Q&A: Do participants in your usability studies have to be in the San Francisco or Puget Sound areas?

In my overzealousness in killing off trackback spam (grrr), I accidentally deleted a comment asking about participating in usability studies. I was asked:

Do they absolutely HAVE to be in the Bay area? I'd be glad to help, and have signed up for usability studies, but I'm not in the Bay area.

For the Entourage study that my team is running next week, yes, users absolutely must be in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The majority of the research that my team does is conducted in-house in either Redmond, Washington, or Mountain View, California. While we do complete studies occasionally outside of our home base, it's much less frequent, for many reasons.

I'm located here. Yes, I can (and do) travel, but it's a big hit to my schedule and my productivity. I'd need to travel to another location for a week, plus set-up time. I'm completely inaccessible to the rest of my team for all of that time.

The team is located here. Usability studies are much more powerful when the application team has the opportunity to observe it and see the participants themselves. The report that I bring back to the team is useful, but actually seeing a user struggle with something is more compelling than simply hearing me describe it. While the team can travel, it's much less of time hit for them to walk over to the usability lab across campus, as opposed to getting on a plane and flying to Columbus, Ohio.

I can do more studies when I'm here, because the turn-around time is much faster. If I conduct studies elsewhere, recruiting participants takes longer because I don't have easy access to the same kind of infrastructure that I do here. If I decide today that I want to do a study here in Mountain View, I can have 10 participants in my lab here in two weeks or less. If I decide today that I want to do a study in, say, New York, it will take me at least a month to get those participants because I'll either have to rely on my internal infrastructure to find them (and they're not optimised to find participants that far away) or because I'll have to contract to an outside agency to find them (which has its own time requirements to get up and running).

I can conduct some studies remotely, but not every study lends itself to this format. For my next study, I'm working with low-fidelity prototypes, which require a fair amount of in-person manipulation by the researcher to work. For that kind of study, remote participants simply can't provide the kind of interaction and feedback that I need. Further, using remote participants is both more difficult for me to recruit for, and ensuring that they have everything set up on their computer for me to be able to conduct the study and get the data that I need is time-consuming.

This isn't to say that we don't do studies outside of our home base, just that the majority of them are conducted where I have easy access to facilities, participants, and my team.

Comments

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2009
  Hey nayde... mmm where is the beta of messenger?... after 6 months.. nothing to see...