Remote Usability Evaluation: Overview and Case Studies

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Traditional laboratory-based usability evaluations have many costs associated with them: financial costs, temporary loss in participant productivity, travel issues. For this reason, many human-computer interaction practitioners cannot conduct as many test iterations as they would like or may fail to secure representative samples, especially as user groups become more global. In recent years, we have begun to use less expensive remote evaluation techniques to complement traditional methods. This article describes some collaborative software that allows remote evaluations, along with the necessary hardware, to reproduce, as closely as possible, traditional evaluation techniques. It also describes the types of activities that lend themselves to this sort of approach and provides tips for conducting these sorts of sessions. Finally, this article provides data that suggest remote techniques are not only effective at improving interface designs, but also produce results comparable to traditional approaches for typical measures.