Remote Site Testing Has Significant Advantages
Many larger companies will conduct extensive market research before designing a website or making major changes to an existing site. Once the new site is ready to be deployed, they will then employ a usability testing company to make sure that the site will provide the desired user experience. Most of these larger companies will benefit from remote testing rather than hallway tests or other lab testing.
Remote usability testing depends on the testing company having the technology to deploy surveys and instructions to test subjects anywhere in the world and measure their responses during the testing process. Also known as asynchronous usability testing, remote tests record things like eye tracking, time taken to complete different steps, and the actual clicks made on a page or site.
All this information could be collected in a laboratory, but by using remote testing, companies can sample a much larger audience. That larger sample is the key to the advantages of remote Site Testing . With large enough numbers, companies can get results targeted not only by age, gender and other demographics, but also by geography and even look at results based on user attitude and behavior traits. These are things that are difficult to get good sample of when a test is only a dozen or less users. Additionally, by testing users on their home, school, and work computers, companies get usability data for a variety of software and hardware configurations as well as different sources of connection, such as DSL versus cable versus cellular wifi.