@Jared: What you're describing is a situation in which you'd fully implement remote, unobtrusive testing into an overall test plan. That is not really how I have used it (and I did not mean to imply that this is how I use it). I'm still experimenting a bit, but with several clients I have asked them (not me) to install Userfly for some period of time. Afterward, I pop in and randomly pick a few (sometimes the longer ones) and look for anything that jumps out as being interesting.
One memorable example is a conversion point (in the form of a button-looking thing) that was sitting near the top of a longer-ish page. The Userfly recordings I watched showed practically everyone, after they would reach the page, scrolling past the conversion point and not going back to it. Before we had conducted a formal user test, we were able to show our client a major problem point (they were impressed with the turnaround time for feedback). This finding allowed us to focus formal testing time on that page, which I thought was really cool. Would we have found the problem through heuristic analysis? Probably. With formalized user testing? Definitely. But knowing (from observation of real users) where the problem was allowed us to spend more time coming up with recommendations to remedy it. @Harry See above example on how I have used Userfly to create a better formal testing plan. I think you're absolutely right that it depends on the context. If a business client has a conversion point that's not meeting expectations, I think unobtrusive observation can help there. And as you point out, it's also a great way to show newcomers to user research (in many cases, clients) some user perspective. ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
