Remote Testing Overview
Your site's customers visit from all over the world? How can you
tap their experience? Remote usability testing offers one solution
where you solicit structured feedback from users, wherever they might
be. You can also do "desktop testing" in your user's normal environment with the Uzilla.net system.
The Testing Process
- Identify key tasks on your web site or application and design surveys to assess critical issues. You may need to divide
your user base into groups to cover the key functions. Frequency of
use and mission critical systems are a good place to look first.
- Send an autorun cd, offer a download, or use a screen sharing solution.
Uzilla runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. An auto-run CD version
of the client is available, requiring no software
installation on your participant's computer. Uzilla, LLC will also postal mail auto-run cd's to your participants.
- Understand where user's get into trouble and benchmark
your key tasks. Generate
graphs and reports with the Uzilla Analysis
application. Compare this run to previous usability tests. With
large sample sizes, quantitative usability methods prove very useful.
How many users to test? While any usability testing is better
than none, usability researchers are still debating the nature of the
relationship between sample size and results. Remote testing generally
requires more users than lab testing.We recommend aiming for
over 10, particularly if you wish to use the iterative benchmarking
process as your website develops?
What can I expect to learn? You might be suprised! In addition
to task success ratios and your user's impressions of your site, you
can reveal navigation patterns. Is the site being used the way the
designer expects?
Uzilla.net computes a measure of lostness and offers a variety of
insights into deviations from optimality. Quantitative data is highly
useful when a benchmark is provided, crafted in Uzilla.net by a
designer doing the test tasks.
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Related Links
Fidelity Comparison of Remote and Lab Usability Testing: With a larger sample size, remote testing indentified comparable results to lab testing.
OCLC's Remote Site
with a case study of remote testing using screen sharing. Uzilla
eliminates the need for many video coding tasks. It also works well
with screen sharing programs.Jakob Nielsen on remote usability testing in "Offshore Usability".
IBM Systems Journal features a nice writeup titled "Methodology for remote usability activities: A case study". F.S.H. Krauss classifies remote usability activity into four categories.
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