This book is about remote user research, which is a method of using Internet tools and services to conduct user research with participants who are in another location. (User research, in turn, is the field of studying how people interact with technology.)

Are you a user experience/human-computer interaction practitioner? If so, you’re totally gonna love this book, especially if you’ve ever been frustrated with current in-person or lab methods of user research for any of the several reasons we describe in Chapter 1. If you’re a software or Web developer looking for insights into your own (or your competitors’) designs, or an interaction designer or consultant, you’ll probably dig this book too.

Is there anyone this book isn’t for? You don’t need to be a veteran user-experience researcher to understand what we talk about in this book, although we do focus mostly on the “remote” aspects of remote research. You won’t find much advice on how to conduct user research in general—for that, a great place to start is Mike Kuniavsky’s Observing the User Experience.

Remote Research is a how-to book about remote research methods: using a phone and the Internet to conduct user experience research from a distance.

In the Introduction and Chapter 1, you’ll get an overview of what remote research is all about, when you should and shouldn’t use remote methods, and the two main kinds of remote research studies: moderated and automated.

In Chapter 2 through Chapter 5, you’ll learn how to set up, recruit, and conduct a basic remote moderated study. We describe a method called “live recruiting,” which involves intercepting visitors to your own Web site to participate in your studies immediately. We also discuss the privacy and consent issues around recruiting, session recording, and remote participation.

In Chapter 6 we describe various automated research methods, illustrating them with case studies.

Chapter 7 provides advice about how to analyze and report on the findings of remote research studies.

Chapter 8 is a short guide to tools and services you can use to fill the many technological needs of remote research, including screen sharing applications, recording software, and several online automated research Web apps.

Chapter 9 illustrates how many of the basic principles described earlier in the book can be adapted and applied to special testing circumstances, where normal remote testing methods aren’t possible or desirable.

Chapter 10 is a review of the major challenges you’ll face when planning, conducting, and presenting a remote research study.

This book comes with two companion Web sites. The first is the Remote Research page ( www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/remoteresearch) on the Web site of our publisher, Rosenfeld Media. The other site is our companion Web site for the book, Remote Usability (http://remoteusability.com). On both sites you’ll be able to find detailed resources, research document templates, supplementary articles, and up-to-date lists of remote research tools and services.

We’ve also made the book’s diagrams, screenshots, and other illustrations available under a Creative Common license for you to download and include in your own presentations. You’ll find the original illustrations and diagrams from this book at http://www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/, or you can just double-click the pushpin next to the image to see them in high resolution.