Playing Games and Cursing: The Truth About Remote User Research
Wednesday, August 16, 2:00-3:45 PM
by Nate Bolt and Rashmi Sinha
In which Rashmi and Nate will share how their life has been changed by remote methods, and do a joint demo of MindCanvas and Ethnio, their respective products. MindCanvas is a gamelike platform for user research, while Ethnio is the first moderated remote usability application. Both are completely web-based. Both can be used independently, or you could use Ethnio to watch and record people play MindCanvas games and never leave your desk. Ever.
About Nate Bolt
Nate specializes in remote usability. After pioneering and directing the User Experience department at Clear Ink in 1999, which included the construction of Natural Environment and Remote Observation laboratories, Nate co-founded Bolt | Peters. He now serves as CEO where he has overseen hundreds of user research studies for Hallmark, Oracle, Time Warner, Levi's, Restoration Hardware, and others. Beginning in 2003, he led the creation of the first moderated remote usability software, Ethnio, which is being used around the world to increase the ease-of-use of software, web applications, and web sites.
Nate regularly gives presentations on remote user-research methods in both commercial and academic settings. Working with faculty at the University of California, San Diego, he created a degree titled "Digital Technology and Society," which focused on the intersection of technology and mass population usage. He also completed a year of communications studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he was jailed briefly for playing drums in public without a license.
About Rashmi Sinha
Rashmi Sinha is the founding principal of Uzanto - a Mountain View based consulting company that focuses on web product strategy. At Uzanto, Rashmi focuses on customer research and social technologies. For the past year, Rashmi has been focused on MindCanvas which uses game-like methods to understand user thinking and preferences (think of it as online games meet online surveys). MindCanvas provides user researchers with a remote research platform to rapidly gather customer insights for the design of technology products. Results from studies are displayed as interactive visualizations.
Rashmi writes a blog at rashmisinha.com focusing on research methods, search interfaces and social technologies as tagging and recommender systems.
Prior to Uzanto, Rashmi worked as a researcher at the School of Information Management, UC Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Brown University. She is also co-Program Chair of the monthly BayCHI Program, and has been on the committee of the CHI conferece and the IA Summit.