Benefits to remote online interviews

1) The "remote" aspect of this technique is certainly appealing; it makes it easier to reach respondents in diverse geographic areas, and you don’t need to limit your users to a single city or area (unless you want to). This is particularly useful if you are developing for a small, hard-to-reach, or decentralized group of users for whom it would be difficult to schedule interviews at a single location otherwise.

2)The potential cost savings, particularly if you typically travel and/or rent a focus group facility for your testing. It eliminates travel costs for the interviewer and team, which is useful when your team is scattered across the country, as was the case for our project. Instead of paying for travel costs and facility fees, you pay a per-minute, per-participant fee to use WebEx.

3)The interview schedule can be much more flexible, eliminates the need to "make the most" of a day's rental at a focus group facility, and allows your users to select a time that suits their individual schedules.

4)One final benefit of this type of testing involves exposure at the client’s company. Typically, the research manager and direct team are the only ones that can feasibly attend in-person usability interviews—a handful of very interested people, but still just a portion of the folks who could benefit from first-hand observation. Remote online interviews suddenly enable these other interested people, from senior management to the actual website developers, to "attend."

Before interview

Once you have respondents scheduled and the meetings arranged, you’ll be ready to conduct the interviews. There are a number of techniques that will make the interviews themselves go a lot smoother. Most of the following suggestions are aimed at reducing last-minute scrambling (on the part of the moderator) and avoiding possible "dead time" as observers wait for respondents to get up and running.

• Be prepared to spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of each interview getting set up, from helping the respondents log in to demonstrating the shared browser feature. (This is important to keep in mind as you consider how many tasks you can fit in an interview.)


• A few minutes before the scheduled interview time, log in to your WebEx account and start the meeting. By opening the meeting a few minutes early, "observers" will have a chance to log in and get settled. You should also turn on the sharing feature and bring up the URL of the site to be evaluated, so that it's ready to go as soon as the respondent has joined the meeting.


• At the appointed interview time, call the respondent and walk them through joining the meeting. A short setup feature is required for first-time users, which simply installs a necessary plug-in in the user's browser.


• To help the respondent log in to the meeting read out the meeting ID number and have them enter it in the appropriate field.
  (This is another argument for not bothering with the WebEx meeting invitation: giving the respondent the ID verbally, as he or she types it in, is a lot easier than waiting for the respondent to sift through an Inbox in search of the email containing the ID.) You know the respondent has successfully logged in when you see his or her name appear in the "Attendees" list in the main WebEx Meeting Manager window.


• Check that the sharing feature is turned on, and enable the respondent with browser sharing "power."

Start Interview

Now you can proceed with the same type of introduction you might use in a traditional usability test: describe the purpose of the research, ask the respondent to "think out loud," reassure them that there are no right or wrong answers, etc. At this point, it's also useful to cover a few other WebEx-related items:

• State that you're audio recording, (if applicable) and that you have a few colleagues listening in. In many states, it is illegal to record a telephone call without all callers’ knowledge and consent, so be sure this statement is included in your audio recording.


• Remind observers to keep quiet: say,"…and I just want to remind my colleagues to keep their phones on mute throughout the interview." Say it once, when everyone's on the phone, and then move on.


• Finally, give a brief description of how WebEx works, and demonstrate how to trade control of the browser back and forth. This doesn’t take long, but it's critical for the success of the interview. It also allows you to get a sense of the delay time when transferring control of the browser between the user and yourself, which may vary slightly from interview to interview. Once the participant has the hang of it, get started with the tasks.


• Ask the respondents to point with the mouse as they discuss various aspects of a page. This helps avoid confusion about which link, graphic, or text that they are talking about.