had quite an interesting and fun afternoon yesterday at User Research Friday. Apart from all the great speakers, kudos on not running out of drinks, clearly they’ve got some generous sponsors and the beer flowed like wine

Overall I thought it was pretty interesting and introduced me to some tools that I hadn’t seen before, and i got to meet and reconnect with a bunch of folks like Steve Portigal (Portigal Consulting), Peter Merholz, and Lane Becker (of Adaptive Path), and Indi Young (formerly Adaptive Path). On a blogging front i got to meet Daniel Riveong (e-storm & emergence-media.com).

Some folks who are user researchers for a living had some criticisms regarding the level of depth the presenters got to, remarking that much of what was covered was 101 for people that did this for a living. Probably fair comment, but the presenters also only had 20 minutes each.

I really enjoyed Indi Young’s presentation on research methods and for me a really good take-away was how often “preference research” (what we like – from marketing folks) often drives product design, when “conceptual research” (how we approach getting things done). Here’s a slide from her presentation which she has graciously shared on SlideShare.com

I also took some notes on the tools that I saw that were interesting, and here they are:

Eye Tools

eye tracking heat maps, help describes what users are looking at when they interact wiht a web page or email. Very good for quantative direction on where users are paying attention. Good for mass marketing, trying to tweak response rates. Also describes users flow through informtion, scrolling etc.

Intuit presentation on how they use a ethnio tool

A solution to remotely recruit, and share a screen with real users coming to your site. Very useful tool for doing remote “talk aloud” usability on a live site with a real user. User is offered a chance to earn $75 for taking a survey, they fill out a quick screener, if they are a good candidate they are sent the screen sharing application and a usability person can share their screen and have them talked through a task.

Rashmi Sinha – Uzanto/Mind Canvas on Global Research

Uzanto (user research consulting)
Mind Canvas (online tool for gathering feedback, uses card sorting, questionares etc.)

International research using a distributed collaboration model. Main US team creates the main study, local teams localize the study involving marketing and sales people not necessarily usability people.

Global research works well after there is an initial design that can be refined for global versions.

Sorry to you folks that didn’t make it but, we’ll organize a more dedicated blogger happy hour soon.

Cheers,

Karl