Comments on: Guerrilla Techniques – Does inexpensive research have to be ‘quick & dirty’?

By: orse

orse — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 17:03:48 +0000

Hi, regarding some research based on twitter maybe this pdf is interesting for you because of the approach when using twitter usage statistics for research.

Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities
http://tinyurl.com/23ywyv

By: Conversations with Dina » Twitter for Ethnography

Conversations with Dina » Twitter for Ethnography — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:41:55 +0000

[...] Check this post by Leisa Reichelt – Guerrilla Techniques – Does inexpensive research have to be ‘quick & dirty’ where she raises a “whole lotta questions” about using tools such as Twitter for research – my favourite question there is “Are we getting to the point where, perhaps, we can do better research outside of the lab than inside it?” [...]

By: Designing corporate intranet folksonomies/taxonomies with post-its « Green Tea Ice Cream

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 06:29:29 +0000

[...] This is our wall of post-its, left after two groups of 20 to 30 staff members had debated, scribbled and stickered in a frantic exercise in speed-brainstorming. I hadn’t tried any IA exercises with such comparatively large groups in my previous life so I was curious (and a little nervous) as to how it would work out. The goal was to gain an understanding of the types of information (and their comparative weighting) that our new intranet wiki will need to support (I should also add that Leisa Reichelt’s posts on disambiguity about guerilla research proved very inspirational in finally tackling this). [...]

By: wakako takagi

wakako takagi — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:00:28 +0000

What an interesting topic! As an independent research designer/strategist, I try to be in the field as much as possible and archive the key findings and thoughts to see if any of the discoveries come useful when I work on the future project.

As far as the method and tools…I would love to see the opportunity to leverage some of the social network sites like twitters to learn about consumers.

Looking forward to your post!

By: penny hagen

penny hagen — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 13:05:33 +0000

Hi Leisa
We are using a method we call mobile diaries – which takes advantage of mobile phones as in situ reporting devices, and blogs as a place to collect, reflect and comment on those reports/posts. We find them to be a very rich, informative and collaborative research method, straight forward to deploy and cost effective. That said (instead of using some of the existing free media sharing sites) we did need to customise a word press blog in order to retain the rights to our (participants) content, and to support the range of media (audio, text, video and image) formats we wanted.

We also do “beer and pizza” nights (which does include other non alcoholic beverages of course) nights where we do informal usability testing in house, as well as giving participants lofi video cameras to “tell their own story” of using the site, which generates a different kind of feedback.

I am also interested in the increasing number of research companies using online tools such as blogs (generally customised) to collect research data and feedback such as http://www.kdaresearch.com/blog/?p=30

I look forward to other posts.

By: Michael Clarke

Michael Clarke — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 20:02:17 +0000

I’m a great believer also in paper prototyping. If nothing else, it gets the bugs sorted out of the business process and it’s cheap, cheap, cheap…I also tend to use photocopies of actual sketches of wireframes rather than nicely processed ones because a) it’s quicker and b) people seem more at ease with starting to scribble on them themselves than on some beautifully produced story board or other.

By: Mazy

Mazy — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 11:11:37 +0000

Very interesting post Leisa, I’d really like to try out some of the things you’ve mentioned.
I’ve previously used Gumtree http://www.gumtree.com/ to recruit participants on a (no!) budget project. We were specifically working with members of the Latin American community in London and this site was an excellent tool to reach this very specific target audience.
Paper-prototyping is cheap & effective – For the project mentioned above I paper prototyped a mobile social software app – here’s a link to a project report with more details- http://tinyurl.com/2f3994 (PDF)
I’ve used Morae, which is very good for screen recording, video and audio, but for a no-budget option a free screen recorder with audio such as Camstudio – http://www.camstudio.org/ is the next-best.
Ultimately, I think the best-value tool is your imagination!

By: Karen

Karen — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 15:40:16 +0000

I’ll definitely be watching to see what others are adding to the discussion, as we’re in the “low budget” group. Unfortunately, we just found out legal isn’t too keen on us doing this kind of research so my plans of snagging impromptu participants at the mall and community center for an upcoming test are nixed.

In the past, I’ve had good luck turning to specific user groups (both real-life and virtual communities) when we’re looking at a specific target population. For example, going to a local Mac users group meeting or scoping out online food discussion forums for people who prefer to buy organic foods.

Also, regarding the single computer for camera & screen recording, it can be done. Techsmith (makers of Camtasia) make a program called Morae that does simultaneous capture of on-screen events (and logs keystrokes, clicks, etc.) and video of the user from a USB webcam. If you want to mark participant actions/timepoints, that can be done remotely via another machine. Unfortunately it only works for PCs right now- however, at CHI I did see it running on a Macbook with the built-in webcam via Bootcamp; but I’m not 100% sure that’s officially supported. If I’ve done my tags right, you should be able to go here for more info: http://www.techsmith.com/morae.asp

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:00:12 +0000

Oops! A couple of links got lost in translation. Apologies for the spam.

Camtasia
http://tinyurl.com/24dbby

Digital vs ‘traditional’ diary studies
http://userhappiness.com/blog/dear-digital-diary

By: Nick

Nick — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 08:55:15 +0000

Dunno about the Mac, Leisa, but on the PC Camtasia’s an excellent and cheap (£160?) tool for recording screen, audio and webcam video. . I’d say it’s worth getting hold of a ‘quick and dirty’ Windows laptop or a copy of Parallels to run it.

As for doing more out of the lab than in it, definitely. (I’ve never been a fan of big, expensive labs anyway. They can often be too formal and intimidating for participants. That said, if you’ve got the money they can be done really well. Nokia in Huntingdon have a fantastic lab that mimics a posh sitting room.) I’m finding ‘cafe’ usability sessions are fast replacing lab sessions for the ‘standard’ evaluation work I do. You can run them at all sorts of places – trade shows, staff canteens, conferences, schools – and as Kevin points out, you’re often in the context of use. Combined with the ‘listening lab’ approach (in a nutshell: ‘what are you interested in using this kind of site for, now try and use it for the things you’ve just told me’) it’s a really effective way of getting a user-centred rather than usability evaluator-centred insight.

I’m just starting out with remote tools and I think that I’d actually use remote card sorting in preference to face-to-face sessions. What’s exciting for me is the access to large sample sizes and the statistical reliability that comes with that. As for flickr diary studies, I’d argue that there’s still a lot you can do with ‘traditional’ diary studies. (I blogged about some digital vs traditional diaries last month ). And they still come up pretty cheap