 So, we will park the questions towards for the end because we really need to move fast. Also for this session, I am assuming most of you are aware of UX research as a concept. In case some of the terms and terminologies are not clear, we can meet offline and you know I can clarify or give more details. Okay. So, what comes to mind when we say user research? I am sure most of you will think that user research means meeting users in person, face to face, either in their location or in your usability lab to understand their mental model, behavior, environment, ecosystem and so on. Similar notion, I am going to burst these two myths by sharing my learnings of doing remote research from India. Mostly in ADP our users are based in United States. So, I am going to talk about the pros and cons of you know in-person research and how we can bridge the gap with remote research. I am going to share some methods that we can use for remote research. Also share some of the best practices of conducting remote research. So, what is remote research? Remote research is basically when you are not talking in-person with the users. There are moderated and unmoderated remote research. Moderated research is when basically you are face to face with users talking one on one via a one on one interview, but using an online web conferencing tool. An unmoderated user research or user testing is basically you are using a tool like user zoom or user testing. There are so many different types of tools available in the market. So, similarly the way you create a survey right, where you set up a questions using survey monkey, similar way you set up an unmoderated user study. And then your users take that study just like they take a survey which is totally unmoderated at their own location at their own convenient time. So, I am sharing these details so that maybe you can start thinking of how you can start conducting remote research or at least put a case in your company to hire researchers in India. Because I strongly feel that user researchers should be co-located where the design and development teams are not where the users are because remote research you can do. But when the researchers are co-located with the design and development team, they can make sure that the research findings are percolated and the teams are making informed design decisions. For example, Webex or BlueJeans, you can ask your users to switch on the webcam and you can also meet them, talk to them on a one on one basis as an interview face to face and you can observe their reactions while they are using the product. Using these tools you can share your screen, you can pass on the mouse control, you can ask your users to share their screens and you can observe their reactions as well. When we are doing in-person research, you have a dependency on moderator, right? So, users are geographically dislocated here and there, then moderator has to travel and it's not just the moderator who travels, most of the time the team also travels. So, it significantly increases the cost, the travel cost. With remote research, a technique called unmoderated research, there is no dependency on the moderator. You can totally set up an unmoderated study and users can take it like a survey in their own time zone. With this technique, you can reach out to multiple users across geographies, across time zone and you can get results overnight. When you are doing in-person research, you know there is a ton of data that you collect and then you need to do manual analysis of data. But if you are using tools like user zoom or any other tool for remote research, the tools actually give you analysis of data like click stream, heat maps, you get audio and video recording that you can use and share and so on. Some of the methods and tools survey, I'm sure all of you know what a survey is. It's a great method to collect both quantitative and quality feedback from your users, very cost effective also. You can use tools like Qualtrics or SurveyMonkey. One-on-one moderated interviews, as I was just saying, you're basically using a web conferencing tool or a video conferencing tool and you're talking to your user via a phone call. You can also watching them face-to-face with a video camera. You can use tools like Webex and Bluejeans. You can record your sessions and share those recordings as well. Card sorting, basically this is a method that you use to test your information architecture or you can use it to prioritize your features or categorize any information with your users. So with tools like user zoom or optimal sort, you can conduct this online with a group of users or individual users, both open and close card sort. The best side of these tools are they help you a ton in analyzing the card sorted data. Diary study, how many of you know about diary study? Nobody? Okay, so this is another method, it's basically a longitudinal study where you are trying to understand the user's behavior, how they are using your product over a period of time. So that period of time could be few days, few weeks or few months. So basically you meet with the user as a one-on-one moderated interview and then explain them what is expected from them, give them a diary to log their feedback and again meet with them after the study. And that way you can observe in the real environment while they are using their product, you can capture their behavior. So again you can use tools like user zoom, there are several other tools in the market. Unmoderated user studying, we already spoke. So again you can do this with multiple users and get your results overnight. Help you in measuring other things like task efficiency, heat map, click stream, other data analysis, you can add survey like questions. Dendrogram, this is basically a card sorting result. When we conducted unmoderated user testing, we even received feedback from our users that they are really enjoying this kind of experience. Because this gives them an opportunity to take the research study, participate in that, share their, what they feel about the product at their own convenience time from their own location and even earn some few bucks quickly. Some stats from user zoom, user zoom did a research and they have published a report, I have given link and this presentation will also be available later. So you can see how companies who are using user zoom are saving a ton in terms of labor and time cost. Let's talk about some of the best practices of remote research. I will cover both moderated and unmoderated. So number one is build a participant panel. This is very important and that's why I have placed it as number one. Because recruitment, I'm sure if you have experience doing user research, then you must be knowing that recruiting users take a bunch of time. And every time you're planning a study, if you're spending considerable amount of time in recruiting, then you're going to spend a lot of time. So having a participant panel helps, you can based on your market segment or personas, you can reach out to them, do the recruitment in advance. In remote research, you get an opportunity to meet the users more frequently versus in person where you're just visiting their location or calling them in your lab once in a year. So this also helps in building a relationship with your clients. I'm sure all of you would agree that research is not an isolated process. So you must include all your stakeholders like your design team and product team, insist them to attend those research sessions and also ask them to take notes. You can use collaborative tools like mural or even an Excel sheet that you can share with everybody and have it at a central location. Notetaking also gives a perspective. So everybody is attending and everybody can share their own perspective of how they felt about the research sessions. And this will also save you tons of time when you're presenting your findings. You don't have to create pages of reports. What you can do is just talk through your notes whenever you need to refer to. Debrief meeting, try to have a debrief meeting with all your stakeholders immediately after every moderated session or whenever you are conducting the earliest possible way so that all can share their perspective. You can make immediate changes to your design prototypes or you can even make changes to your protocol if you think you need to probe more. And as a team, you can collaborate. Keeping it short, so studies says that global attention span is diminishing. And there is also a direct correlation between the time of completion and the success of the task, the length of the task. So try to keep your study as short as possible. With these methods for researchers, even for product team, it's very tempting to test every nook and corner of the screen. But don't just squeeze everything in one test, try to break it down into multiple tests. And that way you can also cover more demographics and geographies. So ideal time for unmoderated study is 15 minutes. And for moderate session, you should not extend beyond 45 to 60 minutes. Test your study, since remote research is a lot based on technology. And sometimes technology can fail us, right? Like low bandwidth or bad internet connection, call drops, those things can surely happen. So you need to have a backup plan and keep testing your study. When you're using tools like unmoderated and remote research tools, they give you, you can create segments of tests. So the same study, you can send it to your internal users or your colleagues to test whether the task description is clear or not, whether the time taken is in the feasible limit or not. And then keep testing and keep iterating. Also, send it in batches. So let us say if you want to test it with ten users, first try to send it to two, three users and then see the results. How is that coming, whether anybody is abandoning the task or if something is going wrong with your prototype or anything of that sort. And then once you are thorough, then you can send it to a larger audience. This is the most important, I think, applicable for all the professionals. You need to have a patience and positive attitude. Because anything that you start new and fresh takes time and practice, right? So you need to have that positive attitude. Sometimes you may notice that you are not getting the expected result or it may happen that you observe that users have abandoned your task or you have got only audio and not video or vice versa. So I think with practice and by following the rest of the best practices that I shared, you will eventually get a hang of it. Okay, so we have reached to the end of the session. So this is the summary basically with remote research will help you to conduct your sessions across geographies, there won't be any time zone. And the best part is the researchers can conduct the study at their own time. And maybe sitting across the globe, anywhere across the globe, wearing either a track pant or on a bad hair day. So that's the advantage. And same advantage is also on the user side that they can take the test and earn some few bucks, they can do that over their weekend or from their home. So there's no dependency on moderator, no more time zones issues. And of course the tool helps you in analyzing the data. I have shared some more learnings and on LinkedIn I have published few articles on moderated and unmoderated research, you can feel free to read through them. And this is my email ID and phone number.